Recommendations for a New Television Set?

My family still has a cathode-ray tube television in our house, as we simply have never purchased a new set, but my brother and I are considering purchasing a new television set for our parents as a Christmas gift this year. The new television in question shall obviously be an LCD-screen device, but I am not certain about the brand or model that we should purchase, as I am not familiar with the various brands and of televisions. That is rather ironic, as I am very familiar with the various brand and models of computer monitors, which are very similar to television sets (although I use my computer much more often that I use my television, so that may be the reason for which I have better knowledge of computer monitors than I do of television sets).

I shall certainly be conducting my own research (i.e., checking the prices of television sets at various stores and vendors and reading reviews), but can anyone here make any recommendations for a new television set? I am seeking a model with a screen size between 30 inches and 40 inches and ideally, less than $400 in price, if that is possible. For the display type, I am seeking an LCD screen, as LED screens are still slightly too expensive presently, and plasma screens, from my research, are too inefficient in terms of power consumption and heat generation.

What recommendations can anyone here make? I shall greatly appreciate any feedback that anyone here can offer, and I await your responses.

I have a 37" Vizio 1080P and lots of ports on the back. Its a good brand if your looking to save some money. I also have a Phillips which is nice but more expensive.

I also have the 37" Vizio TV. I am currently on it right now actually using it as a monitor lol. Vizio has never treated me wrong. Had a 32" 720p one too and it was great, just didn't need it anymore so I sold it.

My parents have a Sony TV and I will say the picture quality on that TV is better than the Vizio I have, but they paid a lot more for it for a barely noticeable gain in image quality.

vizio or samsung. samsung has the best picture... vizio is good to. i have a 55 inch vizio. go with led, not lcd. 8)

Panasonic has the best picture quality and some of the best factory calibration out there.

My favorites, however, are Samsung TVs. The thin and clear bezels really make the difference for me there.

Make sure, however, that no matter what TV you get, that it supports one to one pixel mapping. I have an LG, and it has a setting called "just scan" which makes the picture fit, but takes an overscanned image, then interpolates it back down to 1080p. For the most part it doesn't look that bad, but I can tell and it drives me nuts. There's no way to get 1:1 pixel mapping on it.

I also wouldn't rule out plasma. Most of the regulation means that their power and heat has come down a lot. With a plasma you'll get the best picture quality and the best price. I was at walmart the other day and they had a 55" plasma for ~$600. I know that's out of your price range, but compared to LED-LCD and LCD panels of the same size, it's a lot cheaper.

I'd also say to try and get as big as you can. If you can get to the 46-47" range, then I'd do it. Rarely do people think they went too big, but they often wish they went just a little bigger.

So, looks like this is in your price range at walmart: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Philips-46...ished/20565701

Costco if you have a membership. 40" running around $350-400.

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Originally Posted by Cale_Hagan

vizio or samsung. samsung has the best picture... vizio is good to. i have a 55 inch vizio. go with led, not lcd. 8)

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I do wish to purchase an LED television over and LCD television, but LED television sets are still slightly too expensive for me to afford at this point in time, so I shall need to settle for an LCD television, and even and LCD television shall be a major improvement over my current CRT television.

I thank everyone for their input, and it seems that Sony, Samsung, and Vizio are some of the most appealing manufacturers for televisions, so I shall definitely focus on products manufactured by them in my search.

i have a vizio 26" just for my bedroom and i love the hell out of it compared to others i've seen.

my recommendation to add to the others though would be to try out the menu settings and see which you like most.

for example...picture display. on my vizio i four settings: normal, zoom, panaramic, and something else. they are easy to understand and change. however, on my parent's toshiba, they have 5 settings: 4:3, movie1, movie2, movie3, and something else. for some reason they are so annoying to me to change on that tv.

but then again, you may be one of those people that just set it to fill the screen and don't worry about whether or not the picture is squashed and fat or if everyone is tall and skinny. to me that drive's me nuts though.

why can't tv's just automatically change for the correct aspect ratio? it can't be that hard to do. my computer can do it and my little android mini pc i have hooked to my tv can do it. so why not just add that bit of programming to the processor already on the tv?

lg makes a great budget led. Also walmart is having a thanksgiving day deal on a name brand tv (cant remember at the minute) but it is like a 32 inch lcd for 138 dollars. If you are in line and they sell out the price is guaranteed and it will be delivered before christmas. Just an idea.

FWIW:

I have had several LCD TV's and so far I have been the most satisfied with Samsung. My Sony kept having issues (fixed several times under warranty) and I will never buy another LG product again (not specifically tv related, but the worst service I have ever had).

Sony: tons of bad pixels on first unit, failed power supply (twice) on 2nd unit and the 3rd one kept loosing sync or something.

Samsung: Bad PSU on 1st unit (fixed under warranty), no other problems.

Toshiba: Good TV no problems (yet). ( Got a free Blueray player and other freebies)

LG: TV would never find a signal on multiple devices and inputs.

just take a look through the black friday ads. i am sure there will be a few out there.... i think blackfriday.com has almost all of them :whistler:

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Originally Posted by DemonDragonJ

I am seeking a model with a screen size between 30 inches and 40 inches and ideally, less than $400 in price, if that is possible. For the display type, I am seeking an LCD screen, as LED screens are still slightly too expensive presently, and plasma screens, from my research, are too inefficient in terms of power consumption and heat generation.

What recommendations can anyone here make? I shall greatly appreciate any feedback that anyone here can offer, and I await your responses.

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No problem! Not only will I do that for you, but I will list only LED televisions while I'm at it!

Samsung UN32EH5000 32-Inch 1080p 60Hz LED HDTV - $330

Samsung UN40EH5000 40-Inch 1080p 60Hz LED HDTV - $430

Samsung UN32EH4003 32-Inch 720p 60Hz LED HDTV - $250

And just in case you're interested... Though it's not LED.

VIZIO E3D320VX 32-Inch Class Theater 3D LCD HDTV with Internet Apps - $300

It's amazing how affordable high quality HDTV's are these days!

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Originally Posted by CrazyTeaPot

No problem! Not only will I do that for you, but I will list only LED televisions while I'm at it!

Samsung UN32EH5000 32-Inch 1080p 60Hz LED HDTV - $330

Samsung UN40EH5000 40-Inch 1080p 60Hz LED HDTV - $430

Samsung UN32EH4003 32-Inch 720p 60Hz LED HDTV - $250

And just in case you're interested... Though it's not LED.

VIZIO E3D320VX 32-Inch Class Theater 3D LCD HDTV with Internet Apps - $300

It's amazing how affordable high quality HDTV's are these days!

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Wow, those are excellent deals for excellent models; I thank you very much for those recommendations! :up:

I cant say enough good things about Sharp either! My 37" Aquos is now 6+ years old, and still looks as good as the day it was new! And I bought it because it was the best picture in the whole freakin' store. :)

my wife and I just upgraded from a 27" CRT to a 47" LG 3D LED LCD unit. We got it from Walmart online with a sound bar and 3D glassed for $800. We ditched the sound bar as we've already got a home theater setup but the LED and 3D is awesome

LED is awesome! I've got a 40" Sammy TV, the extremely lucky $600 price tag 3 years ago.

I just recently got a 21.5" Acer LED. Thing barely gets warm to the touch.

Ultimately, my brother and I purchased this television set, here, and we are immensely satisfied with it, as are our parents. It is a noticeable improvement over our previous television in term of power consumption and image quality, and it is definitely future-proof, as it has HDMI ports for when we eventually upgrade our regular DVD player to a blu-ray disc player, although we may not do that for some time yet. Our parents are pleased with it, and, by extension, so are my brother and I.

Congrats! You'll love the upgrade to blu-ray when you make it. The difference is like going from black and white to color or from mono to stereo sound. It's huge.

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Originally Posted by d_stilgar

Congrats! You'll love the upgrade to blu-ray when you make it. The difference is like going from black and white to color or from mono to stereo sound. It's huge.

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I am certain that upgrading from standard DVD to blu-ray disc shall be a significant upgrade, but I doubt that it shall be as major an upgrade as you proclaim it to be, if you do not mind me saying so, because while blu-ray discs are certainly more advanced than standard DVD's, they are simply the same optical discs with higher storage capacities. That is merely an improvement of an existing format, and not a fundamental change of format itself, as are upgrading from VHS to DVD, from audio cassettes to audio CD's, from floppy disks to flash drives, from a CRT television or computer monitor to an LCD unit, from dial-up internet to Ethernet, or from a mechanical hard drive to a solid-state drive. Again, I hope to not sound rude, and I am certain that blu-ray shall be an improvement over DVD, I doubt that it shall be a ground-breaking a change as was DVD over VHS.

I haven't made the jump to Blu-Ray yet either. My upconverting 1080p DVD player works extremely well, and makes all my existing plastic discs look pretty decent. It also upconverts all the stuff I have for my son to watch on a 1TB portable USB drive. I will eventually make the move as the price of the players is heading into much more reasonable territory, and the price of Blu-Ray discs appears to be heading into similar range as DVD. $15 for a movie on Blu-Ray is reasonable to me. $30+ for one, out of my budget.

I'm going to stay firm on my statement. It's a huge leap. I know that it seems like it isn't much, but take a look at this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ve...Standards4.svg

Now, compare NTSC resolution to 1080p. NTSC is 640x480 (standard for most DVDs), while 1080p is 1920x1080. That's 6.75x the number of pixels. It may not seem like that big of a deal, but it is. There is so much more detail when you have that much more raw data. I see things I've never seen before in movies on blu-ray that I've watched dozens of times on DVD. It really is that staggering of a difference.

Also, I've noticed that lots of movies are now changing as blu-ray has become more widely adopted. Directors will often think about how things will appear on a home television and will make the movie accordingly. There's a lot of stuff in movies now that I think will be lost on DVD, like text on a letter or car that is readable at a higher resolution, but will likely get lost at a lower resolution.

There's some decent upconverters out there, but they all have to guess at what those other pixels should have been. It may not look horrible, but it's not going to be nearly the same.

As for the audio quality, I don't think most people have a nice enough sound system to tell between compressed 5.1 on a DVD to the uncompressed 7.1 in most blu-rays, but it's still a huge leap in quality, and if you have the speaker setup for it, you'll be missing out.

As for discs, my wife and I don't buy blu-rays. We don't buy movies in general. We'll rent if something is interesting and that's about it. I hate having a shelf full of discs. It drives me nuts. The movie industry needs to offer a service like steam. Ultraviolet is out there, but has way too many strings attached at this point, and is still just streaming. You can't download you movies to a computer and watch them whenever you want. And they also have a maintenance fee after a certain period of time, which is dumb. I don't pay a maintenance fee on any discs I own, and if steam can offer "free forever" after buying something, then a movie service should be able to do the same.

^Going off of what D said. When we switched from a 32" CRT to a 40" LED, my mom's words: "It looks too good." Now that we've adjusted to it, my mom again, when trying to watch the old tube, "I tried cleaning my glasses, but, nope, it is that blurry."

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Originally Posted by AmEv

^Going off of what D said. When we switched from a 32" CRT to a 40" LED, my mom's words: "It looks too good." Now that we've adjusted to it, my mom again, when trying to watch the old tube, "I tried cleaning my glasses, but, nope, it is that blurry."

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Yes, I have experienced that phenomenon, as well. When I was young, my family had a CRT television and a VCR, and we never thought that the quality of the images that they provided was poor. Years later, when we upgraded to a DVD player, I noticed that the image and audio quality of the DVD's far surpassed those of the cassette tapes that we had been using, and our new television further reveals the limitations of the older formats, as well. Even further, I have recently found old television advertisements from my youth on the internet, and am amazed at the difference in video quality between those advertisements and ones made today. Technology certainly does progress at quite an amazing rate, does it not?