Vu LED TV in India - Review 2024
Vu TV is the decade-old desi brand, which could be one of the strong claimants for the best budget LED TVs in India. Vu TV is grabbing the bull by its horns—taking on the TV giants like Samsung, Sony, or LG even in the premium TV category.
Vu is a disruptive brand that is changing the dynamics of the fast-growing smart TV segment with innovation and smart selling strategy, especially in the e-commerce space, where Indian shoppers have traditionally been reluctant to buy big appliances. In fact, more than half of Vu’s sales come through online channels. Online consumers in India trust Vu because it delivers what they want at a reasonable price.
Vu LED offers a complete range of TVs starting from basic 32′ HD TV to the monstrous 85′ 4K TVs.
Key Vu TV Technologies
4K Quantum Dot Display
Following the footsteps of bigwigs like Samsung and TCL, Vu now offers quantum-dot displays—one of the best display technology available in the market.
Quantum-dot display is available in Vu’s flagship TV: Vu Masterpiece coming with a majestic 85’ display. Quantum dots are nano-sized crystals (one billionth of a meter or 1/10,000 of hair strand size) made of semiconductor materials. These semiconductors have an excellent light absorption and emission capacity making them ideal for large displays.
Models with QLED use special optical materials to control backlight zone-wise. In this way, QLED creates wide range of colour and contrast, and bring out the vibrant, true-to-life picture quality on the big TV screen. As opposed to the conventional LED display, which tends to blend with adjacent colors, quantum display retains the original colors pixel by pixel. In fact, QLEDs have much a larger color volume, making visuals on the screen sharp and life-like.
Basically, with QLED TVs you’ll experience darker blacks. Furthermore, QLED displays are much brighter. Vu Masterpiece QLED TV has 1000 nits peak brightness and comes with a 4K resolution (3840×2160 pixels).
VOD Upscaler Technology
Although Vu TVs come with 4K resolution, 4K content is not so readily available. Often, you’ll have to watch content in standard definition (SD) or high definition (HD) on a 4K TV. This means you are underusing the potential of a 4K TV. This is where Vu’s VOD Upscaler Technology comes into play. Using advanced machine learning algorithms and digital signal processing, premium Vu 4K TVs upscale video-on-demand (VOD) content so the visuals looks good on the big screen. This way watching content of low resolution wouldn’t ruin the viewing experience.
Multiple HDR Support: Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG
Premium 4K Vu TVs support multiple HDR formats such as Dolby Vision, HDR 10, and HLG. HDR is High Dynamic Range which significantly expands the range of two important factors—contrast ratio and color accuracy Thus, bright parts of the image get much brighter, so it seems the image possesses more depth. The color range expands to show brighter blues, greens, reds, and everything in between. Thus HDR-compatible movies push TVs to their limit, with brighter highlights and perfect blacks.
Models from the Masterpiece and Cinema series come with proprietary Dolby Vision HDR which is the best standard for HDR out there. HDR offered by budget brands only supports HDR10 with a maximum 10-bit color depth. But Dolby Vision supports 12-bit color depth. This difference may not seem significant superficially, but it matters a lot when it comes to color reproduction. Dolby Vision HDR TVs are capable of producing up to 68 billion colors as opposed to 1 billion colors on TVs that run only on HDR10.
Besides Dolby Vision and HDR10 premium Vu, 4K models like 50PM also support Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) HDR format.
The mainstream HDR formats (HDR10 and Dolby Vision) work after post-production i.e., after the entire film or an episode of a show, has been shot. Live TV broadcasts do not support these HDR formats. So, to make live telecast content vibrant like recorded HDR content, BBC from Britain and NHK from Japan have collaborated to develop Hybrid Log Gamma HDR format (HLG). HLG allows viewers to enjoy the vibrancy of HDR even in live broadcasts such as news or sports—provided the broadcaster supports the HLG format.
Dolby Digital Audio
New Vu TVs come with Dolby Digital sound technology. The strength of Dolby Digital lies in compressing the size of multichannel audio files without disturbing the sound quality. What Dolby Digital does is takes cues from how the human ear processes sound and implements it in its own functioning. It provides 5 bandwidth channels: front right, front left, center, surround right, surround left for an amazingly true sound feel. Thus, it expands right and left conventional stereo channels to give listeners enveloping 360 degrees of sound. This arrangement also helps in providing clean, crisp dialogue delivery of the onscreen sound.
Models like 50PM have a Dolby Audio MS12 decoder that intelligently adjusts the loudness of speech from background music making speech clear and audible even when mishmash with other audio inputs.
Quantitatively speaking Vu Masterpiece model comes with 6 speakers, 2 subwoofers, and 2 tweeters that deliver immersive audio output. Vu Cinema 65LX model comes with 100 watts speaker which is the loudest in the 65-inch TV category.
Android 9
Vu like Panasonic, Samsung, and LG used to come with its own operating systems—Opera TV OS. But now Vu has completely switched over to Android OS. That’s good, because with Android you get Play Store to download thousands of apps. And of course, all core Google apps like Google Music, Google Play Movies, Google Games come out of the box.
The latest Android 4K Vu TVs come with Android Pie. They come with the Chromecast built-in which facilitates seamless casting of videos, photos, and other content from mobile, tablet or laptop on the giant Vu TV. With the Google Home app, you can seamlessly control your TV with the Android smartphone.
Dual-band WiFi Support and Bluetooth 5.0
One of the appreciable features of the new Vu TVs is that they come with dual-band WiFi support. Most of the smart TVs come with single-band WiFi, working on 2.4 GHz frequency. But the new 4K Vu TV will work not only on 2.4 GHz WiFi but also on 5 GHz WiFi. The advantage of compatibility with 5 GHz WiFi is that you can enjoy super high-speed wireless internet running on the latest WiFi 6 launched this year. Similarly, the new Vu TV comes with the latest Bluetooth 5.0 version which has a greater range, faster transfer speeds, and more device support.
MEMC to Reduce Motion Blur
There is a long list of parameters specified for TVs and one of the less commonly considered parameters is the refresh rate. The refresh rate tells how many frames the TV would show per second. A TV with a 50 Hz refresh rate would show 50 different frames per second. Higher the refresh better would be the video clarity.
The refresh rate would matter the most while watching action pack scenes, with fast moving objects. Often during such scenes, you will witness motion blur or judder due to low frame rates. Vu Masterpiece TV comes with a 120 Hz refresh rate. Thus, watching fast-paced action scenes or playing high-FPS games would be a breeze on this TV. Vu Cinema series TV comes with MEMC (motion estimation, motion compensation) to reduce motion blur even on TVs with 60 Hz panel.
Vu TVs Advantages and Disadvantages
One of the main qualities of Vu TVs is their value-for-money. Nearly at half the price of other premium Korean brands like Samsung or LG, Indian brand Vu offer almost the same features. Also, Vu is one of the rare TV manufacturers that use an A+ grade panel for their LEDs. It provides a good amount of ports like HDMI, Ethernet, USB to connect other devices to it. It also offers USB 3.0 in its high-range devices which again is quite impressive. Bluetooth 5.0 and dual-band WiFi support is the icing on the cake. Connectivity wise everything is covered in Vu 4K smart TVs.
But on the downside, neither the build quality is as premium as Sony or Samsung, nor the picture quality is as strikingly beautiful as OLED TVs from LG or Panasonic. Another thing which surprised us is no adoption of 8K resolution yet. Even the flagship Vu Masterpiece TV with mammoth 85’ screen comes with 4K resolution. Vu is falling behind Samsung, LG and Panasonic when it comes to launching TVs with 8K resolution.
Conclusion
VuTV is one of the fastest growing TV brand in India. One thing we must appreciate about Vu is that it has dared to break the unspoken rule of Indian retail—big appliances do not find buyers on e-commerce. Thanks to its noticeable presence on e-commerce platforms, Vu TVs sell like hot cakes during flash sales. Beyond virtual space, it also has outlets in many cities like Mumbai, Pune, Puducherry, Indore, etc. So, considering all this, and apart from a few lapses in the build quality, Vu still could be your go-to brand if your budget is limited but aspirations are not!