Hi,

I am planning to buy a smallish (19"-24") TV for the spare room. I would like one with Freeview and a built in DVD player if possible.

Tesco, Sainsbury's, Currys etc. seem to have lots of cheap models with brand names such as Technika, Emotion and Essentials.

One feature offered by these models which does not seem to appear on more mainstream brands is the ability to record from the Freeview tuner to an external USB storage device. This is a pretty attractive feature but I am a bit uncomfortable buying this type of brand.

Does anyone have one? – if so how have you found it?

Thanks

"record from the Freeview tuner to an external USB storage device"

I don't know, I don't have one, but I'd imagine they'll just dump the MPEG2 transport stream (i.e. what's broadcast). So about 1gig an hour. This is technically fairly simple – they don't have to transcode – so I'm surprised more TVs don't do it.

If this is what they do it'll probably only play on the telly or in VLC without transcoding, or a new container format at least.

That was probably more technical info that you were after, feel free to ignore me. 🙂

Mate of mine has a Hannspring or something, never heard of it but it's really good.

My mum got an "onn" form ASDA. It's now dead. TFFT. Bad remote, bad screen, bad sound and bad menus.

I got a cheap logik one from comet I think. Can't really complain at the price. Picture is good, records onto a portable hard drive fine. Gripes are: poor sound and reverbs at certain frequencies, cheap remote with rubbish layout and annoyingly illogical menus, doesn't name recorded files with the program title.

We got a 19" one from aldi earlier this year , it's the bedroom telly so doesn't see masses of use but I've no complaints with it. It has all the USB record facilities n all that but we've never tried them out.

Got a Technika from Tesco IIRC it is Samsung that makes the screen. seems to work okay (but it is not used a lot)

My mum bought a technika one from tescos last year, died after 5 months. Now replaced with a samsung, much better picture and sound. And above all still going strong a year down the line.

Thanks guys,

I think I am going to go for a "reputable" brand as I want a decent remote, menus etc. Will lost the USB feature but it sounds a bit undeveloped anyway.

In terms of the screen, there's only a few companies that make LCD panels so that won't be much different. It's the extra features that will be missing on cheap tv's, like the number and type of connectors.

In my experience either buy weird brand Tesco, take a punt and put up with the bad menus. You get what you pay for and in my experience it's low cost, lowish function but value for money. Either that or go the other way and buy Song, Smasung etc. Easy to use quality kit that you pay for. Avoid the mid range brands, all the problems of the cheap stuff with an inflated cost. I think this advice applies to a lot of electrical stuff these days including white goods and power tools. Take a punt and go cheap or stump up top whack, the middle way is likely to cost more in the long run.

Although only a few people make the LCDs, which i am not sure is true for the smaller screens, there is a huge quality difference between the cheap screens and more expensive screens from the same factory.

I have a cheap Argos LCD in the kitchen and although OK for watching the news in the morning the viewing angles are terrible, the sound is poor and it generally just isnt great.

In car terms its like comparing a top of the range Perodua with a bottom of the range Mini. Next time I will be dropping a few features and spending about 15% more.

The Foehn & Hirsch TV's on ebuyer get good feedback. They come with 3 years warranty so might be worth a look? Good on value too.

If you go for a usb record function, check if it works on a timer, also most devices will only have one tuner, so you can only record what you're watching.
May not be that much use if that is the case.

We bought a cheap assa 26" tv back when LCDs were just becoming popular. Several years on it's now on the bedroom wall but not a single dead pixel on it and still works perfectly. Ok the menus are mental but at the time the main bonus (apart from the price) was the connections – IIRC the forums were saying the ASDA tv was a rebadged Hitachi, but the Hitachi had most of the ports blank so where I have VGA, s-vid, component etc, the more expensive only has scart and phono.

I bought a 22" Technica with freeview and DVD and USB storage eary this year for my kitchen/dinnning room. We watch it much more than the new 42" Samsung plasma sat in the living room.
The picture is fine and the sound is ok for a small tv, tunning was easy enough and the menu is simple enough, ives 5 days programme info and can do the pause live tv stuff. 4gb usb memroy comes with the tv.

I guess it depends where you using it, is it your main TV? is it like mine for watching while cooking?
We have the radio on it quite often and because it has a dvd player I can put the daughter and pals in that room and keep em quiet.

The Tesco technika are samsung screens and tbh the new ones are value for money, look better than the previous models and the reliability seems to of been fixed, ive seen less coming back, in fact in the last 6 months ive only seen one returned and that was due to the idiot who brought it snapped the fittings off when fitting the stand, unsure how he managed that!

At the moment they have a clearance so best time to pick up a bargain and you can always get a 5 year warranty.

Buy a cheap one and keep the receipt!

All the supermarket ones come with a at least a 2 year warranty, same as the expensive ones – and in my experience places like Tesco tend to be fairly no quibble, replace straight away with any warranty job.