Dynex DX-46L261A12 LCD TV Review

Introduction

Design

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U-G-L-Y, with no alibi in sight.

Bulky and boxy in all the wrong places, this plastic monstrosity is not only ugly, but the casing itself actually gets in its own way, restricting access to some of the rear ports. There's just very little to love here, with a bloated plastic casing that contradicts most modern design principles.

On the back of the Dynex DX-46L261A12 is where you’ll find all of your ports, arranged in an L-shape. Some of the jacks are a little difficult to get at because of the poor fit of the casing over its metal innards. Included among the paltry collection are two HDMI ports, a composite/component video input, a headphone jack, VGA input, 1/8th-inch audio input, and a digital audio output. That's plenty for a bedroom, but at this price range there are plenty of televisions that offer three or four HDMI inputs.

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Smart TV Features

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A bare-bones menu system that still manages to be frustrating.

The menu system of the Dynex DX-46L261A12 is simple enough, with barely any frills to catch your eye, or unnecessary elements to it. If you have certain features enabled, it will disable others, which is incredibly frustrating if you want to mix and match settings. As a rule, you shouldn’t have to hunt and play whack-a-mole just to adjust the backlight or brightness settings.

Our only other note is that the response time—the time it takes to press a button on the remote to see the action display on the TV—can be a bit laggy. So for those of you scoring at home the menu is devoid of any nice extras, confusing, laggy, and frustrating.

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Picture Quality

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A very impressive contrast ratio, made less impressive by soundly flawed color results.

The Dynex DX-46L261A12 tested with a much higher contrast ratio than we were expecting: For an entry level LCD TV, it gets surprisingly dark and quite bright, which makes watching it a lot easier. Further, while there was nothing wholly impressive about how it manages color, it could definitely do a worse job of it (it could also definitely do a better job of it, something worth keeping in mind).

When we analyzed moving objects on the Dynex DX-46L261A12’s screen, we noted the typical judder that you’ll see in a lot of LCD TVs. Unlike more expensive LCDs, this model lacks a “motion smoothing” feature that might eliminate some of these issues. Such judder causes a loss in fine detail, like small text or the finer features on a person’s face. On the plus side, there were no noticeable artifacts like color smearing or haloing. These are issues to be expected with a "house brand" affordable LCD, and they're not as distracting as they could be.

Conclusion

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The Dynex DX-46L261A12 (MSRP $599) is a flawed television, but certainly not without its positives.

Dynex is, of course, a house brand for Best Buy, just like the company's Insignia brand, so it's unlikely you'll find it any cheaper than Best Buy is selling it for. Best Buy isn't doing you any favors here: it's an excuse to attach cables and DVD players and other things that actually earn them money. As a result, the Dynex brand doesn’t exude an image of quality or trust like Sony or Samsung or Panasonic, and rightfully not—it hasn’t earned it. Case in point: the DX-46L261A12.

Look beyond the bloated plastic casing and frustrating menu and you'll find some real performance issues here. The black levels are crushed to achieve a great score in our black level test, but as a result, there’s no detail in the shadows. It’s a cheat, and a cheap one at that. The rest of the test results were mixed. The TV’s color performance is rocky, but the motion performance and resolution scaling were actually pretty good. The Dynex DX-46L261A12 has a nice simple interface, but its clunky plastic design shows little forethought or care.

Overall, we’d pass on this TV. It's certainly appealing to pick up a 46-inch television for $600 and under, but that's what Best Buy is banking on. It's an under-performing panel designed to fill a void in your checkout cart, wrapped up with overpriced cables and attachments. There are better options available for not much more money, sans the inevitable buyer's remorse.

Science Introduction

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The Dynex DX-46L261A12 had one single strength: its contrast ratio. Unfortunately, it achieved this feat by reducing the clarity and detail of its shadow tones, resulting in mildly flawed color curves for the sake of a wider contrast ratio and deeper blacks. Its contrast ratio is praiseworthy, or rather, would be were the television not sacrificing some of its color integrity to achieve it. Beyond this, there's nothing much noteworthy or impressive about this TV's performance.

Contrast

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The Dynex DX-46L261A12's contrast ratio was its only true strength.

Unfortunately, that strength came at the cost of a loss of detail in its full color spectrum. The Dynex's black level of 0.05 cd/m ² is particularly deep for an LCD television, and much deeper than we'd expected for a budget model. That's because Dynex, in a sense, "cheated," and crushed their shadow levels via engineering alterations to produce deeper blacks. This caused a lot of spectrum detail across the shadow tones of black/grey, red, green, and blue to lose a lot of detail. In our opinion, this is a bad trade-off.

However, the resulting contrast ratio of 6331:1 is something Dynex could be proud of under different circumstances, and is still a good result objectively. Ultimately, it's an impressive result only when examined devoid of context. It still earns a decent score in our system, but the television is heavily penalized as it cuts corners elsewhere.

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Motion Performance

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Judder, fits, and starts—the Dynex DX-46L261A12 lives up to its brand name here.

When we analyzed moving objects on the Dynex DX-46L261A12’s screen, we noted the typical judder that you’ll see in a lot of LCD TVs. Unlike more expensive LCDs, this model lacks a “motion smoothing” feature that might eliminate some of these issues. Such judder causes a loss in fine detail, like small text or the finer features on a person’s face. On the plus side, there were no noticeable artifacts like color smearing or haloing.

The one thing that this panel does have over cheaper models is its native resolution is a true 1080p. This means that the television doesn't have to scale full HD content in order to fit the screen. Most of the content you feed this television will probably be 720p for the time being, though, so it's rare you'll be able to take advantage of this.

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Other Tests

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