Good budget TV 42 or 46 inch

Soldato
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After a good budget TV. 42 or 46 inch. To watch films and to connect to an Xbox or Playstation. Wont be used for terrestrial tv as i dont watch any.

Budget i would say not more that £500 max. Ok, i could go a little higher but want to keep it around £500 if possible.

Ta
 
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29 May 2010
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Cheshire
There aren't that many really good TVs in the size range and at your budget TBH. The two go-to sets under £500 are both 40". That might be too small for you. These are the Panasonic 40EX700 and the Samsung 40MU6400.

Both have the the VA type panel which means good black levels, decent colour and good brightness uniformity. This last feature means you're less likely to have light cloudy patches on screen. You wouldn't notice poor uniformity so much on casual TV viewing, but when gaming you don't want patches of light and dark screen area spoiling your view and perhaps even masking crucial detail when playing FPS-type games.

The other panel type is IPS. The contrast isn't so good with these because black never really gets that velvety darkness that VA can achieve. Where VA wins is in viewing angle. If you have a living room where someone will be sat well off to one side or the other rather than more centrally then an IPS TV will still look okay.

Other useful features of these two TVs: They both have a backlight system that can dim with the picture content. This enhances black even further. The other thing is their Game Mode has really low lag - around 22ms which is really very good for 4K TVs.

Sony makes a 43" UHD TV at under £500 retail. The 43XE7003. I can't be certain, but from the same family of XE7000 chassis sets the more expensive 43XE7073 uses an IPS panel and they tend to be a bit cheaper than the VA panels if TV pricing is anything to go on.

LG use IPS panels in pretty much everything they make.

That sums it up for decent brands. The rest is stuff made by 3rd party manufacturers, so the badge name you see on the front of the TV isn't the company that made it. Toshiba, Sharp, Hitachi, all hail from the same production lines as Bush, JMB, Technika and a dozen other budget/supermarket TV brands that are now instantly forgettable. Philips and HiSense are slightly different.

The name behind Philips is TPV. They're sort of a single brand manufacturer. Some of the product isn't bad. It's just hard to find because retailers got their fingers burned with Philips quality in the past. HiSense bought out old manufacturing capacity from once major Japanese brands and they now make cheap TVs of not that great quality. In the US (but not Europe) HiSense also produce for Sharp, but it's not a happy marriage. Sharp Japan are really unhappy that the brand is being dragged down.
 
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