Recomend a tv!

[Jenkosowls]

right iv got around £400 for a tv certainly no more than £400 been after one for a while it musnt be a plasma to and must not exceed 40" due it going inside a sunken wall mounting. been looking round and managed to find this 40" toshibia smart led tv what do you reckon?

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/toshiba-40 ... 2_04-04-12

did find a sony bravia tv with simular spec but wasnt any available. any recomendations from a high street reatailer?

[kingy]

ive got a 50 inch led smart tv for £200 brand new but the volume button is broke on it but at that price i couldnt turn it down. bum tish.

sorry, i know ive already done this one but what a oppotunity to crack it again.

[Midnightclub]

Why not a plasma?

[Niall]

Plasmas are crap! Use horrendous amounts of power and not very good quality.
I've got a Samsung smart led and it's great and it's now only about 400 quids.
You can get cheaper screens for that money that might seem like they have more options but I'm a bit of a obsessive when it comes to image/sound quality!

Edit: didn't actually say what it was lol. It's a 32" Samsung series 7 led. Newer model might be more expensive so you could go series 6. Iirc the only difference is refresh rate.

[Midnightclub]

Having a decent plasma for the last year i entirely disagree, most LED TV's aren't even proper LED TV's it's just a LCD screen with LED backlights! Plasmas are so much smoother and responsive! You'll never get the same sort of response time of a plasma with a LCD

[Toms306]

I've got an LG LED tv, its o.ly 23" so obv not big enough for you but the quality is awessome, and the menus are all easy to use. I've no idea on price of bigger ones but I'd certainly recommend an LG if they're in budget.

[Niall]

Having a decent plasma for the last year i entirely disagree, most LED TV's aren't even proper LED TV's it's just a LCD screen with LED backlights! Plasmas are so much smoother and responsive! You'll never get the same sort of response time of a plasma with a LCD

That is true about led tvs. They always were just led backlit as the backlighting makes a massive difference to colour.
I don't think there is a "led" tv on the market at the moment.
You are corre t about plasmas being smoother but I think that's a thing of the past as most manufacturers are concentrating on led technology now and considering they are pushing towards refresh rates of 1000hz, I think plasma will slowly die out now.
Other thing is what with everyone going Eco mad lately, plasmas arnt favourable. They use silly amounts of power unlike a LCD or led.

[Toms306]

There is a Sony oLED tv niall....damn expensive though!

And the led backighting makes a huge difference imo, no more shodowing and blacks are properly black as the leds are turned off for black bits. Colours seem much deeper if that makes sense too.

[kingy]

i know a friend who has a packard bell 38inch smart tv for sale for £300. showed it me a couple of weeks ago and it does everything. full google. not well up on t.v's but this well impressed me. was going to get it untill i found out i was gonna be a dad again so money has to go on a buggy. i can get more details if needed.

[Midnightclub]

I dunno, my plasma barely uses any power although it supposedly an 'eco' TV but tbh that aspect really doesn't bother me.. Considering my TV is probably 18 months old now it's still pretty epic and wipes the floor with most LCD tv's out there and some LED tv's... Neo PDP panel too so 600Hz for silky smooth viewing/gaming

Plus most peoples biggest huff about plasmas is the burn in.. It really isn't bad, left my TV on the other night by accident.. on the same still screen for about 6 hours.. 0% burn in

Tom, you get true blacks with a plasma too

[Toms306]

I dunno, my plasma barely uses any power although it supposedly an 'eco' TV but tbh that aspect really doesn't bother me.. Considering my TV is probably 18 months old now it's still pretty epic and wipes the floor with most LCD tv's out there and some LED tv's... Neo PDP panel too so 600Hz for silky smooth viewing/gaming

Plus most peoples biggest huff about plasmas is the burn in.. It really isn't bad, left my TV on the other night by accident.. on the same still screen for about 6 hours.. 0% burn in

Tom, you get true blacks with a plasma too

I didn't make that clear, was comparing LED backlit with stanard LCD. We had q 37 plasma several years ago....the picture wasnt great and .it was awful with screen burn, look at the sky planner for 5 minutes and it'd be there all day! was glad when it broke . It was guranteed so ee got a Panasonic LCD 42" instead, imo too big and the quality is nowhere near the same as.my LG, BUT is much better than the plasma was, they may have got better since we had that though!

[Toby]

Just to clear up a few things here..

The smallest commercially available plasma is 42", so these have to be ruled out immediately due to the size restriction of 40". They generally have thicker bezels as well so the sizes are often even larger.

Although manufacturers of plasma TV's state a 600hz refresh rate, this in fact is referring to the sub-field drive which is the processing unit which drives the picture. In reality, this is split into 12 lots of 50hz. Now, new technology mostly pioneered by Panasonic is bringing this figure up, however you will not see much more than a 150hz panel refresh rate with even the best plasmas.

Compare this to LED/LCD TV's however, and it is better. The reason for this is that although Samsung (for example) may advertise an 800hz refresh rate with their 8000 series, it is in fact more like 100hz. They get around this by inserting black slides between picture frames, giving the appearance of a smooth picture. If you read the small print, you will find that they never specifically say that the panel has 800hz, they say that it has an 800hz CMR (clear motion rate). Very different things.

The other important factor is response time, which a lot of people ignore when shopping for a tv.

It is also worth mentioning that modern plasma TV's are very resilient to screen burn, technology like orbital pixel shifting has almost nullified this effect.

I will also say that the top end Samsungs are blighted with clouding around the edges of the screen, particularly on the 7000 and 8000 series. I know this because I sell TV's, and have had a lot of these exchanged/refunded. If you decide to purchase one of these please make sure you test it thoroughly in a dark room.

Umm I think that's all.

Edit: Oh yeah, ultimately it comes down to cost. Midnightclub is right in saying that some plasma's are quality bits of kit, for example the Panasonic VT30's are some of the best TV's I have ever seen. However they are generally a fair bit more expensive.

[Midnightclub]

AFAIK.. with my tv.. (panasonic 42" plasma) it's 600Hz but with 6 100Hz panels as it's got the NEO PDP panel

[Toby]

AFAIK.. with my tv.. (panasonic 42" plasma) it's 600Hz but with 6 100Hz panels as it's got the NEO PDP panel

Exactly

Some of the newer Panasonics run a 4 x 150hz processor.

Oh, just fyi, PDP stands for Plasma Display Panel

[Midnightclub]

Yeah my TV isn't massively new now but the quality of it is still great, alot of people just get the perception of plasmas being wank but IMO at least they really aren't

[Jonny b]

Sony Bravia end of!!!!

[Eeyore]

Mine is only 12 inches :/

[kentiiboii]

I bought my 40" LCD from asda £280. It's a low end make Lowry which I have heared before. But if you look inside the vents on the back everything is Samsung.
The tv it's self has everything USB multimedia, hdmi, VGA, touch buttons and much more. When I first had it I thought the sound was a little tinny but I played with the settings and get it sounding nice with a touch off bass which made it so much better. As for the picture quality I have a TiVo box connect to it which is full hd and it's fantastic. There was a toshiba tv next to it £100 more and the picture quality of that didnt come any where near.
For the price of what I paid for my IMO is a fantastic dead for what you get quality wise.

[Niall]

I would never buy a Sony seeing as they are actually made by a tiny company call the hung Chung picture tube company (spelling will be horrendously off there) never mind the fact that they might actually stop making tvs soon.

I must say, I suffered from this clouding problem with my Samsung that Toby mentioned. It was under warranty so went back to Samsung and they couldn't of been more helpful.
Straight away they accepted there was a known problem and replaced the panel with a updated version.

Tom your wrong about why the blacks are black. It doesn't switch LEDs off. Its because LEDs are white where as the backlighting on normal LCD tvs have a yellow tint so never goes truly black.

Also, I believe that oLED technology once again, isnt truly an led tv.

[Toms306]

Tom your wrong about why the blacks are black. It doesn't switch LEDs off. Its because LEDs are white where as the backlighting on normal LCD tvs have a yellow tint so never goes truly black.

Also, I believe that oLED technology once again, isnt truly an led tv.

Only going by what I researched when looking for TV myself, quote from wiki -

This method of backlighting allows local dimming of specific areas of darkness on the screen. This can show truer blacks, whites and PRs at much higher dynamic contrast ratios by dimming or brightening the backlight locally, at the cost of less detail in small, bright objects on a dark background, such as star fields or shadow detail.[

Also, why isnt it truly an LED tv? It uses no backlight, just a semiconducter film made of LEDs if I've understood it correctly?

[Niall]

I thought it still worked on LCD technology tbh. Could be wrong though. Either way if it's Sony making it, I wouldn't buy it! Lol

[Toms306]

I thought it still worked on LCD technology tbh. Could be wrong though. Either way if it's Sony making it, I wouldn't buy it! Lol

Haha fair enough, I don't totally understand it myself (electronics aren't my strong point lol) but I'm pretty sure it isn't LCD based (if thats the right way to word it).

[Midnightclub]

A TRUE led TV is where instead of having pixels the 'screen/panel' is made from millions of leds..

Current 'led' TV's are just normal LCD TV's but with led back lights instead of fluorescent

[Toms306]

A TRUE led TV is where instead of having pixels the 'screen/panel' is made from millions of leds..

Current 'led' TV's are just normal LCD TV's but with led back lights instead of fluorescent

No thats LED backlit, we're talking oLED....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED_TV

[Midnightclub]

f*cking facepalm tom.. do you even read what other people post!?!

[Niall]

What he's saying Tom is all these led tvs on the market at the moment arnt led displays.

[Midnightclub]

^^ This!

I also explained what a TRUE LED TV is...

[Niall]

Anyway going off topic here.

As I said if it was a choice between led and LCD, I would go led as colours are much better and the body of the tv is much slimmer.
Personally I would avoid plasma. Only benefit of plasma is you do get nice deep blacks but the body is much bigger, they consume a lot more power and are generally more expensive to buy..(IMO of course)

[THE_Liam]

I have a colour one, and I would really recommend it! It has such features as a remote control, a black plastic finish and an on/off switch