In recent years, Full HD resolution has been a rarity on a 32-inch TV. Interestingly, this combination was quite popular a decade ago during the non-smart TV era. Ultimately, manufacturers sacrificed the extra pixels to keep costs down, as the smaller screen sizes were primarily geared toward budget-conscious buyers. Until now, Realme has been playing it safe in the smart TV segment with the choice of screen sizes and resolutions. Now the company has decided to get a little more adventurous with a new 32-inch Full HD smart TV. Time to find out if it was the right decision.
Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 – Design and connectivity: 8/10
The layout is pretty neat, with the TV almost frameless on three sides. It has a significantly thicker bottom bezel with a small chin in the middle that houses a power LED and an infrared receiver. The TV can easily be mounted on the wall or placed on a desk with the included stands. The plastic stands are very lightweight, but they hold the TV firmly in place. The wall mount kit is not included and will probably need to be purchased separately. The necessary screws are included along with the standard wireless remote control and a pair of AAA batteries.
In the connectivity department, you get three HDMI ports: one of them is ARC-compliant, two USB 2.0 ports, digital audio out, A / V input, and a LAN port. All connections are on the left side of the TV. Since it is a compact TV, the connections are easy to reach even when mounted on the wall. It also has some wireless connectivity options in Bluetooth 5.0 to connect to wireless speakers or headphones and 2.4GHz WiFi with support for b / g / n standards. While you can ignore the lack of 5GHz WLAN support in this segment, I would have liked a 3.5mm analog audio output on this TV.
Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 – Features and Specifications: 8/10
This TV has a 32-inch panel with a Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and a refresh rate of 60 Hz. The maximum brightness was not mentioned, but it is claimed that it supports some HDR formats, namely HDR10 and HLG. This TV is powered by a quad-core Mediatek chip with quad ARM Cortex-A53 cores and an MP3 Mali-470 GPU. Each of the four CPU cores can throttle between 1000 MHz and 1300 MHz. You get 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage, part of which is taken up by the official Android TV 9.0 operating system.
The sound output is 24 watts RMS with support for Dolby audio. Like all certified Android TVs, Chromecast is built in and can cast content from compatible apps on your phone or tablet to the screen. You get the usual Realme wireless remote, which is pretty cool. It’s compact, sure, but it doesn’t lose any important buttons. The remote has dedicated buttons for setup, input selection, and mute, as well as the usual navigation buttons, volume control, and hotkeys for Netflix, Prime Video, and YouTube .
It works via IR and Bluetooth. The remote’s power button communicates with the TV via infrared when it’s on, and the rest work via bluetooth once it’s paired with the TV. The remote is voice activated so you can access the Google Assistant by pressing the appropriate button and giving voice commands. It is a bit slow to respond after issuing a command, but it works satisfactorily.
Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 – User Interface: 7/10
Realme TV runs the Android TV 9.0 operating system and has a standard user interface seen on most official Android TVs without a third-party launcher. I wonder why Realme returned to Android TV 9.0 when most of its previous releases this year were on Android TV 10. And that’s not the only thing that set the company back. Unlike your newer TVs, where you can instantly access picture and sound settings from any input or application, this 32-inch TV only allows you to do this using an HDMI or USB input.
Despite a dedicated settings button on the remote, you cannot access these options when viewing something on one of the OTT platforms or even from the home screen. You have to delve into the Android settings to modify the image or sound. Not very smart, and certainly not in 2021. Also, the user interface is easy to use. It has lines for your favorite apps installed and recently played or suggested content from various OTT platforms. Apps for Netflix, Prime Video are pre-installed along with some popular Google services. There is also the Google Play Store, which gives you access to many more applications.
Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 – Image quality: 7.5 / 10
The image quality here is quite good for a budget TV. The panel is bright and given the higher pixel density the picture looks quite sharp on this TV. Color rendering is excellent too. Although the colors are vivid, they look slightly saturated out of the box, and some even like it that way. For the rest, this Realme TV has many options to adjust the image to your liking. You get the usual settings for brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, as well as advanced options for adjusting gamma, white balance, and an elaborate color tuner.
Overall, the contrast is pretty good for the segment, but the black levels aren’t the best. They often appear dark gray in color and sometimes have a bluish tint. Some details in darker areas of the screen were only visible in our test videos after slightly increasing the brightness; otherwise they looked a bit too dark. Even in high contrast scenes, especially HDR videos, you may notice clear flickering. But let’s not forget that this is a less than Rs 20,000 TV and the overall performance is quite impressive for the segment
Overall, 1080p content looks sharp and vibrant with vibrant colors on this TV. I have to add that skin tones look quite natural on this screen, something that not many budget TVs can boast of. 720p videos look almost equally good. Anything below 720p down to DVD quality can also be viewed here, as the glitches aren’t too noticeable on this small screen. Viewing angles are perfectly acceptable with a little color shift when watching TV from acute angles. After all, it is quite a useful screen to connect your laptop via HDMI and expand your screen. Things look sharp and legible.
Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 – Audio quality: 7.5 / 10
It appears that Realme used the same speaker setup from its 2020 43-inch TV. You get two pairs of downward-facing speakers rated at 24 watts RMS (total) delivering Dolby-certified audio. Each speaker module has a wideband driver for the mids and lows, as well as its own tweeter for the high frequencies. The audio output from this television is loud and clear, and quite powerful for a small television. Volume can vary by source, but is generally loud enough in a medium-sized room at 50 percent volume.
There’s a lot of clarity in the vocals and a hint of warmth to the sound, but don’t expect hard-hitting bass. The speakers are well-tuned out of the box and you have a few more sound settings to further optimize the sound. Dolby Audio is disabled by default and should be enabled in the sound settings. It’s best to leave it on all the time as the audio will sound better overall, regardless of whether the audio source supports Dolby or not.
The TV speakers are good enough for general audio needs, such as watching the news, doing sports, doing one web series or another, or listening to music. If you want an extra oomph, this Realme TV has a handful of audio outputs like HDMI ARC, digital audio out, and Bluetooth for connecting a soundbar or speaker system. Note that there is no 3.5mm jack here. So make sure your external speakers are compatible with this TV’s output options.
Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 – total output: 7.5 / 10
The TV takes about 40 seconds to start up when you turn it on from the network, which is standard for an Android TV. If you turn it off and on again with the remote control, the TV will come back on from standby in just a few seconds, so there will be no problems. There is no noticeable lag in operation, either with the user interface or while viewing content. Yes, the voice assistant response sometimes lags a bit, but it’s not terribly slow.
The default media player on this TV is pretty good and managed to play most of our test videos smoothly using different codecs except 4K videos. Using another player didn’t help either. Since it’s a Full HD display, many wouldn’t mind, but it would have been nice to have the option. Also, there were no obvious problems to report.
Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 – Price and Verdict
The Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 can be purchased from Flipkart and the company’s website for Rs. 18,999 with a one-year parts warranty and a two-year panel warranty. The price may seem a bit steep for a 32-inch TV, but most of these TVs will have a 768p panel instead of 1080p like this TV. However, the price is also too close to that of some 40-inch TVs that have most of the features available here on a larger screen. So if you don’t have any space issues, a bigger screen for an extra few thousand rupees would be the logical choice.
Going back to that TV, it is one of the best 32-inch smart TV models available in India for its sharp graphics and good sound. For the casual viewer, the higher resolution on a screen of this size compared to some HD-capable 32-inch models may not provide a noticeable improvement in image quality. In such cases, it is better to save a few thousand euros and go for the latter. But for gamers looking for a higher resolution compact display or wanting to expand their laptop screen, the Realme Smart TV Full HD 32 is a great option.
