Home > Consumer Reviews > RCA F38310 38" 16:9 HDTV with Built-In DirecTV and HDTV Receivers

RCA you need to start over. The picture is great if your watching DVD's and more specifically only 16:9 ratio DVD's. If you watch anything in a 4:3 aspect ratio and you want the image to look normal you are watching it on a 29 inch screen. If you stretch the image with the only two options you have full (looks like a fun house mirror) and fill (you loose two inches of image at the top and bottom of the screen) it looks terrible. RCA you need to do a better job and offer more options for a more normal conversion of a 4:3 aspect ratio signal. The most annoying of all things with this TV is the HDTV fan that runs 24 hours a day. It never shuts off! Not only is it a huge waste of energy but at some point it will break. After reading other reviews of the lousy service RCA provides for customer support I decided to return my product before it was to late and something broke. There are better TV's at about the same price and although they are a couple of inches smaller the are way better. Don't get lured into the 38 inch size only attraction of this set. Stay away!

I purchased TV. in Dec 2001 And I like 75% of the reviewers had a problem which needed to be repaired. Thankfully the tech repaired it in house and from the symptons I told him he new the trouble before he opened the TV. He had seen the same trbl before 2 capacitors were bad in the power supply.
Yes the fan runs 24/7 and it bothered me at first but now I dont even notice it. No video output to record directv channels, speakers sound bad at high volumes when watching certain shows, The local channels dont look as sharp as on an analog tv.
But on the plus side The picture with HDTV or DVD is phenominal, It is the largest widescreen direct view on the market. And it is cheaper then most 34" widescreen. It has HDTV tuner and sat tuner built in.

I have had my F38310 for 6 months now. It came out of the box working and looking just about perfect. A few minor adjustemnts, and I can not overstate how wonderful the picture is. Really.

I don't think the average person is aware just how good digital TV, and HDTV in particular is or they would never consider a TV without a built-in DTV decoder. You will find yourself watching shows brodcast in HDTV that you previously had no interest in simply because they look and sound so good. With a simple indoor antenna (I have tried a bunch and found the $14 Radio Shack double bow-tie UHF antenna to be far and away the best), I still am amazed at just how good everthing looks. If you enjoy DVDs, they look fantastic as well. In fact, the picture on this TV is so good, you'll begin to notice the limitations of the DVD format. The picture quality is not quite as good as the HDTV content you'll get with an antenna.

Like anything, the TV has a couple of "less than perfect" attributes, all of which have been mentioned here. By no means should you let any of them prevent you from strongly considering this TV.

I bought this television 4 months ago. All the methods suggested by RCA to get the TV to work were tried but nothing worked. Finally a RCA-approved local technician checked it and found that a component in the power supply board was bad. After this, a video converter board was found to be bad. I am going to cut my losses and sell this TV now and buy something else. If you scan the reviews here at Amazon and other sites, you will see that RCA/Thompson products have a much higher component failure rate than similar products made by Sony, Panasonic, JVC, etc. You pay a little less for RCA up front, but are taking a high risk later with repair bills and headaches. Think about it before you buy.

I just bought this set and have had it for a day and so far I am very happy. One concern that others had expressed was the noise of the fan. I can barely hear the fan if I put my ear next to teh TV, so on my unit anyway this is not an issue (unless it gets worse with time). I have not yet hooked up direct TV so I have not yet gotten the HDTV part going, but just looking at a DVD on the set (component input) the quality is really great.
Now "regular" TV channels don't always look so fabulous, but I suspect that may be just because the clarity and size of the tv shows teh imperfections in those signals (like sometimes I notice artifacts that I think are from my tivo--I never noticed them before but I wasn;t using such a good set before).

Anyway, for the price, considerng it has a built in HDTV tuner (very few sets do)...its a great deal.