Be Excellent To Each Other

Right,

I've finally convinced Mrs K to let me replace our ancient 27inch CRT. The biggest we can go to is 37 inch. The only one of techradar's top 10 37 inchers that I can either afford or is still on sale is the Panasonic TX-L37E5B, which they're not wholehearted about. The Philips 37PFL4007T looks like it might be also pretty good, but I can't find any reviews.

An absolute must is a VGA socket.

Budget is up to 550.

Always get bigger than you think you'll need/want. I'd say for all but the tiniest of tiny living rooms 42" is the minimum these days.

Ange baulked when I said I wanted to get a 50-incher as our living room is fairly small, but now we agree it's brilliant (go ahead, Z).

One of the Samsung. They all have VGA. My new 40" has one

I wish I had got bigger.

37 is bigger than we thought we'd need - 32 was the agreed size! We sit about 6 feet from the telly.

Kov, the Samsung UE37ES6300 doesn't seem to have VGA-in, and I've read loads of stuff about Samsung panels having clouding issues. Am I being scared off by internet people?

Panasonic plasma TVs are bestest.

Also, I'm obviously going to order £500 fairy dust coated cables.

I've got three LGs and they've all been superb for the price. LED is probably the way to go, though:

http://www.tekshop247.com/lg-37lv355-37 ... 62654.html

Heh.

We have a 26 inch TV in the living room. Anything bigger wouldn't fit:

Mali: that would drive me bonkers - it's like a postage stamp.

Move that painting and put a 42" on the wall.

Don't get a Samsung. I've already had the panel replaced on my 40" and the new one has dark spots and backlight bleeding. Won't be getting a Samsung again.

I had a 26" previously by Samsung and that was fine, but this has soured me. My budget was the same as yours.

(Btw: I had the panel replaced because I got a cross of dead pixels the width and height of the screen. It also had clouding and stuff, but I was living with it. Obviously it's an inherent problem because the new panel is just as bad for it.)

I think I'll be picking up the LG 37LS5600. It was on my list, but I was a bit concerned about LG being an unknown, but as Myp's roadtested them I think I'll give it a go. The £150 saving against the Panasonic is worth a lot more than the Freeview HD receiver built in to the Panasonic. I can buy lots of cables and an upscaling DVD player with the change.

I wouldn't get another Samsung.

I'll be getting a 40"LED TV once my boy stops hitting the current one and we don't have our pooch to dribble over it as she barks out the living room window.

What's your experience with Samsung, Z?

Got an LG LV37550T about six months ago - Freeview HD built in, Smart TV, plenty of ports including VGA.

Very happy with it. Richer Sounds was where I got it from.

I also got mine from Richer Sounds and their customer service was excellent when I needed my panel replacing. I rang them up and they sorted everything, sending engineers out promptly - obviously it's not their fault Samsung seem to make shit TVs these days...

I've had a 19" tv that needed to be completely replaced (use it as a 2nd monitor now and still has occasional banding issues) and my 32" LCD needed a replacement panel after a year.

Definitely not just me then! I was really surprised because the 26" telly I had never skipped a beat for over four years and is still going strong now (in my brother's caravan...).

Btw, vga to hdmi conversion is a trivial matter. Cables are plentiful.

I have a 40 inch led technika from tesco and it's all kinds of unexpected excellent. Apart from the built in sound which sucks donkey penis. No one uses that though, right?

Also, if you think 42 is a minimum, then either your eyes are broken, or your house is too big.

But on the other hand... I've had my Samsung for about 18 months and it's the best telly I've ever had.

Really though there's no absolute answer I guess - this will be one of those threads where someone says Toshiba (or whatever) are the best, but others will say their Toshiba broke.

You can tie yourself up in knots when deciding on a new TV, but eventually you just have to do a spot of research and take the plunge.

But go as large as possible, obviously.

Go and look round comet or currys. See them in the flesh

Then again my 40 inch Samsung 720p screen is still working perfectly after over five years of use, so swings and roundabouts innit.

The panels are all churned out by the same three or four manufacturers anyway, and then just get different labels put on them.

Chances are Samsung make the panels for those who say 'THIS IS THE BEST TELLY EVER' and then also say 'SAMSUNG ARE SHIT MINE BROKE' when they came off the same fucking production line.

Yeah, I've had two Samsungs for years - bulletproof. Other than being not actually, y'know, bulletproof.

I only replaced mine because it got damaged. Love the new Led screen

YMMV, obviously. It doesn't change my current opinion of Samsung and it won't stop me attempting to steer folk away from them.

What about if I step on your face, will that stop you, eh?

Probably not, going by the middle age spread thread!

It's like the requirement for 60FPS or daffy resolutions.

Can we at least agree that 26" is too small for any living room?

I have an LG TV in the living room and it can do 3D... It's a great TV but I rarely use it as I'm normally found in my Command Centre playing games.

Yeah it probably is. The 42"+ thing is bollocks though. I literally couldn't fit a TV larger than 40" in our living room (unless we mounted it on the wall I guess), but anything bigger would be ridiculous. It'd be nice, but it'd be ridiculous.

It depends if you're living in 1985 or not, I suppose.

37-40 inch works for most rooms where you can get the sofa a decent distance away in my experience.

We've physically got space for a bigger screen in the telly corner (could comfortably go up to a 50), but I've never felt remotely inclined to do so.

For smaller rooms, a 32 inch seems to work pretty well.

I've got a 37" LG. It's lovely and has a VGA thingymabob. And three HDMI whatits. And some smart plugs. Two. Thereof. It probably has a million pixels. That might seem like a lot but I don't think it's enough. They probably ran out of space. They should put some more on the back.

Not at all.

48" Samsung for me, and it's marvelous.
It probably helped that it was budgeted for with our mortgage, so was top of the range at the time

I can't recommend Samsung enough.

I don't sit much further than 6 feet away and we have a 60 inch Pioneer.

I just don't see the point on spending hundreds of pounds on a TV only to squint at it in the corner of a room. Also, HD content is barely discernable on 32" or lower, I find.

I struggle a bit gaming on mine with the PS3, it's too large for that I reckon. TV and films it's perfect for, and you can really tell the difference between DVD and Blu-ray.

It would be too high then. I once had a client who used to fit sky dishes and branched out into mounting flatpanels. Whenever he turned up, clients would always insist on mounting it higher than he advised, because they had this idea that it should be at the same height as you would a painting. He'd charge £50 for the initial mounting, then £100 when they invariably called up asking for it to be remounted lower.

I didn't say to put it exactly where the painting is.

When we're sat down, the top of the TV is at eye level - that should be about right.

So what you meant to say was, take down the painting and rip out the fireplace? Sounds a reasonably simple proposition, yes.

That's what I did.

It isn't a painting. Eagle eyed people will recignise the central photograph as they probably had it on their mantlepiece 9 months ago.

Not quite, the panel/glass will be the same. The electronics and firmware will be completely different.
In my experience, the processing and electronics are equally important to image quality, if not more so, than the panel.

(50" Panasonic plasma, and 100" HD projector here No way I would go smaller than 50" after having one, size matters people!)

Huge TVs in small living rooms are great as long as you're prepared to sacrifice the whole space to the single purpose of TV watching. I've had the 40" for about a month and it still seems massive in my living room (8' ish by 12' ish). MiniPaz was waving to the people on the screen during HD olympics because she thought they were in the room

I suppose she's used to seeing massive heads up close.

40" is about right I reckon for normal sized rooms. I think there's a bit of snobbishness that goes about where people associate large tellies with poor and/or lazy people, fuck all that, though.

Before the flat screen revolution, I was at a friend of a friends house for a party. Their living room couldn't have been more that 8ft square and they had the biggest CRT I've ever seen. Must've been a 36 inch screen and at least as much backwards. It looked ridiculous. Suitably, they now have 60" plasma over the fire. Much better for the floorspace.