Hello! Not really into the TV scene so thought I would ask the hive mind here! My gran has an old Panasonic TX-L42D26BA and I managed to find the specs here:
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/648839/Panasonic-Viera-Tx-L32d26ba.html?page=107#manual with a review here:
https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/panasonic-viera-tx-l42d25b
The main use is F1 and footie via Sky Sports HD (which looks like 1080i output?) and this TV does indeed support 1920x1080. Question is, is it worth moving to a newer TV from a picture quality point of view? And if so, what? Father in-law has just got a Samsung 43” Q65C QLED 4K HDR Smart TV and seems happy with it. Will she 'see' the benefit of spending ~£500 on a similar sized telly?
Changing a TV screen can open a can of worms. The first big problem won't be the picture. It will be the sound.
Flatscreen TV sound has never been a patch on CRT TV sound simply because flatscreen TVs have never had the space inside the case to house the larger speakers that were common with CRT sets. This was bad enough with CCFL backlit LCD sets which are 3-4 inches thick. It got a lot worse when TVs went to LED backlighting. Now your £500 budget has to be split between a TV and a sound bar, and you'll need that sound bar to be HDMI ARC compatible so your gran doesn't need to juggle two remotes. You've also got to get your dear old gran to accept another bit of kit in the form of a sound bar sitting in front of the TV. That might not go down so well aesthetically, plus there's the need for an extra power socket and even more wires.
Presuming she's happy to go with a sound bar, you've now got to find a TV for £350-£400 because a chunk of budget has just disappeared into something to fix the sound. Being the dutiful grandson, and wanting what's best for your dear old sainted gran, you naturally gravitate towards the major brands because you want to make sure you get something good, right? First stop then, Samsung and LG. "
They're huge brands so they're going to be the best."
Samsung Crystal 43CU7100 4K with HDR, and Bixby and Alexa too. 'Crystal' sounds exciting and the blurb looks promising; '
Even the blandest of scenes are given a makeover with PurColour which boosts colours while keeping them looking natural. The Crystal 4K Processor is the brain of the TV. It's hard at work in the background boosting the picture and sound of everything you watch in real-time.' All of that is BS. The motion processing is carp and the colour level is no different to increasing the colour level a couple of notches on your gran's TV.
What's worse with these sets is the brightness level. It's dire. They've cut corners each year to compete with the cheaper brands, and as a result there are now fewer LED lights behind the screen which results in a dull and lifeless picture. What you'll do then is ramp up the backlight to maximum, and in doing so those few LEDs will be working flat out and cooking themselves to death. in 18-24 months the screen will develop a purple tint that can't be adjusted out with any of the picture controls. The screen backlights are frucked.
Okay, LG then. the 43NANO766 at £399. It's the same story. There's no point beating around the bush here. Her old TV has 4x HDMI inputs. It was made when Panasonic was a step up from LG, Samsung etc. The nearest equivalent would have been Sony. The motion processing makes SD look pretty good. All newer budget 4K sets are going to struggle with this.
Swapping the TV at this level means going backwards in picture quality.
It's not all bad news. The entry-level Samsung QLED your F-i-L has does do decent brightness with ordinary SD and HD images, so it will look punchier compared to her old set. However, HDR (if she has a source) will look disappointingly dull and there's still the motion processing issues which make fast movement look blurred. You said she likes F1 and football, right? The processing power just isn't there to handle 4x the number of pixels over a HD 1080p screen.
You'd be better off tuning up the picture on her existing TV. Get the brightness and contrast set correctly. Turn off overscan. Tweak the sharpness to take away the image halos (ringing), turn the colour down and then set the colour balance to warm. Increase the colour until faces (skin tones) look like you see them in real life, then go up a couple of notches on the setting. More guidance here:
https://www.avforums.com/PicturePerfect/
Changing to a newer TV can have a marked increase in performance over an older set, but you need to spend enough to get more accurate colours, deeper colour saturation, better motion processes, good upscaling, and the extra brightness to make the image really pop. The TV screen resolution is almost incidental.
To be fair she does notice when she comes to my house and sees our OLED but still seems ok with her 4K LED LG and has a habit of leaving paused programmes on screen for a long time.
