Review: Luxury Metz TV Sports Redundant SCARTs

The German-made Caleo 47 LED 100 Twin R from Metz is a 47 inch LCD screen that is obviously designed for Europe without too much consideration for the Asia Pacific market. As such, it sports three SCART ports and a menu that just doesn’t get HDMI.

Attempting to plug in a Blu-ray player proved extremely difficult – not just for technical set up purposes, but physically. All the inputs are awkwardly located on a downward-facing panel on the bottom half of the back-end of the TV.

Not just that, but there’s no labelling on the backside of the screen. As a result, you’ll find yourself lying on the floor and looking up to find which port fits which cable.

When you find the right plugs and slots, you’ll also notice the three SCART ports which have no real function for Australian TV owners. Used primarily in the European electronics market, Australian (and most of the world’s) electronics favour HDMI. Thankfully, the Caleo 47 fits in three HDMI ports.

Getting the Caleo to recognise inputs in these HDMI ports is another struggle of its own. When a Blu-ray player was plugged in, there was no recognition by the TV or labelling in the menu for ‘Blu-ray player’ or even ‘HDMI input’ of any kind.

Users instead have to identify which numbered HDMI port they’ve plugged the media player into (back on the floor, you go) and then select either ‘Other Device’ 1, 2 or 3 from the AV menu accordingly. Looking in the manual doesn’t help either as you’ll be hard-pressed to find a reference to HDMI inputs.

There’s no intuitive functionality in-built on the patchwork menu that is both poorly set out and is prone to lag.

Once the Blu-ray player was up and running, the default picture quality, which should have been 1080p Full HD, instead came out with a high level of visual noise. The Noise Reduction function partially improved the grainy image quality, but did not fully redeem the image quality.

The picture also occasionally switched its scaling to different resolutions without prompting.

On the plus side, an in-built PVR allows for programmable recording of TV on portable storage and the TV’s 500GB storage, equating to around 100 hours of HD or 500 hours, of SD television.

The TV shapes up to 115.4×73.9×9.8 cm without the base – chunkier than your average flat panel. The brushed aluminium panel doesn’t conform to the typically sleek, black finish of most LCDs. Two black columns adorn the sides of the screen while the top and bottom of the screen sport metallic grey.

It’s unconventional and not very attractive, following suit with the on-screen menu, remote control and the miniature screen below the Metz logo that displays channel numbers in orange and yellow text.

For a brand that markets its TVs as luxury goods (not to mention the $5499) price tag, it’s hard to find anything luxurious about this TV package, except perhaps the inbuilt PVR.

You can read International Dynamics’ response to this review here.