Cheapish Widescreen TV?

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Pho

Pho

Pho

Soldato
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Hi all,

The TV in my room (a cheap Bush 28" widescreen CRT) decided to blow up the other day, I think it's probably the line transformer so it will be pretty expensive to replace. The person I usually get to repair all my electrical things isn't around so I can't ask him either.

I'm not sure whether to go HD or not. I don't have Sky or an Xbox 360 or infact anything which uses HD so I think it will be wasted on me (I'd probably use it to upscale DVDs though).

At the moment all my video (xbox, freeview box, DVD player and laptop) is fed through my receiver and out into 5.1 so I don't need anything with great speakers.

Any recomendations? If I do go HDTV I hear Mirai are very good, but then I hear LCDs aren't great for standard non-HD feeds. I'm looking for something around 28-32". There's loads of these around and I can't decide :).

Budget is ~£400 for HD, <£200 if I go for a standard TV.


Cheers :)
 
If your not really interested in having the lastest sleek looking flat TV (LCD/plasma)...

Then you should be able to pickup some great bargins on secondhand widescreen CRT....as there are so many people changing to lcd/plasma which makes 1000's of secondhand CRT's available..You should be able to pick up what wouldn't been one of the very highend toshiba or sony etc widescreen CRT very cheap...
 
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I picked up a 632V200 Mirai from OCuk last night (I live local) albeit a bit over £400, first impressions are very good. The analogue tuner is awful though (true of most LCD TVs), but attach a Freeview box and hay presto a pretty impressive picture, I have no complaints upto now. I still need a bit of time to play with it before I would give it 100% thumbs up, but based on first impression it’s looking good.
P.S I think they do a 27" which would be cheaper?
 
ASE001, how would you say the picture quality looks compared to more well known brands like Sony and Samsung, especially on SD material?
 
Well I have Toshiba 37WLT58 as the main TV, it's about 16 months old. This is still in my opinion up there with very best available LCD TV’s today.

If I give this 10 out of 10 then I would score the Mirai at least 7 out of 10, which is pretty good in my book.

It hasn’t had time settle down yet, they do take a day or two before you get optimum PQ. Also I haven’t had chance to try all the picture modes and settings yet so I may put my score up another point after that.

If you factor in the price then you notch it up another point.


But thats my opinion, I would seek others as well!

P.S This is my current setup, as you can see it is pretty much budget AV gear which says volumns for this TV.

SCART 1 = £25 Freeview receiver from Tesco
SCART 2 = JVC Nicam VHS video recorder
Component = £22 DVD player/karaoke player with component out from B&M (a little gem for the price, although the mechanism is a little noisy).
RCA AV (on the side) = Xbox (old)
PS2 = Not sure yet, suggestions please?
VGA = DIY media player (basically an old laptop guts put inside an old DVD player case, the screen got smashed). I’m still refining this and writing some software to handle a TV remote type device through the infrared port.
 
chaparral said:
If your not really interested in having the lastest sleek looking flat TV (LCD/plasma)...

Then you should be able to pickup some great bargins on secondhand widescreen CRT....as there are so many people changing to lcd/plasma which makes 1000's of secondhand CRT's available..You should be able to pick up what wouldn't been one of the very highend toshiba or sony etc widescreen CRT very cheap...
Click to expand...

That's what I'm thinking. I have a Sony Trinitron 32" which has a very nice picture so maybe I can find something like that for cheap now. I'll have a hunt :).
 
Energize said:
I can't imagine how bad those must be.
Click to expand...
they looked ok to be fair, better than a few i have seen at a lot higher price when i was out n about shopping over xmas, but then it does matter how the shop feeds a picture in to them as to how good they look
 
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