Tellybox Advice

40″ TV, budget of around £300, what would you get?

I would seriously consider dropping a size to be able to afford more recent tech.

Last week we bought two Sony Bravia 32″ 653 from Richer Sounds. Id spent the day doing the rounds of the usual shops and what was really obvious was that the “bargin” 32″ TVs (say £260) were 12-18m old tech and noticeably poorer quality of picture to the later (and £100+ more expensive) tech (say 6m old). That applied to all the main players, samsung, panasonic, Sony etc. And 32″ I reckon is a perfectly comfortable size.

So my budget of £300 I bumped up to £360 and got the Sonys as I dont want to have to buy again for many years – these are our first TVs for 10yrs having previously used an old monitor, I’m that tightarse 😳

This will be my first TV in about 12 years, still using an old Panasonic CRT. Which is great, to be fair, but HD is calling now we have fibre optic internets. At the moment I’ve been looking at a 5000 series Samsung (bit over budget) and a Finlux which gets good reviews. Good point about the old tech, but surely it’s still advancing? Or have they hit a plateau with 2d / 1080 now?

I mean old tech being on the cheaper models that are heavily discounted into your price/size range. Newer screen tech (and its not just pixels) came out on ranges during the middle of last year, this are obviously not discounted yet, but they really do look much better.

Panasonic TX-P42X60 ?
£300 – ‘HD Ready’ and no ‘smart’ features if that bothers you.

I’ve got the older 50″ x50 model and when fed with HD it really is stunning.

Defo worth considering.

Ooh. That Panasonic Plasma will almost certainly give better pictures than any LCD at that sort of price. Bargain. It’s not 1080 but you won’t notice on a 40″ set.

Two questions –

– what are you going to hook up to it? 720 will be fine with anything designed to output to a TV (including Apple TV). If you’re going to hook up a PC directly then 1080 more likely to be worthwhile.

– What’s your room like? Plasmas outperform LCD in darker rooms but are not so great in bright ambient light.

That Panasonic actually looks pretty bob on.

Two answers:

– We’ll be watching HD Freeview, and streaming movies / playing games through an Xbox 360, possibly with the addition of a PS3 for Blu Ray (and more games) later.

– It varies! Fairly bright during the day, but dark at night. That seems really obvious now I type it! We tend to have the lights low / off for watching stuff.

John Lewis – Price match, and simply the best FREE warranty back up you’re going to get.

If you can buy it from them, make it so!

I was about to leap in as I have just bought the 40 inch Sony W9 set.

It is pretty good although I notice that the edge lit isn’t super successful at maintaining uniformity across the screen – my MILs cheap Sharp which is backlit was much better.

One thing I have noticed is that it streams Netflix and Lovefilm much more successfully than a PC, laptop or PS3. There is no slight jerkiness to movement whereas even on the PS3 there is.

I wouldn’t worry at all about HD ready unless you are watching bluray quality all the time – otherwise it has to upscale the picture and there is less work to do to upscale to HD ready than there is to 1080P.

In fact it might be preferable if you are watching broadcast HD all the time, or even SD.

Right, I really like the look of the Panasonic plasma, but it appears to be an old 1024 x 768 resolution, as opposed to “proper” 720p, which I believe is 1280 x 720.

Should I worry about that? It seems to get some cracking reviews.

I would seriously consider dropping a size to be able to afford more recent tech.

I wouldn’t – I’d get the size your room warrants, and then save money by going older. You can get smart TV by other means if you want it (PVR, PS3 etc) later.

I watch Netflix on my PS3 and it’s excellent, looks like HD even though we struggle to beat 3Mbps and can’t watch BBC HD. Netflix also looks better than BBC HD.

I wouldn’t worry about the resolution, the good reviews suggest it’s not an issue! One good reason to go plasma is that you can easily clean the screen, could be a factor if you’ve got sticky-mitted kids about the place. Downside is they’re more prone to reflections.

720P sets are normally 1366×768 !

A 1280×720 panel for a TV would be pretty old.

Aaaargh! Too complicated!

Swaying back towards this Samsung at the moment, I reckon 32″ is probably big enough (it’s not a huge room), it’s well priced and reviewed and comes with a 5 year warranty from Richer Sounds.

you want 1080p not 720.

Fmc I saw that one In the shop and the bravia was noticeably better, as was the Panasonic . You really need to go to the shop to make your choice. Trying to pick a winner on spec alone is worthless.

Aye I went and had a look in a few shops, but to be honest under the glarey lights and showing crappy SD broadcasts it didn’t really help much!

you want 1080p not 720

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on screen size and how far away you sit, and what you watch, most sources other than BR aren’t 1080. As far as screen size goes, I’ve never heard anyone say they wish they’d gone for smaller, and fairly often heard people wish they’d gone bigger. Flat screens have nothing like the bulk of CRTs and are relatively unassuming when they’re off.

I’ve never heard anyone say they wish they’d gone for smaller,

I have and a mate did switch.

If you get a set that is too big it is just the same as standing too close to a smaller set and seeing all the upscaling mess and artifacts.

Better to have too small than too big…

I’d steer clear of Samsung LCDs, even the newer ones. The colours are pretty ropey, especially flesh tones, so unless you like everyone either washed out or David Dickenson orange, you’ll forever be fiddling with the settings. There’s no halfway ground.

If you want “in your face” colours, though, by all means go for it.

Aaaargh! Too complicated!

Swaying back towards this Samsung at the moment, I reckon 32″ is probably big enough (it’s not a huge room), it’s well priced and reviewed and comes with a 5 year warranty from Richer Sounds.

I bought one of those a couple of weeks ago. So far am very pleased with it. Got mine a little cheaper from Amazon. It’s actually slightly cheaper now than when I got mine 👿

Not sure how long the warranty was though.

Had one of these http://www.whathifi.com/review/panasonic-tx-l32e6b for around three months now and I’m blown away by how good it is. Picture is stunning – only problem is it means I’m watching more crap than ever just coz it looks nice. Highly recommended.

TV’s you see in shops (Currys etc) are set in “Shop” mode which gives them a very bright vivid picture (if you go into the service menu on my Samsung you can actually select Shop mode). It makes it very difficult to compare TV’s when they look nothing like the one you will take home. Plus they don’t feed them with a true HD signal – look at the back and you will see that they are plugged into the component connections and not the HDMI socket (okay it only makes a tiny difference but even so!)

Richer Sounds may not do any of the above (but they do sell expensive HDMI leads which makes me question everything else they do)..

I spent ages researching TVs and looking at ones lined up next to each other in shops. Picture on ours is way better at home than it ever looked in store. Still looked better in the shop than the equivalent Sony or Samsung.

That Panasonic looks lovely, bit of my price range though

Right, I really like the look of the Panasonic plasma, but it appears to be an old 1024 x 768 resolution, as opposed to “proper” 720p, which I believe is 1280 x 720.

Should I worry about that? It seems to get some cracking reviews.

No, at the money you’re spending you’ll get a much better picture out of that plasma than you will an LCD. I’ve had a 40″ Pioneer Kuro for the last 5 years at that resolution and it had a better picture than any LCD (of any price) I’ve ever seen. The scaling works fine on any source designed to output to a TV but not if you’re outputting a computer OS image where the desktop wouldn’t look great.

Whatever you buy, for best results turn the picture mode off ‘vivid’ and onto ‘movie’ as soon as you get it and make minor adjustments from there. http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/ is the goto source of screen reviews and info.

We paid around £370 and got a 5-year warranty and free delivery – John Lewis. Might have come down further since. Richer Sounds also stock them.

Some Sevenoas HiFi branches, such as Weybridge, don’t use shop mode but rather normal mode and attempt to set them up correctly.

That’s true – there *are* shops that try to demo screens properly but it’s not currys/most high street places.

Pretty much decided to throw caution to the wind and go for the Panasonic plasma – no 5yr warranty, but the picture should be ace.

flyingmonkeycorps – Member

what would you get?

Couple of grams of coke and some hookers, TV is shite and you can watch most stuff on your PC. 😀

stick it on the ‘true cinema’ setting and don’t adjust it until you’ve had a couple of weeks to get used to it

After a brief stock based kerfuffle I’ve now got the Samsung F5000 and quite happy with it!