That said, I found the remote well designed and easy to use. The channel and volume buttons are large and easy to reach with your thumb, and the remote felt comfortable in my hand.

Video-quality scores were mixed. In PCWorld Labs video-quality testing, some members of our panel gave the HL46XSL2 good--but not great--scores, while other testers were less impressed. Ultimately, the HL46XSL2 finished slightly below average compared with the other HDTVs we've evaluated in the past year.

Our test panel found that the HL46XSL2 was consistently too bright. Some judges didn't mind the brightness as much as others, though, so this can be a matter of personal preference. We also noticed that the TV struggled to replicate fine details in some scenes. And although it handled motion-heavy scenes reasonably well, this 120Hz HDTV did produce some distortion around moving objects (for example, when Tom Cruise scales the Vatican wall in Chapter 7 of the Mission Impossible III Blu-ray release).

In typical use, the HL46XSL2 consumes 144 watts, according to , which makes it one of the least-efficient TVs in its size class that we've tested over the past year. But when it's switched off, it doesn't draw any current at all.

If you're shopping for a 46-inch TV on the cheap, the Haier HL46XSL2 may be worth a look--but you'd be better off paying a little more for better image quality.