Ten monster tellies to suit all budgets If you’re gearing up for the London Games, a gargantuan new TV should be top of your shopping list. The good news is that there’s plenty of choice if you want to go large, with prices to suit most pockets: our Top Ten kicks off at a modest £480, before reaching a wallet-busting £7,000. The cheaper end of the market has become a …
I ordered one of the sony's last week, and it should arrive Monday. I'm looking forward to it. I'm not too bothered about its media streaming, as I have a separate media player for that.
I'd like to make it absolutely clear that it's nothing to do with the Olympics though! Except maybe the beach volleyball.
Thin panel TVs don't have enough internal capacity to act as a decent speaker cabinet so the bass disappears. This is more marked with LED backlighting than CCFL.
If you go for external speakers to get round this, check that your solution will lipsync correctly. (My all-Sony setup can't do this on freeview, though it's fine on DVD/blu-ray.)
I've just been through the whole new tv hunt. I'm surpised at all the 1024x768 sets especially in curry's et al. Was also dubious about such a low resolution and sky's less than HD 3d transmissions.
Finally settled for a Panny TX-P42UT50B for £499. It came today. Full 1080p, the 3d is very good. overall very impressed.
People are so wrapped up in having the latest and greatest, you can get older tech for cheap. I just bought a 52" Mitsubishi DLP for $100. It's 6 years old, but only has 2000 hours on a 6000 hour bulb. Sure, it's a bit bigger, but you would only know that if you looked behind it. I have it hooked up to a PC so I can watch anything with it. Normally I have it at 1280x720p, but it will do 1920x1080i and doesn't look to bad at that higher res. I just replaced a 10 year old 60" non HD Philips that I got for free. I had to throw in $25 of coupling fluid, and 3 hours of my time to get it working like new. We used that TV for 2 years until I found the Mitsubishi.
You can get a very decent 100" projector setup (including a decent screen) for under a grand. Some of the new ones have fairly bright pictures, and a side by side comparison with TVs might be useful.
To me, over 2k pounds is clearly into home cinema territory - the only way I would have a TV of this value is if I won one in a competition. YMMV, of course, but I'm a projector enthusiast so even if I just had 500 to spend on a new "telly" I'd get a projector.
HD TV is broadcast at 1920x1080, except for the BBC HD channels which are at the lower 1440x1080. Interestingly the BBC broadcast their HD channels to the rest of Europe at the full HD resolution of 1920x1080 and at a much higher bit rate than in the UK. Presumably this is to free up space on satellite and freeview for the legion of shite channels that they also broadcast. Virgin media in the uk have the BBC HD channel at full res and decent bit rate, again presumably because there isn't the same bandwidth restrictions via cable.
Picked up an LG 50PM670T - 50" 1920x1080 plasma. It'll do online (wired ethernet), 3d (glasses not included), Freeview, and has 4x HDMI ports.
Picture: Crap out-the-box. Needs all the "enhancement" stuff turned off, and then it's absolutely great. Really nice image.
Sound: Flat and quiet. I'd heard this about this screen before, but it all goes through my AV amp and Kefs anyway, so I wasn't bothered. Lip-sync has been a bit of a laugh, but I think I've got it all tuned out now.
Would I recommend one? Yes, if you have a separate audio output.
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