A couple of months ago I found myself at the local Goodwill. I wanted to find a monitor or TV that I could connect the NES Classic to. I searched through piles of monitors and at the bottom found an old Samsung 19" TV. It showed signs of heavy use but as they were only asking $7 it seemed like a good buy. I paid for it and brought it home. I cleaned up the TV and started testing the inputs. It was then I started to realize all the features this little TV has.



Let's get the specs out of the way first. The TV is a Samsung LN-T1953H. It's a 19" LCD TV released in 2007 that has:

• Support for 480p, 720p, 1080i Resolutions
• VGA
• Component
• S-Video
• Composite
• HDMI

VGA and S-Video aren't unheard of in this era of TV, and component was commonplace at the time so I decided to test a Super Famicom. To my surprise, the TV accepted the 240p signal and even better I couldn't detect any noticeable lag. I tested a couple of different games and the results were the same.


Since composite video worked I decided to try component output (via SCART) from a Model 1 Genesis. I tried Dick Tracy, Gleylancer, and Sonic the Hedgehog. In Sonic I noticed that the Chaos Emerald wasn't blinking and booted up the 240p test suite. I ran the Drop Shadow test and it confirmed that 240p content was being scaled as if it were 480i. I ran the manual input lag test and it averaged 2.5 frames which isn't the worst I've seen but nowhere near the 1 frame processing time of the Framemeister or the lightning-fast line doubling of the OSSC.



While the Samsung LN-T1953H isn't a perfect one size fits all solution it's a solid TV for travel and testing thanks to its wide range of inputs and supported resolutions. While it's great that it supports 240p it also mistakenly processes it as 480i. This can be solved by using external scalers but the benefits of those would be best used on larger TVs. It's not a bad buy as long as it's cheap enough and expectations are kept in check.

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