Hitachi L37LX01

Listen up, sofa spuds! Hitachi knows what you want most in a television, and they're not afraid to give it to you.

Yes, this LCD sports a fully automated swivel stand that twists at the prod of a remote control button; never again will you have to haul your frame off the couch to angle the screen slightly towards you. And people wonder why this country has an obesity problem...

Thankfully, this dapper 37-incher has way more going for it than a lard arse-friendly stand. It's sat right at the top of Hitachi's range and packed with high-end features like a full 1920 x 1080 resolution, three HDMI sockets and SD card and USB ports for digital photo peeping. It also benefits from a tidy high gloss design and solid build quality.

Of course, all the bells and whistles in the world don't mean a jot if the performance is more shambolic than Winehouse after Wetherspoon's happy hour, but praise be -- this thing's a very good gogglebox.

While the picture quality isn't quite up to the standards of a Pioneer plasma or Philips LCD, you certainly wouldn't be ashamed to plug your Blu-ray player or Xbox 360 into this fella. Hi-def movies and telly look crisp and clean on the screen, and speedy motion in video games barely causes a blur. Standard def pictures aren't quite so impressive, thanks to some noticeable smearing and grubby-looking noise at times, but that's almost always the case with LCD tellies, so we can't slam Hitachi too hard for it.

Sound quality is a notch above most TVs, thanks to the wealth of sonic wizardry stuffed inside: there's SRS and a powerful digital amp, which keeps things beefier than we've come to expect from a compact flat screen.

This screen isn't cheap, and it's not the best in its class, but it's a solid all-round performer with tons of features and strong picture and audio performance. Oh, and did we mention that it's got a motorised stand?