what TV equipment do i need to buy>

artichoke

Hi all

We have lived without TV for quite a few years.....but have now decided to get a new TV and a satellite dish so we can watch free sat. We live in a remote hilly area and the digital freeview signal is weak so have been advised freesat is the best option. We do NOT want sky or any other package.

Or old TV which the kids use to play the Wii is an old bulky 14 inch portable, which i had in the 90's with an old VCR.... but it is so old we are going to leave that with the kids for the wii.

So we need a new TV and whatever else we need, boxes, etc?


I have looked onlne but as i have not watched TV for over 10 years i am bewildered by the choices. Built in box, DVD, recordable or not??? high definition, 3D.... i have no idea - we just want to watch a few films over christmas and let the kids watch a few childrens things every week...


budget is tight - we are so out of the habit of watching TV that i doubtwe will need all the latest gizmos.... we are in the habit of watching iplayer on the laptop ....so are used to watching on a small screen... the house is small so the ideal screen would be 60 cm at most

can anyone suggest a basic TV and tell me what other boxes we will need?


art

macman

Get a basic LCD TV, I'd look at LG and Samsung. All have built in Freeview, some also have a Freesat tuner. If you don't want PVR facilities then find one with a built in Freesat tuner.
If you do want a PVR, then the Humax Foxsat HDR is the one to go for. Try Richer Sounds.
After that you just need a dish, LNB, (and a twin feed if you want PVR facilities). You can get that as a package from your local installer.

artichoke

thanks but - what is PVR? i dont know if i want it as i dont know what it is??

We can not have freeview as the signal is too weak it must be freesat.

also what is LNB? and Richer Sounds?

thanks again - i really feel out of touch as i have no idea what all these terms are!

art

macman

PVR: Personal Video Recorder (the Freeview or Freesat equivalent of Sky+). For recording and playback of programmes (like your old VCR, but much better). It's basically a twin tuner with a hard drive; Freeview and Freesat versions available.
if you can't find a TV with a built in Freesat tuner then you'll need a separate Freesat digibox anyway, so you might as well get a PVR instead.
LNB: Low Noise Block (the little box that sits in front of the dish and collects the satellite signal.
Richer Sounds is a chain of cut price TV/audio shops, Google it.

vale46_2

if you want freesat make sure your dish cant point at 28.2e satellite first without any obstructions from hill/walls/trees etc
use http://www.dishpointer.com/
input your postcode and select 28.2E ASTRA 2A From the drop down menus then drag the green symbol to your property
zoom in and see where the line is pointing .that's where your dish will need to point without anything in the way to get freesat
dishpointer example here http://i41.tinypic.com/289iej9.jpg

when you get an idea where the dish will point.have a look in that direction to see if your dish will point at the sky without anything blocking the clear line of sight to the sky/satellite

Gratis

You need to follow a clear and organised path to achieve your objective optimally.

Before you spend any money, the first two things to establish – since you write that your home is in a remote and hilly area – are whether or not the Freeview signal receivable at your premises will improve next year as a result of a Digital Switchover and whether or not you can actually receive a FreeSat signal at all. For FreeSat (or Sky) you need a completely unobstructed line of sight between your dish and the satellite itself. Trees, a hill or a neighbouring building can, in some situations, make this impossible.

Once you know what your options truly are, you can then make some informed decisions.

Start with Freeview (bear with me!). Go to this site and to this site and enter your postcode. On the second one, follow the links to the pages for the transmitters themselves; these will give you a comprehensive explanation (and coverage map) of what your situation is now, signal-wise, and what it may become within the next year. You might be pleasantly surprised. If you can find a Freeview (hopefully a Freeview HD) solution, it will be cheaper and more convenient than FreeSat. (Not least because you can re-arrange the channels on a decent Freeview television to suit your viewing preferences, but mainly because a terrestrial signal is an easier beast to deal with in terms of moving the television to other locations within the premises or distributing the signal to more than one room.

If Freeview HD can be made a viable option for you, all would then be solved by the simple purchase of a 24” (61 cm) Panasonic TX-L24c3B or TX-L24e3B television. Both of these have a Freeview HD tuner built into them and Panasonic is the only manufacturer of which I am aware that offers Freeview HD internally on a television as small as 24”. The TX-L24c3B is LCD and has a screen resolution of 720p. The TX-L24e3b is LED-backlit and has a screen resolution of 1,080p. The latter is preferable but the former is adequate for watching HD television on a 24” screen.

At this point, there will be howls of protest from the “I don’t have it myself but I know” brigade on MSE, and elsewhere, that there’s no point in having HD on a television as small as 24”. Well, they’re wrong. We do have a 24” television, in our kitchen, and I can assure you that the HD picture on it is appreciably better than the SD picture. That’s because the HD signal itself is transmitted with a whole lot more picture information in it than the SD signal, so it’s a great deal more detailed. In SD you can see a lawn: in HD you can see the blades of grass.


If, however, you’re going for a satellite solution you’re going to need a decoder box because, again so far as I am aware, nobody makes a television as small as 60 cm with a built-in satellite decoder.

At this point, the next decision you have to make is whether or not you want to record things.

To receive satellite television, you’re going to need a dish. Attached to the dish will be an arm, on the end of which is a lump called an LNB. It’s best to specify a “quad” LNB because that has four outputs. I’ll explain later why that’s better.

Before, for understandable reasons, ruling out Sky completely, bear in mind that, to a new subscriber, Sky offers major discounts, free kit and free installation, as a loss-leading lure. Further discounts, by way of substantial cashbacks, can be had by purchasing this through Quidco or Top Cashback and, at the moment, Sky is also offering a £100 Marks & Spencer voucher to newcomers.

What this means is that, if you’re starting from scratch, you should consider the economics of subscribing to Sky for one year, on its cheapest package, to get the incentives, a box, a dish and free installation, and then cancelling in the eleventh month of the contract (to give Sky the required 31 days’ notice) and going FreeSat, instead. At that point, you’ll lose the Sky channels and the recording facility but the box will still work as a receiver (even in HD) for the basic Freeview channels. Until it packs up. (We were on our third, under warranty, at the end of our initial year.)

If you get fully organised with the discounts, cashbacks and vouchers, this method of getting up and running can work out cheaper than paying, yourself, for a dish installation, cabling and something to decode the satellite signal with. The art is to eat Sky's bait but avoid its hook.

If you want to have a continuing facility to record things (and you will do!) the Humax box recommended by “macman” (who knows his stuff and posts excellent advice) is the one to buy.

You could then use the Sky box (if that’s the route you’ve gone), free and without subscription, as a simple receiver of the basic Freeview channels – which you cannot currently receive by aerial because of hills and remoteness of your location – in another room. To do that, you’ll need to use the additional feeds of the “quad” LNB on the dish, to which I referred earlier.

If you can’t and won’t be able to receive a usable Freeview signal, there’s no point in buying a television with a Freeview HD tuner in it. So, for FreeSat, you’ll just need a good 60 cm television with an HDMI input. For our kitchen, we bought a Sony KDL-24ex320w in white. It also comes in black. I’d recommend it. It has a resolution of 1,080p and displays HD excellently when fed an HD signal from a Humax (or Sky) box.

Depending on where you live, you may not have a Richer Sounds store within reasonable range. If so, consider Amazon. We do have a Richer Sounds store locally but Curry’s has (well, certainly it had, last September) an oft-forgotten Price Promise of not only matching local retailers’ prices but refunding the difference by a further 10%. Unsurprisingly, Curry’s was charging a whole lot more than Richer Sounds for the television but our car was parked conveniently outside its store. So, I got Curry’s to match the price at Richer Sounds and the additional 10% refund on the price difference was a nice bonus. We bought it there and then and took it home in the car.

I’d certainly want (and I have) the security of a five-year warranty from John Lewis, Richer Sounds, Marks & Spencer or a leading manufacturer on any large-screen television or other expensive item but for anything costing less than £300 I tend to just look for the best price and settle for the universal one-year guarantee on quality items, writing it off if (like a Sky+HD box) it does then fail.

Humax boxes, both Freeview and FreeSat are best bought cheaply as “Manager Specials” Grade A refurbs from Humax Direct with a full year’s manufacturer warranty. Unlike the Sky+HD boxes, though, I’ve found ours extremely reliable and others seem to think the same.

The Humax HDR-FoxSat twin-tuner FreeSat HD recorder to which "macman" has (very sensibly) referred you is available here.

If you decide to get a dish installed professionally (which is advisable) use someone approved by the CAI.

The only other thing you need to bear in mind and budget is that modern, flat-screen televisions tend to have lousy speakers and sound horrible. So, it’s best to feed their audio through some decent external speakers.

If there is one thing that I would urge of you, it is that you put all previous experience with CRT televisions behind you and consider completely afresh the size of television best suited to your needs. Read this. The optimum distance to sit from a 55” digital HD television is 7 feet. The optimum distance to sit from a 32" HD television is 4 feet. Our own 24” HD television is on a shelf just above the kitchen table and we watch it from a distance of about 18”; that’s the comfortable distance.

So, take the family to a good television showroom, stand them in front of a quality 40” digital HD television at a distance of 6 feet and see what you all think. Then step back from it and see how the visual experience falls away, the further from it you stand. There’s also a strange phenomenon that you get drawn into what’s happening on-screen if you watch it in a larger size. It’s hard to explain, you need to experience it yourself to understand it, but perhaps the best way to put it is that you can’t really appreciate what’s in a Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt picture if you look at if from a distance of twenty feet.

Anyway, I hope all this gives you enough information to set off prudently along the route to finding the best solution for your own particular needs and I wish you happy, subscription-free HD viewing.



PS.

Just for the record, in our home we have Freeview HD, Freesat HD and Sky HD; and we watch these on a variety of HD televisions, ranging in size from 20" to 55". I appreciate fully that this is far greater than that which you want for yourself but I mention it just to re-assure you that all I have written above is from direct personal experience rather than from conjecture, what I read somewhere else or what somebody told me in a pub – which tends to form the basis of much that is posted on MSE, with kindly intention but profound ignorance.

artichoke

thank you everyone...

i will work through all this tomorrow and look up some of the references for equipment.

We have a clear line of site to the satellite.. - there is nothing but open moorland to the south of my house - we are on a hilltop with a view for miles and miles.

I know we have just had the digital switchover...but I have asked the local TV installer person and he says the signal is weak as we are on a relay transmitter.

So free sat is the only option - this is why we have never had a TV since living here.

I will look at TV's online - and try and get to a shop to see them in person - but not sure how easy that will be...I have googled and there is a Richer Sounds in Sheffield i see but that is 20 miles away..

thanks everyone i will return with more questions if necessary

art

vale46_2

Artichoke dont forget to get a dish with a Quad/4 outlet lnb on it if you can it will be of more use
you can run a HD / Pvr box off that and have freesat in other rooms if needed too all off the one dish

macman

Don't buy a TV without seeing the picture on it-and hearing the sound! Narrow it down online by all means, then take your shortlist to RS and choose.
If you are on a relay station then you will have a limited no. of Freeview channels, so Freesat is definitely the platform to go for.

jayme1

so for an example what you need:

you could get a TV like this one http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/lg-m2280d-22-full-hd-led-backlit-tv-monitor-04965820-pdt.html it's full 1080p HD with 2 HDMI along with SCART and PC inputs (good if you want to connect your laptop up to it for online video or as a computer monitor)

and then you will need a freesat box if you want to be able to record the telly and pause and rewind live TV then you need a PVR one, if you just want to watch straight TV then you don't need a PVR one (esp if you tend to use catchup services), if you get a HD freesat box then you connect it to the TV and can watch TV in HD

you then just need to have the dish installed which vale46 has you sound.

you connect the freesat box to the dish socket, connect the freesat box to the TV via HDMI, plug it all in, change the TV to the HDMI source/input and go, you don't have to even connect an aerial to the TV.

Gratis

It occurred to me when thinking about it further, subsequent to my answer (above) to the OP, that if the OP can still receive no adequate Freeview signal after the Digital Switchover, and has also lost the analogue signal entirely as a result of it, there is no actual point in the OP buying a television at all. Neither of its two tuners would be of any practical use.

A good quality 1,920 x 1,080 resolution monitor with one (preferably two, or more) HDMI port(s) would be perfectly adequate to display the output of a Humax FoxSat-HDR (or Sky) box in HD.

The sound output of current small LCD and “LED” televisions is so nasty anyway that the OP would, in all probability, want to use some decent external speakers in any case – and both the Humax box and the Sky box can feed those. They even have volume controls.

So, why buy a television at all if a monitor can do the job?

I’m still uneasy about the certainty with which the OP has been told locally to forget about trying to get a usable Freeview signal, though. The OP (who lives in open countryside within 20 miles of Sheffield) may have been using a relay station prior to the DSO but at that time the Emley Moor transmitter was only transmitting Freeview at a very low strength. After the DSO, in September this year, the Freeview signal was ramped up massively. I’d like to know that somebody has at least tried now pointing a good quality Band B aerial directly at Emley Moor itself and seeing if that can receive a signal adequate for Freeview at the OP's location.