Recommend me an HD TV.

Best make? LED/LCD/BACKLIT?

Size makes all the difference. If 42″ or more go for a plasma and probably a Panasonic.

Samsung are one of the best (colours/low input lag for gaming/amount of settings/customisation).

They are all pretty much LCD with LED backlighting I beleive, if they say LED.

Loads of threads on here, use the search, but Samsung will come pretty high up.

Oh and do not go for a 37″, there is one manufacture in the world of this size, that sells them to all the others, they are really rubbish.

Samsung are one of the best

I have yet to see a Samsung that impresses me – particularly in terms of any picture processing they do – they seem to make the biggest possible hash of it.

Whereas I was pretty impressed with the pictures on the Sony’s in a Sony centre I was browsing in recently.

Panasonics are nearly always pretty sound.

And funnily enough I have been very impressed with a couple of Sharps I have seen recently – their color rendition seemed very good and the resulting pictures were very realistic – I was watching the tennis on one at the weekend (with the line judge incident) and it reminded me of how realistic the picture on my old Sony Trinitron was when watching wimbledon coverage after having been there that day.

I know what decent HD should look like – I worked at BBC Research Dept when they were working on the original HD, which was 1280 lines of uncompressed analogue, and that was impressive.

Just bought a Panasonic Plasma and it is really impressive out of the box (THX setting).
Don’t get sucked into “its brighter – it must be better”
When we stood in the shop having a demo the chap put it to THX setting after we had been watching it in some other setting. It looked really dim! After about 2 minutes of chatting I looked at the picture and thought how good it was – this is the setting I will start with although there is a massive amount of adjustment for me to bu99er it up with.

Excellent. Thanks people.

Samsung / Panasonic / Toshiba.

Anecdotally, the last two TVs I’ve bought were both Tosh and I’m very happy with them.

Samsung telly.
And John Lewis free 5-year guarantee whilst they’ve got a sale on.
But its all about the cables. 😉

I have yet to see a Samsung that impresses me – particularly in terms of any picture processing they do – they seem to make the biggest possible hash of it.

Have you seen a callibrated one fed an HD signal? Mine sits in the room next door to my reference Pioneer plasma. The picture is very impressive.

Samsung TVs in the shop are set on Dynamic mode and this is truly dreadful. Over-bright, over-sharp. Turn off the processing, set the colours and sharpness, and the picture is fantastic.

Have you seen a callibrated one fed an HD signal?

what if you are not feeding it an HD signal?

Unless you are feeding it a 1080P signal you will be relying on the onboard picture processing to scale the picture to the panel, and Samsungs seem to be the worst at doing this, whereas the current Sony’s seem to be fairly good at it – and they are both suppossed to be using panels made at the same factory – aren’t they?

Obviously, if you use Virgin or Sky you might have a lot of 720P HD channels and can rely on their boxes to do the picture processing – bypassing a lot of the stuff the Samsung would otherwise be making a mess of.

Panasonic.