Ok following my 18month old son breaking my 6month old LCD TV last year we have finally gotten round to buying another one

Which one? They ‘all look the same to me.

http://www.richersounds.com/product/tv—all/lg/42cs460/lg-42cs460

http://www.richersounds.com/product/lcd-led-tvs/sharp/lc40sh340/shar-lc40sh340

Only £60 difference between the two.

I have an LG 37″ one. It shows pictures, it sounds ok. It doesn’t complete me though and I do wonder if it’s maybe a size too small…

Speaking as a non electronics geek, I have always found sharp stuff at bit rubbish in the same way as Bush stuff is.

Saying that they probably all have the same internals and different cases 😉

My OH bought a 40″ Sharp LCD TV for her Parents for Xmas. Worked fine for 30 minutes then the sound died and now it just crackles. Going back to shop…….

We had a LG before it met hora junior

My OH bought a 40″ Sharp LCD TV for her Parents for Xmas. Worked fine for 30 minutes then the sound died and now it just crackles. Going back to shop…….

Read a couple of reviews like this on the Sharp. Hmmm £60 difference.

Got an LG about 4 years ago, looks very like the one in your pic, mate has same model, same age. No probs as yet.

Work with guys in presentation business, LG seems good enough for them.

LG all the way even bought my 101 year old Nan an LG TV and she loved it
so easy to use menu system etc and all bought via Richer Sounds

I’d stretch your budget just a little bit more and get a Panasonic
http://www.richersounds.com/product/tv—all/panasonic/viera-txp42x50b/pana-txp42x50b

Maybe not the sexiest looking TV ,but will probably be a better picture,more reliable and if not Richer Sounds are chucking in a 5yr warranty for nowt.

My parents have just bought a 42″ panasonic plasma from currys for £289. Not full HD, but still has a very sharp detailed picture.

Unovolo: 1024×768 v 1924×1080 and its not fully HD ready plus RS are transferring the 5yr warranty that I originally took out 🙂

Still have a Sharp Aquos 13″ LCD in daily use that’s getting on for a decade old, but then like the original “piano key” VHS players in the mid 70s, it was over £700! Bought a 15″ version a few years later and that’s also still working fine, so 2/2 here.

The Panny has a glass protective screen. That could the clincher considering previous damage

Unovolo: 1024×768 v 1924×1080 and its not fully HD ready plus RS are transferring the 5yr warranty that I originally took out

Here what your saying and yes on paper the Screen resolution sounds better on the other TV,but if you can it would be best to actually view the screens in question in the fles,as the reality can be markedly difference.
2 examples,Fitted a Sky HD in a ladies house just 2 days ago,she had a LG Smart 3DTV full HD, this model to be exact
http://www.lg.com/uk/tvs/lg-47LM640T-3d-tv

The HD picture was grainy and just not great ,colours were fine and contrast OK just a odd grainy feel to the picture even when viewing from a distance.
Yet looking at the spec it should be better than the Panasonic Plasma screen I have, trust me when I say its not.

Another exmaple:Compare the Screen specs for the New Ipad Mini and a Google Nexus 7,the PPI on the Nexus 7 is much higher than the Ipad mini so should be a much clearer screen,go have a look at them in real life and you will find theres not a lot of difference(and no I’m not a apple fan boy I have owned a Ipad 1 but currently have said NEXUS 7).

I have the Panasonic TX-P42X50B and it can be found for £300ish now. The picture is excellent. We have bought a TX-P50X50B (£420) for the front room exactly because of the glass screen being better than any LCD/LED screen in the price range. We have 2 year old lad too, and damage was the prime concern.

Troutwrestler..aye as I found out. I think the glass front will be the decider.

Trout looking at the stats both pannys are exactly the same. Just an upscaled panel. Do you see any quality loss?

Think wewill go with the panny 42

The cheap one’s HD ready, not full HD if it’s any interest.

My parents have just bought a 42″ panasonic plasma from currys for £289. Not full HD, but still has a very sharp detailed picture.

We just bought , I’m guessing, the same one, and probably the same as Troutwrestlers, but £319 at Richer Sounds, with a 5 year warranty. Cracking picture, better than our (admittedly) 3 year old Sony LCD, picture seemed better than the similarly priced LCD/LED’s in the shop.

Unless you’ll just be watching from a Sky/PVR box, I’d recommend one with a Freeview HD tuner built in. Look for DVB-T2 listed in the specs. Lots of ‘full HD’ sets seem not to include this, so rely on an external source for best picture.

I tend to watch DVDs or graze freeview. Not really sky or a telly recorder type.

Saw one in RS for 460 (LED pan) and it was brilliant however where do you stop? Its a TV.

If you dont intend to watch Blu-ray DVD then I would not worry about whether its full HD or HD ready.

I watch a lot of encoded films MP4,AVI,H264 etc via a media sender and the Panny makes them all look pretty good.

We’ve got a Sharp Aquos 37″ HD Ready, never had a problem in the 6 years we’ve had it. Its now in the bedroom.
We also have a 42″ Panasonic Viera Plasma. Much much better, but that’s probably down to the Full HD rather than the actual telly make.

We have an LG Fridge Freezer…… again, super reliable for the last 7 years.

Pot luck I reckon. 😀

Neil F if its the one linked to by another poster its not full HD?

We’ve got a Sharp Aquos. About 2 years old, no problems, still a great picture & still like the design of it which was so much cooler than the others on the market when we bought it. Happy punter here 🙂

The picture on both is excellent. Both have Freeview HD tuners. We have a Panasonic Bluray (BD77) and the output from a standard DVD on the TV is WAY BETTER than I anticipated. TBH I can’t imagine how the picture could be better. I don’t know if the upscaling on the signal is done at the Bluray or the TV end, but it looks great.

I am very pleased with the purchase.

We have a very similar to that LG both as the main TV and as the XBOX TV upstairs. both fantastic. Absolutely no complaints.

Lg 48″ plasma, no idea what the TV is like, its my computer monitor. Was on special as a managers offer ex display… works fine….

Personally I’d stay away from Sharp, or LG if you are serious about PQ and go for a Panny, Sony, or Samsung.

If you just want a tv, then go for it.

hora – Member
Neil F if its the one linked to by another poster its not full HD?

Na, my Panny is about 4 years old.
http://www.electronicworldtv.co.uk/42_panasonic_th42pz82b_viera_full_hd_1080p_digital_freeview_plasma_tv_24_d

Watching football is massively better on the plasma, but to be honest everything else is pretty much the same, or there’s very little difference, IMO.

Speaking as a non electronics geek, I have always found sharp stuff at bit rubbish in the same way as Bush stuff is.

that is a bit of an insult – Bush have rarely made anything of any quality whereas Sharp have a long history of quality electronic goods.

Sharp seem to produce more sets in the budget range now than they did so they should be judged accordingly.

However I have recently seen quite a few Sharp LCDs that I have been quite impressed with.

My parents-in-law have one and it makes a much better job of displaying SD freeview channels than a similar Panasonic that we were using in a rental cottage the week before, which was fed from Freesat.

I visited someone recently with a large Sharp set showing BBC iPlayer HD material and I was very impressed with the picture quality.

I used to have a Sharp Aquos ‘Optimised-for-Pal’ set that had 540 vertical pixels.

When displaying PAL it chopped the top and bottom 18 lines from the picture and mapped it straight to the display – so there was none of the nasty effects from upscaling that you see on many sets.

For broadcast HD, 1080i mapped straight onto the screen as each frame is 540 lines and so again no upscaling needed, and 720P could just be downscaled slightly.

The results were excellent, combined with a very good color representation.

When I replaced it with a Sony LCD it took me a long while to get ‘as good’ a picture with broadcast sources – I have to make adjustments in the Sony’s service menu to get the colors better, and I had to use the upscaling in my Virgin V+ box rather than the TV. The difference on a 720P source was pretty much unnoticable, and the Sharp scored on its better colors.

When looking for a new set Sharp would figure in my shortlist, along with Panasonic, and Sony as I think their new sets seem to have good pictures.

LG and Samsung would not – dubious about LG’s quality (why has their name got Lucky in it?) and I think Samsungs picture processing sucks badly.

[My first job was at BBC Research Department when they were working on HD, which was 1280 lines of analogue and very impressive, so all my judgements on picture quality stem from this – I have yet to see anything that was as good as back then]

Turnerguy so isthe panny 42 720 above ok to buy?

ReviewHEREfor the Panny.
Also available from John Lewis with a 5yr Guarantee for £329.
And if your not bothered about a 5yr guarantee you can get it from Argos for £289.
http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/7471247.htm?CMPID=GS001&_$ja=tsid:11527%7Ccc:%7Cprd:7471247%7Ccat:technology+%2F+televisions+and+accessories+%2F+televisions

Turnerguy so isthe panny 42 720 above ok to buy?

My point about the 720 screens is that the lack of pixels 1. ‘smooths out’ the picture and 2. means there is less upscaling to do.

If you remember when plasmas were first out, everyone used to say how much better the pictures were on them, but they were only 480 lines, not even enough for PAL.

The screen smoothed out a lot of detail but led to impression that the overall picture was good.

So if you are going to watch the non-HD catch-up services from the web, or the SD channels, then a 720P screen might well offer a better picture than a 1080P screen.

Obviously a good upscaler might work well, but it still is having to create information that isn’t in the source, and normally making a bit of a mess of it. And that is one reason that TVs vary in price – the quality of the computer processing in it.

In Selfridges I saw a 720P and a 1080P version of the same set next to each other and showing a freeview channel (maybe ITV HD) – and the difference was easily apparent – the 720P screen looked better.