Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 Review: Best 32-inch TV?
32-inch smart TVs are generally targeted at price-sensitive buyers by most manufacturers. Full-HD resolution on a TV this size has become extremely rare these days. More often than not, you get a 768p panel (resolution of 1366x768 pixels) to keep the costs down. To be fair, the difference in picture quality on a Full-HD panel as compared to a regular one on a 32-inch screen is minimal to an untrained eye, especially when consuming content on DTH. The higher resolution does come in handy in console gaming or in several shows on Netflix or Prime Video. Now, Realme has addressed the needs of those who wish to have a smaller screen but with the extra pixels in it, with the launch of their 32-inch Full-HD smart TV model. Let's see how well it performs, and if it is worthy of the small premium it demands.
A good-looking TV with a variety of input options
This Realme TV does look quite polished with near absence of bezels on three sides. The bottom bezel is understandably thicker and has a tiny chin at the center under the company's logo that hosts a power LED and IR receiver. The TV can easily be wall-mounted using a standard VESA mount that needs to be purchased separately. Alternatively, one can place it on a desk using the bundled plastic stands and screws. You also get a voice enabled wireless remote control and a pair of AAA batteries to power it. The connectivity options are pretty neat on this TV. You get three HDMI ports - one of which supports ARC, two USB 2.0 ports, a digital audio out, A/V input and a LAN port. One notable absentee here is a 3.5mm analog audio output like a headphone jack. All the ports are located along the left edge of the rear module. Since this is not a large screen TV, the ports are easy to reach even if you wall mount it. That said, having them a little closer to the edge would have been more ergonomic. Meanwhile, wireless connectivity options include Bluetooth 5.0 to connect wireless speakers or headphones/earphones and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi with support for b/g/n standards. Support for 5GHz Wi-Fi networks isn't available here, but that's the case with most budget TVs.
Full-HD panel on a 32-inch TV is a rarity
By now you know that this 32-inch TV has a Full-HD panel with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels and a 60Hz refresh rate. The panel type hasn't been mentioned but it seems like a VA panel. Support for HDR formats is limited to HDR10 and HLG. Of course, I wasn't expecting support for Dolby Vision or even HDR10+ on a budget TV. It is powered by a quad-core Mediatek chip with four ARM Cortex A53 cores that can go as high as 1,300MHz each, and you have a Mali-470 MP3 GPU to crunch the graphics. You get 1GB RAM and 8GB of internal storage, with 60% of it consumed by the Android TV 9.0 OS and the few preinstalled apps. Sound output is rated at 24W RMS with support for Dolby audio. You get two pairs of bottom firing speakers that have a full-range driver and a dedicated tweeter each to handle the full frequency spectrum. Like all certified Android TVs, the Realme 32 Full HD TV has built-in Chromecast and lets you cast content to the screen from compatible apps on your phone or tablet. You get the standard Realme wireless remote control, which I believe is one of the better TV remotes around. It is compact and comes with only a handful of buttons without missing out on any important function. The remote has hotkeys for Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube, along with buttons for settings, input selection, volume control, mute, Google's voice assistant and the usual navigation keys. It operates over both infrared (IR) and Bluetooth. The power button works on IR, while the rest of the functions operate over Bluetooth once the remote is paired with the TV. The remote is voice enabled, and you can issue voice commands after pressing the button for voice assistant.
Standard Android TV UI that could have been smarter
This Realme TV runs Android TV 9.0 OS and has a stock user interface without any third party launcher like Patchwall that you get on Xiaomi models. Though there isn't anything glaringly wrong with Android TV 9.0, the company should have stuck to Android TV 10 that most of their 2021 TV models were launched with. But I do have a major issue with Realme going back to their older UI wherein one cannot access picture and sound settings on the fly from any app or OTT platform. And that too despite having a dedicated settings button on the remote. You get instant access to those settings by pressing that button only when watching something through HDMI or USB input. Rest of the time, you have to pause the video, go to the Android home screen, go to Android settings, navigate to the picture or sound adjustment options, tweak the picture or sound, go back to the video and see if it looks as intended. If not, repeat the process. Now you know what I mean! All this could have been possible at a simple click of the settings button, but that's not the case as of now. Beyond that, the UI is pretty standard and simple to use. You have a row for your preferred apps where you can add, remove or shuffle the shortcuts for installed apps. Other than that, you get rows that display last played or suggested content from various OTT platforms. Apps for Netflix, Prime Video are pre-installed along with the usual Google services and a web browser. Further, Google Play Store on the TV gives you access to thousands of more apps.
Sharp picture with good colors that can be tuned further
Coming to the business end of the review, let's talk about the picture quality of this TV. Straight up, the visuals are quite impressive for a budget TV. The panel is bright, and the picture looks quite sharp on this Full-HD screen. The color reproduction is good too, but after a bit of adjustment. Colors look slightly saturated out of the box, but thankfully, this Realme TV offers tons of picture adjustment options to fine-tune the output to your liking. You get controls for brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, gamma, white balance and also a fairly detailed color tuner. If you find the settings too complex, you also have picture presets, of which, Standard and Movie modes offer best results. The contrast is more than decent for the segment, but the black levels are average at best with deep black shades appearing dark grey at times, and also with a bluish tinge occasionally. Though the TV claims to support HDR10, certain HDR content on Netflix and Prime Video looks a little erratic with boosted colors and some noticeable flickering in high contrast areas of the scenes. To be honest, I did not expect a stellar HDR performance in this segment. But the SDR performance is quite impressive here - 1080p content looks sharp and lively and 720p video quality doesn't lag too far behind either. On top of that, the skin tones are reproduced accurately and look quite natural, something that is rare in budget TVs. A combination of a decent upscaling engine and a small screen makes lower resolution videos up to 480p perfectly watchable on this TV too. The viewing angles are broad with minimal color shift when watching the TV from wide angles. This screen can also double up as an extended display for your laptop using HDMI. Well, almost all TVs let you do that, but given the higher pixel density here, things look sharp and legible.
Loud and clear sound, satisfactory all-round performance
As I touched upon earlier, you get two pairs of well-tuned speakers that deliver up to 24W RMS of Dolby certified audio. The audio output of this TV is quite punchy for its size with the TV getting loud enough at 50% volume in a mid-sized room. Midrange frequencies get preference for dialogue clarity and there is a bit of warmth in the overall sound, but of course not soundbar level bass. The TV speakers are good enough for watching news, sports, soap operas and the odd web-series. For some reason, Dolby Audio is disabled by default in the sound settings, and it's best to switch it on and leave it on for best results. The overall output sounds better that way even if the source isn't Dolby compliant. If the sound quality isn't good enough for you, there are a bunch of audio outputs like HDMI ARC, digital audio out and Bluetooth to plug in a soundbar or a speaker system. Your old speakers with a 3.5mm Aux input cannot be plugged into this TV directly as the corresponding output port is absent. Moving on, this Realme TV takes about 40 seconds to boot up when you switch it on from the mains, which is at par for the course for most Android TVs. Post that, if you switch it off and on from the remote, the TV comes back on almost instantaneously from standby mode, which is great to see. Other than a slight delay in the voice assistant's response occasionally, things work smoothly and as expected. The default media player here is pretty good and managed to play most of our test videos with various codecs smoothly, with the exception of 4K videos. It is not a deal-breaker given that this is a Full-HD TV.
Good second TV for gaming or extending your laptop display
The Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 can be purchased for Rs. 18,999 with a one year warranty on parts and two years on the panel. It often sells for a thousand bucks less on Flipkart. The price may seem a little higher than that of an average 32-inch TV, but most of those TVs have a resolution lower than 1080p, thus justifying the additional Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 3,000 premium. Its case is further bolstered by its sharp picture and good sound, making it one of the better 32-inch smart TV models around, also handy for console gamers and those looking to extend their laptop display. Having said that, this still isn't a TV for one and all. A casual viewer may not notice any major difference in picture quality as compared to some HD-ready 32-inch models, especially if they are mostly into watching content from DTH. It would then be a sensible call to save some money and opt for an inexpensive HD-ready model. Also, the price of this TV is not too far from some 40-inch Android TV models that have the same resolution and similar features, and a larger screen. If you have space and budget for it, going for a larger screen would be a no brainer.
