The on-screen menus are rudimentary (blocky, not terribly attractive, and blue), but straightforward and easy to navigate. The main menu offers picture, sound, preferences, locks, and setup submenus. The preferences, locks, and setup menus are just what they sound like--the first permits you to tweak closed-caption settings, AV input, and menu language; the second allows you to set up a parental PIN-code lock; and the last lets you reset your TV.

You'll find only three predefined picture modes under the picture menu, and not many advanced options for the average tweaker. The presets include 'standard', 'sports', and 'movie', as well as 'preference' or custom. The basic visual controls--contrast, backlight, brightness, color, tint, and sharpness--are all present. The advanced controls on the main picture menu include color temperature and dynamic contrast; options to tweak noise reduction and theater settings are also available. Theater settings allow you to change the picture size, adjust the picture scroll, tweak aspect ratio, and go into cinema mode or use motion estimation-motion compensation (MEMC) 120Hz.

In our jury testing, the VT4210 earned average number scores but still landed slightly lower than the other TVs in its testing group. On our 1080i football testing clip, one of our jurors saw a mild halo effect around the players in the first scene. On our 1080i vineyard testing clip, the entire scene looked a bit dark for our tastes--unfortunately, this darkness haunted the rest of the testing as well.

In our Phantom of the Opera DVD clips (which test the HDTV's internal upconversion), the scenes appeared darker than usual and a bit choppy. Scenes in Blu-ray Disc clips from Mission Impossible III and The Dark Knight also seemed much too black; in one Dark Knight scene, Christian Bale's tuxedo merely looked like a black blob.

The VT4210 did poorly in our , both horizontal and diagonal. In the horizontal-panning test, the set received a score of 2 out of 5 from four of our jurors, and a score of 1 out of 5 from our most senior juror. The horizontal-panning test shows a blueprint panning across the screen; on this TV the blueprint was so blurry that it was almost impossible to read. In the diagonal-panning test, the VT4210 rated only slightly better, with a unanimous 2 out of 5 from all five of our jurors.