Getting a new TV and slightly bamboozled by the specifications. Just wondering what the difference between led and lcd is, is one better/clearer than the other?

Both are the same screens usually, but one has led lighting around the edge to help illuminate bright spots and to enhance the darkness of dark scenes.

Toby is a bit off there.

While the screens are essentially the same technology it is how they are lit which marks LCD and LED apart.

LCD will be backlit by fluorescent lamps, whereas LED TVs will be either have edge lit or full array LED backlighting. LED should have a more even lighting, this obviously gets better the more you spend, as well as allowing the TVs to be thinner and lighter, this is especially the case with edge lighted sets. Energy consumption on LED sets is also lower.

In summary though, get an LED TV as it is the newer technology.

Excellent, thanks both for your input.

Neither. Get a plasma if you want the best picture quality 🙂

Don’t rule out a plasma, especially the newer neo-plasmas – good if you watch a lot of sport / fast moving programmes.

I left out full backlit as there aren’t that many around, fair point though 🙂

Plasma is better picture quality although they also tend to be much larger than some people want and the contrast and colours aren’t as sprightly as LED.

contrast is *much* better on a plasma. The overall brightness levels can be a bit low though

what’s wrong with CRT?

Nothing, if you have cataracts and too much space in your room.

I challenge anyone to find fault with the picture on my normally backlit Samsung LCD. Maybe an engineer with calibration equipment would but to the normal eye it’s brilliant – easily better than the very, very good PQ on my JVC CRT and I can’t imagine a Plasma being any better.

Thanks again for all the responses. Think I’m going to get this one.

http://www.dixons.co.uk/gbuk/samsung-ue32d4003-32-hd-ready-led-tv-11126514-pdt.html

Do I need to buy a separate HDMI lead, or do ya’ll think it’ll come with one?

Cheers

It would appear that you need one – also it’s not full HD, which may not be critical at the screen size. What’s your viewing distance?

I have the Samsung UE32D5000, which is the next model-ish up, and I am fairly sure it did not come with a cable. Not 100% though.

Just get a cheap and cheerful one from Amazon.

…or start a thread about buying an expensive HDMI cable and watch the forum explode.

You will need HDMI cable

Would be watching it from about 8 or 9 ft, does it make a huge difference even if I’m not watching any HD channels?

defydude, thanks for the link.

Maybe http://www.dixons.co.uk/gbuk/lg-m2780d-27-full-hd-led-tv-08484759-pdt.html instead?

Would you like a 5-year guarentee ?

John Lewis

This would appear to be a stonking deal – 40″ Sony Freeview HD for £350 after cashback.

lgtastic

Neither. Get a plasma if you want the best picture quality

Gets my vote as well

Get the above John Lewis deal, 32 inch is the min you want for your viewing distance mate, and the 5yr guarantee is great!! Buy it!!,

I’ve got the samsung 40C7000 which is edge lit led and while the picture quality is generally stunning the blacks can go cloudy if the tv’s been on for a few hours, tbh the model down with the standard backlighting is probably better picture quality but it’s way thicker which meant the mrs didn’t like it.

LCD, edge-lit LED and true/full LED are all just LCD screens with different sorts of back-lighting.

In an LCD TV the light that is emitted from the screen comes from a series of very thin fluorescent tubes which sit against a white background, behind the screen. They generate a fairly even white light which hits the inside of the screen. Each of the LCDs is effectively a tiny window which allows light through. The voltage passing over the LCD affects the opacity, thus allowing more or less light through depending on how bright that particular pixel is supposed to be. Each pixel is actually three (or four) LCDs of different colours, but that’s irrelevant for the explanation of LCD vs LED.

The LEDs in the middle get most of their light from the white screen/fluorescent tubes directly behind them, but also gets some ‘leaked’ light from just above, below, left and right of it. The LEDs at the edges of the screen are not evenly surrounded by this back-light source, because part of their surroundings is off the edge of the screen and therefore there is no back-light coming from there. For example a pixel on the left of the screen will only have leaked light from above, below and from the right of it.

For this reason the edges of an LED screen can appear slightly less bright than the middle. This is where side-lit LED TVs come in. These have rows of LEDs along the edges to boost the back-light for the pixels near the edge so it matches the centre. Edge-lit LED TVs are basically LCD TVs with LEDs along the edges to even out the back-lighting.

True LED TVs replace the fluorescent tube back-lighting with an array of LEDs. On first thought you’d expect that this would have the same edge drop-off as your basic LCD screen, but since the light output of each LED can be controlled individually, those at the edge can be made brighter than those in the middle, thus compensating for the dimness at the edge. Another benefit is that for large dark areas of the screen, multiple LEDs can be turned off to give a deeper black (rather than the LCD having to block out the light, the light is switched off or dimmed). So true LED TVs are just LCD TVs with better back-lighting.

Plasma TVs, on the other hand, are not back-lit. Each pixel is made up of a tiny wee neon light bulb (and/or possibly argon, or some other noble gas) which is switched on and off. The phosphors on the inside of the bulb determine the colour of the light, so you have your red, green and blue bulbs for each pixel.

That’s how I understand it, anyway.

We’ve just bought a plasma (Panasonic TH-P50ST30Z) as we thought it had a sharper image, deeper blacks and handled fast-moving images better (eg sports) than anything else we could afford. Other opinions are available.

I just got a Samsung UN65D8000XF LED and the picture is insane, though i’m not convinced that the blacks are as consistant as our 40″ LCD Samsung in the bedroom… That may be the screen size as opposed to the backlight though…

This would appear to be a stonking deal – 40″ Sony Freeview HD for £350 after cashback.

I bought one of those for work after our other died. It’s an excellent TV great picture even with just normal freeview sound quality isn’t too bad either.

A full-HD set just means that it has to do more upscaling for a larger percentage of time as broadcast tv is only 720P or 1080i and is not likely to change – other than to get worse and broadcasters up the compression once everyone has HD.

In my view, unless you are using it to view another source like a computer, you are better off with a 720P TV so the upscaling artifacts aren’t as noticable.

In the early days everyone said plasma sets had better pictures but if you look at the specs of these sets they were mostly 480P – i.e. less lines than the source so no upscaling.

I had a 540P Sharp LCD and when I replaced it with a 720P sony set fed from a Virgin V+ box (so lots of upscaling power) it took me lots of tinkering before the picture on the sony matched the Sharp being feed PAL (572i) though a SCART.

is not likely to change – other than to get worse and broadcasters up the compression once everyone has HD.

Except that it’s going to improve as areas drop the crappy old signal that’s what is holding back good HD.

Add to that anyone with sense who’s bought a HD will get a Blu-ray player plus 1080i to 1080p takes little upscaling then your theory is very flawed.

Thanks again for all the responses, went for the Samsung from John Lewis in the end

http://www.johnlewis.com/231344917/Product.aspx?SearchTerm=UE32D4003

5 year guarantee and easy to take back if anything goes wrong, and looks nice.

Except that it’s going to improve as areas drop the crappy old signal that’s what is holding back good HD.

I think you are talking about Freeview here – us cable and satellite users already have to suffer reduced quality on the BBC HD channels so that Freeview HD looks the same as the other distribution channels.

A few years ago, on the same weekend as some ‘Royal’ event in London, the BBC reduced the quality of the freeview feeds to see how low they could get it before people started complaining – the pictures of the event in London were terrible, lots of mpeg breakup, etc.

Sky have done a similair thing on their satellite feeds.

The BBC also installed higher compressing encoders on their HD feeds a couple of years ago and then dismissed all the complaints of reduced picture quality.

Add to that anyone with sense who’s bought a HD will get a Blu-ray player plus 1080i to 1080p takes little upscaling then your theory is very flawed

Of course your box has to upscale 1080i – it is only getting interlaced 540 lines per frame – so for moving images you are likely to see more upscaling artifacts with 1080i than with 720P. I think it is your comment/understanding that is very flawed.

If you watch bluray all the time then fair enough – but otherwise your hardware will be upscaling and so my theory holds. The more upscaling the worse the picture in my opinion.

Granted that on a 1366×768 screen then everything will be rescaled in some manner because of the stupid choice of these screens over 1280×720 screens, but the reduced number of pixels over a 1080P screen offers a useful ‘smoothing’ effect to nullify the mess created by upscaling.