Samsung 32'' HD ready CRT £449 at Comet

purplepatch

This is a brand new product. It is a CRT instead of LCD. No idea if it's any good, but I'm quite taken with the price.

Does anyone have any idea whether it would be a good buy?

Brief write up here.

Comet have it here.

There is mention of a version that has built in freeview (elsewhere I read this is likely to come out next month for around £500 mark). Would that mean that you could watch HD tv without forking out for Sky HD? Don't really understand how all this HD stuff works?

Apologies if this TV has been mentioned before on MSE, but I did a search and nothing came up.

mew

You need the an HDTV, a Sky HD box and a Sky HD subscription to watch Sky HDTV. In theory you could watch the BBC Channels without a SKY HD Subscription but then you still need a Sky HDTV box or an alternative HDTV satellite receiver (and of cause an HDTV too).

In the future you may be able to get HD transmissions via Freeview and possibly with this HDTV Freeview TV but at the moment unless you are part of the BBC trial in central London, Sky or NTL/Telewst boxes and subscriptions are the only way to get HDTV.

Towner_2

Lots of positive and negative views on this TV. Seems to be a bit of a lottery if you get a good one!!
http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=340071&page=10

purplepatch

I did see that forum and it all sounded a bit too technical - a lot of them talking about gaming and connecting pcs which is irrelevant for me. I'd just use it for watching TV.

I see someone on the avforums mentions today that Currys have got the freeview version at £500. Can't find it on the website though.

Some of the stuff I found when googling suggested that you get a better sharper picture with CRT than with LCD, in which case I would have thought it was quite a good buy at considerably less than you could get a 32 in HD ready LCD for.

amoeba

The freeview version is NOT high-def.

The problem with this tv is the geometry is poor, so on the edges of the screen straight lines can be curvy. Also the screen detail/picture quality at the edges of the screen is significantly reduced due to the 'slim fit' tube.

However you can get good ones as well, seems to be about 50/50 good/bad so in the end I just saved my money and bought a normal CRT.

purplepatch

amoeba wrote:

The freeview version is NOT high-def.

Where do you get that from?

All the stuff I've read says that it is HD ready with HDMI. This article says it has HD certification.