Gigantic 37" LCD HD Ready TV £375 all-in. Can you beat it?

Wparks

www.digitaldirect.co.uk are selling LG LCD TV's at great prices. I bought the above TV on Wednesday last week and it was delivered on the Monday. They have massive savings on many TVs.

:beer:

Rubysmum_2

Been looking for a 37 for awhile now, popped into my local currys and picked one up for £299.99 made by Orion, got it home and its great, really good clear picture, would recommend, esp at that price.

mxxx

J4mie wrote: »

If you look under connection types in the technical descriptions, you need to look for either a VGA or DVI connection.

I think that VGA is the most standard, but it depends on what type of graphics card you have on your pc - mine allows for both, but you can get graphics cards that only have VGA, or only have DVI

Another connection that would work is S-Video, but again you need to check whether your pc graphics card has this connection.

Well..... actually, if you have DVI port on your PC (most modern machines do) this is compatible with HDMI so you just need an appropriate cable or adapter which can be picked up reasonably cheaply and you can then plug your PC into the HDMI port on the TV. This is preferable to VGA as its digital, also avoid S-Video as this will give a greatly deteriorated picture quality.

Generally, if a TV has an HDMI connection its unlikely to have DVI as well as they both do virtually the same thing except that HDMI will carry audio too

koru

Does it really make sense to just focus on price for an item like this? The quality of these TVs varies massively - see the reviews by Which? magazine, for instance. According to Which?, many of them have dreadful picture quality and sound quality. In fact, for a long time Which? said there were no Best Buy LCD or plasma models, because there were none that had a picture as good as an avererage cathode ray tube TV. It is only a few of the very best (mainly Panasonic and Sony) that manage to meet this standard, even now. So, by buying the cheapest 37 inch plasma/LCD, you are almost certainly getting a TV that is not as good as an old-fashioned CRT TV.

This is like choosing a model of car on the basis of what is the cheapest 2 litre saloon by any manufacturer, and disregarding any other factors, such as comfort, how good it is to drive, its fuel consumption and its reliability.

I realise we don't all have £800-900 to spend on the top-rated 37 inch Panasonic TV. I am just saying consider the alternatives before just opting for the cheapest. As Martin says, you could wait until prices fall further, as this will apply to the top models as well as the cheapo ones. Or wait until the ability to achieve good quality becomes more widespread, as manufacturers refine their production techniques. Or compromise on something like the size. For instance, you can pick up the top-rated Panasonic TX-32LMD70 for about £470.

Costco are very cheap for the top brand TVs and give a free 3 yr warranty on TVs.

anruari

it might seem a "novel" idea, but I was after a smaller TV recently.
I found that by buying a multifunction computer monitor with a built in TV I got great picture quality and a main brand TV at well below the price of the competition for devices which didn't have the VGA input.

I got a 22" LG M228WA TV Monitor for £240 in PC World. I have since found that Play.com are taking orders again for less than this. (They didn't have any available and weren't taking orders on the day I chose to buy it)

Such devices are available from 15" up to about 30" and are generally a better buy (in my opinion) than comperable TV's aimed at the main market.

klint

In answer to malc_b: yes, current DVDs are 30, 29.94 or 25 fps as is broadcast TV. However, the new HD DVDs will be 24 fps as they will be designed to look just like the cinema. When you play a 24 fps HD DVD on a 25 fps TV, it will show one frame a second twice so the film will appear to pause for a very short time once a second. (It may be possible for really clever TVs to perform temporal interpolation but I don't think that technology is used at present.) TVs that feature frame rates in their specs that are multiples of 24 (i.e. 24, 48, 72 or 96 fps) will show HD DVDs without the jerkiness.

I agree that "HD" TVs with only 768 rows of pixels will show SD programmes less clear than the older non-HD TVs. That's life. Everyone is going for buzzwords these days. Also I blame the Internet. Many people just look at specs and order online without seeing the products in a shop first. I compared an HD (LCD) set with an SD (CRT) set a few years ago, with both of them displaying a normal SD programme, and the SD set's picture was far superior! But the SD set didn't boast quite as many buzzwords as the HD set. What's important? To the manufacturers, it seems buzzwords are more important for their profits.

By the way, don't confuse contrast ratio with colour bit depth, they are totally different concepts. [Warning: techy stuff follows, apologies in advance.] A colour value of (1,1,1) doesn't have to be twice as bright as (0,0,0), so (256,256,256) is not 1024x as bright as (0,0,0). So contrast ratio can be much more than 1000 even with just 8 bits. It's usually hardware quality that determines contrast ratio.

MSE_Martin

oes it really make sense to just focus on price for an item like this?

Price certainly plays a large part - and at the lower end of the market the difference between a £375 and £500 TV aren't that large (of course check the spec is correct in terms of HDMI leads for you etc).

Yet do remember this is "MoneySavingExpert.com" not "Best Quality Plasma.com" here the focus is always on price; that's the site's reason d'etre. I don't say its the only consideration - but other sites do technical reviews very well - that's not what this site is about

Martin

danthemoneysavingman

paulwalker wrote: »

Best full HD 1080P set is the 50" Pioneer 'Kuro' sets. Be careful you get the right one as there are multiple sets with similar model numbers.

Forget buying any cheap LCD, they are rubbish.

At 42" go for the Pioneer or Panasonic, at 37" the panasonic.

Buy from John Lewis because they do a free 5 year warranty with all sets.

Also worth noting, a friend of mine told me the other day, that John Lewis do offer price matching - albeit only with stores that have a physical presence.

Luckily, RGBdirect (http://www.rgbdirect.co.uk), a major online retailer (often amongst the cheapest too!) has a physical store. Hence if you can use their price, then purchase from John Lewis with price-matching, you'll get a free 5-year warranty!!

Brilliant eh? worth the extra few quid you may have to pay compared to the cheapest online I reckon.

malc_b

klint wrote: »

In answer to malc_b: yes, current DVDs are 30, 29.94 or 25 fps as is broadcast TV. However, the new HD DVDs will be 24 fps as they will be designed to look just like the cinema. When you play a 24 fps HD DVD on a 25 fps TV, it will show one frame a second twice so the film will appear to pause for a very short time once a second. (It may be possible for really clever TVs to perform temporal interpolation but I don't think that technology is used at present.) TVs that feature frame rates in their specs that are multiples of 24 (i.e. 24, 48, 72 or 96 fps) will show HD DVDs without the jerkiness.

Interesting. I'd doubt the jerkiness would be even visible. A lot of kit is USA spec so native 60Hz frame rate. For 50Hz, 25 fps, the options are interpolate 5 frames to 6 or display 1,2,3,4,5,5. On my plasma I can select either mode. Repeat frame gives the sharpest and I never notice any jerkiness. I think ticker-tape news might show it but who wants that anyway. Interpolation gives a fuzzier picture as you'd expect and I've seen this on a lot of plasmas when I was looking (hence the reason I choose this one). I don't think you want interpolation anyway.

Of course an interesting point to this is that you'd need to have LCD or plasma for HD 24fps. The reason for mains sync is to avoid beating between the two, so you would need a static picture device rather than a scan device like CRT.

klint wrote: »

I agree that "HD" TVs with only 768 rows of pixels will show SD programmes less clear than the older non-HD TVs. That's life. Everyone is going for buzzwords these days. Also I blame the Internet. Many people just look at specs and order online without seeing the products in a shop first. I compared an HD (LCD) set with an SD (CRT) set a few years ago, with both of them displaying a normal SD programme, and the SD set's picture was far superior! But the SD set didn't boast quite as many buzzwords as the HD set. What's important? To the manufacturers, it seems buzzwords are more important for their profits.

Totally agree. But even if you go to a shop try to find one where the TV signal is not rubbish so you can actually see the performance. Or they are not showing cartoons (wonderful for hiding all the flaws like bad skin tone etc.).

klint wrote: »

By the way, don't confuse contrast ratio with colour bit depth, they are totally different concepts. [Warning: techy stuff follows, apologies in advance.] A colour value of (1,1,1) doesn't have to be twice as bright as (0,0,0), so (256,256,256) is not 1024x as bright as (0,0,0). So contrast ratio can be much more than 1000 even with just 8 bits. It's usually hardware quality that determines contrast ratio.

I think this is confusing log values with DACs. The eye is logarithmic so you can save bits by using that fact which I think is your colour value. When it comes to DACs these are unlikely to be log I'd think. I'm also assuming a 1 bit noise floor (offset) so an 8 bit DAC is 256:1. For black and white, i.e. contrast, all 3 are equal so 8 bit linear DAC is max 256, min 1. If the circuit is log then it could be anything but there comes a point when it is easier to add more DAC bits that try to get a log circuit stable and even. Hence I doubt log is used.

Of course you could cheat and make the zero floor say 0.1 bit. That way an 8 bit DAC would give 2550:1 contrast, but your lower levels would be 0.1,1,2, so not that finer a black resolution at the bottom end but contrast ratio figure looks good. But either way the figure to look for is number of colours which will tell you the DAC resolution.

danthemoneysavingman

you seem to have ignored martins message #38!