Bargain alert! 32" HD Ready LCD TV £499 from £699

RedOnRed

viken wrote:

Quality-v-price. At present most components within LCD and plasma televisions are manufactured by the more well known manufacturers.

I know there are a few people on forums suggesting that might be the case, but what evidence do you have to support that theory?

In every other walk of life if you buy the cheapest you end up paying for it later.

I've got a free trial going on with Which right now and judging by their tests all of the budget brands come out quite poorly in one way or another and even the premium ones are at best ordinary. Certainly when I look in shop showrooms the budget brands look noticeably poorer in quality then the expensive ones.

davidcowan63

Bought last week from pixmania 32" lcd hd ready tv £449+ delivery standard = £14.10 came in 3 days can track your order also

deanos

To be honest i think alot of people will be disapointed with an LCD TV compared to there old fashioned CRT when watchine normal TV and Sky

asylumweb

Hi

Don't want to turn this into a techy discussion but just thought people might want to know a fuller story.

HD Ready is actually not a very good term, there are several resolutions within the HD spec and if the TV can cope with any of them it could be described as HD Ready. The best of these resolutions is 1920 x 1080 pixels or "Ten Eighty" as it's known. There are currently very few TV's in the UK that will display this size natively, believe me I've been looking for a while. Most 'HD Ready' TV's in UK show 1366 x 768 or less.

This means that your SkyHD box picture which, by default is set by the engineers at 1080i, is then having to be reduced by your TV thus reducing the possible quality. Alternatively if you set the SkyHD box to 720p, the other setting available, the TV is now having to blow this up. Both of these functions reduce the quality due to resizing.

Both of these pictures will usually look better than the standard TV I grant you, but would it not be better to wait until both the technology and panels are more available, thus prelonging the life of the TV before you feel you need to upgrade to the full spec. I for one will not be scrambling to get a new TV yet, 32", 37", 40" and bigger panels are available in 1080, they are just a bit expensive at the moment, my personal opinion is wait.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers

ms01ma_2

the woolworths one will be £399.99 from this saturday cheers

wittzi

I just wrote this in a different forum about the wollies £399 TV, but its probably better placeed here:

GUYS - PLEASE DO NOT BUY THIS TELEVISION!

I just went to Woolworths at lunch in preparation to place an order with them for Monday, and picture quality is absolutely aweful. I will give a constructive breakdown of it:

Good Points:
Nice and big
Very flat screen and looks great in black
Plenty of inputs - very impressive

Bad Points:
Movement on the screen is REALLY shaddowed and ghosting is constant
The colour is very dark compared to the other televisions next to it
The shading gradient is very bad

The film they were playing was chicken little; very vivid on the other televisions but looks genuinely poor on this one. I saw two in the store (one as you walk in and one in the TV dept) and both were the same. I played around with the contrasts, brightness, etc ... for a while but with no luck.

In short - yes you can own a big LCD television for cheap. But, hand on heart, I would not advise that you buy it because it really is bad quality. Either spend £100/£200 more or get a smaller set.

You will be dissappointed.

RedOnRed

Good post that.

When ever I go into Tescos and places the cheaper brands just look awful compared to the pricier end of the market. Even the well known cheaper ones like Goodmans look complete rubbish.

You might as well hold on to your old CRT instead of getting a cheapo LCD and at least you can still use it to put a vase or crimbo cards on.

Ann1e

How do you know it's gonna be £399 in store? I s'pose you have your sources nudge nudge!

I've just seen an ad outside the Tenterden Woolies saying order in-store for £499. Tenterden is not a very big shop so I guess they won't actually have it in stock unless it's been ordered.

If I order it at £499 and it's gonna be £399 on Monday will that be what I have to pay - the £399 I mean.

I do note that if Sainsbugs (sorry Sarah Kennedy) and Woolies are flogging them this cheap that others may well join in so I guess it may be worth (Woolworth even!) waiting. I do need a new set, just bought a DVD recorder as it was 80 quid off on Boots website - incidentally, they've got some brill reductions on there right now - but when I came to connect it to old set I didn't have enough scart sockets. However, I did discover that you can buy sort of extension scart sockets (Tesco v good for this sort of thing, only 11 odd quid).

All this modern technology really stumps me sometimes, not even sure that my brand new DVD player is HD - be a bummer if it isn't, p'raps that's why it was cheap. Does anyone know if a non HD ready DVD player/recorder will work with an HD TV?

Oh bring back the old days of 4 channels and betamax!!

Just spent an age trying to connect my daughter's new school laptop to wireless internet with no success so I'm kinda techno-phobed right now. HELP!!

:eek:

Ann1e

Sorry - haven't had time to read all posts but just found Phillips HD TV on Amazon for £469.99

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-23PF5321-01-Widescreen-Ready/dp/B000EYEIFU/sr=8-6/qid=1159469478/ref=sr_1_6/202-4153056-6783049?ie=UTF8&s=electronics

If link doesn't work just go to Amazon and put HD TVs in search

Phillips got a reasonable rep

Checked out website of store selling set - Hughes Direct - seems kosher

Hope this helps someone

lol

RedOnRed

But the link and price is only for a 23" TV, that's not much bigger then my PC monitor???