Pangoo LE-32S700F review

Chinese brand Pangoo may be a new name to the UK, but its has plenty of TV-making experience under its belt. With its debut screen, the company makes the leap from producing screens for other manufacturers into selling fully fledged TVs itself. But can the LE-32S700F make significant waves where other newcomers have left forgettable ripples?

It looks classy enough: the fascia enjoys an almost glass-like finish, exaggerated by a sliver of transparent trim along the bottom edge. It's also strikingly slender round the back, thanks to the edge LED backlighting; a bold statement of intent by Pangoo of just how seriously it wants to be taken.

The set's connections only include three HDMIs when rivals in this group test manage four. But it does manage a degree of multimedia support, courtesy of a D-Sub PC input and a USB input that can play video (though not DivX), JPEG and MP3 files.

With its edge LED lighting already a surprise for the LE-32S700F's price, it's pushing it to expect the TV to have a massive feature count. Picture adjustments are pretty much limited to the basics, aside from a straightforward noise reduction routine.

100Hz surprise

The set does manage to carry 100Hz video processing, though, and carries a full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels.

Pictures are remarkably bright – arguably the brightest we have seen on an LED TV. This is emphasised by the startling vibrancy and richness of its colour palette, which we'd say even outguns the LG 32LH7000 for sheer aggression.

This aggressive stance helps the Pangoo's pictures look phenomenally intense with bright footage, even if you end up reducing the set's brightness to barely 40 per cent, as we did during our calibration exercises.

Bright and breezy High-definition pictures are sharp and detailed too, with that aforementioned brightness helping to give definition to each and every pixel in the image.

Motion causes a touch of smearing and judder at times, but the 100Hz engine ensures that it's seldom distracting.

There is evidence of grey, low-contrast clouding during darker scenes, but it's really not bad by any means. Pictures enjoy a reasonable amount of contrast without sacrificing too much brightness.

Inconsistent backlight

It's aggravating that this Pangoo's backlighting is inconsistent, however. Very obvious pools of extra brightness spill in from the TV's corners, and there's a generally slightly patchy look to extremely dark scenes.

This problem won't trouble you during bright footage, but when you see it over dark movie scenes, it's definitely distracting. And we couldn't get rid of it fully even when we turned the brightness right down to zero.

Other issues concern a slightly ripe look to the colour palette (though this can be improved with careful calibration), a typically limited viewing angle, tiringly treble-biassed sonics and a tendency to slightly exaggerate source noise.

This latter quirk is possibly a result of its unusually bright and contrast-heavy approach. Overall, there are enough positive things to say about the LE-32S700F to make us hope Pangoo sticks around.

But the manufacturer needs to rectify those backlight consistency issues and tune its pictures a little more to UK tastes before it will properly be able to take on the flatscreen big boys.

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