The Evesham V27DMCX-ZE3 is a not quite high definition-ready LCD TV with a 27in screen and at £500, it’s less expensive than many 26in alternatives.

The set doesn’t meet the criteria required to sport the infamous HD-Ready logo, but has a curious HDTV symbol displayed on its bezel.

In the absence of both HDMI and DVI inputs, it transpires that the set will accept HD format images (720p and 1080i) via its VGA socket. A component video adaptor is provided for a more widely accepted HD connection.

Currently, many HD-compatible devices – such as Sky HD, Xbox 360 and some upscaling DVD players – come with component connections, but this is likely to change as more manufacturers start to promote the copy-protection aspect of digital interfaces such as HDMI.

In our tests, results with the VGA/component adaptor were mixed. We had intermittent success with an upscaling DVD player, although occasionally the TV seemed to have problems registering the connection. More reliable was a straight VGA connection to a PC.

We still had to do quite a bit of tweaking, both on the set and in the computer’s display adaptor settings, but eventually we had a bright, sharp display at 1280x768 pixel resolution.

Picture quality is actually pretty good. There’s no real noticeable motion blur, edges are sharp and the viewing angle is extremely wide. Colours look a bit bleached out via the PC input, but manual backlight and colour temperature settings offer good picture quality control.

The Evesham V27DMCX-ZE3 has plenty of problems, though. There’s no built-in Freeview tuner and it doesn’t have separate settings for individual inputs, so changing picture settings while watching a TV station will affect the settings for DVD inputs. That said, picture quality is surprisingly good for a TV of this price.