I'm wanting to buy one of those really new teles with HD ready type things but if Im honest I havent got a clue what Im really looking for. Can someone tell me what they are in simple, non-jargon terms and wheres the best place to get them from? My OH wants one before the world cup!

Even if you buy one before the world cup it won't be ready as you have to register and connect I think through Sky.

All the retailers when selling them must now make purchasers aware that they won't likely be ready to go before the World Cup. I was listening to it on the radio yesterday.

WHat my own advice would be on the TV is to buy for reputable manufacturers such as Sony. Read on line, go along to Curry's etc if even only for advice. 

Just to say, I was surprised to find out (when researching Plasma/LCD Tvs) that LG are in fact the Market leaders and have an amazing state of the art operation which was ground breaking in technological developement.
   Most of the big 'brand' Names are actually LG appliances, Buy a Sony tv and your actually getting (the bit that counts!) an LG! Sony just add on an expsensive name and facing.
    Might save you some pennies :) (So you can go live it up in a verrrrry expensive Health Spa to escape the World Cup! ;) )

Just to say that when and if you know what you are getting, check out John Lewis - all their TVs come with a 5 year guarantee and with their price match promise thing often are the best value.  My Dad recently got a 42" panasonic plasma tv (fab!) and after shopping around John Lewis came out top becuase everywhere else wanted several hundreds of pounds to extend the warranty past 1 year and with plasma tv's they can sometimes lose their gas apparently (i'm not too up on that though)

Hope thats of some use

Sara

Errr cough cough.. :-D  maybe you have read that BUT I can without a doubt tell you the difference in screen quality to the LG and the Sony are like night and day so there is more to it.  Don't go buy them based on what you have read , honestly

Our currys have these 2 models next to each other and the difference is insane.  Only £400 difference in price. 

A lot of companies make stuff for others but that in my exerience doesn't guarantee one to be as good as the other.

I have had Sony for ever and our last TV we bought a Philips.. the worst mistake I have every make.   I am waiting till the WC frenzy dies down before buying a new Sony. 

{{{{{{Hellloooooo!!}}}}}}}}}}
we're talking watching World Cup here!!!
who wants screen quality to see the hairs up Beckhams nose??? :P

ah well,it was just meant to be helpful :rolleyes:
We have the Bang&Olfusen Beo4 and to be honest I dont really see that much difference when I watch other TV's.... rather spend the extra money on myself than a box I watch now and again (and especially if its got bloomin football on it!! ;)

Good tip I did find out tho' was when your looking at TV's in showrooms, ask them to put 'Monsters inc' on...as the definition really shows up on the Blue Monsters fur! you can really see the difference then. :)

We've got a HD ready Panasonic LCD tele but you have to pay a subscription to sign up to the HD PLUS buy a set top box for it which costs at the moment around £300 I think.  We've decided to wait for it to come out and the prices to drop before we go ahead and move over to the HD.

We always buy Sony too.  If you have a Sony retail shop near you their service is great.  They set our LCD up, linked it to the DVD. video and Sky box, showed us how it worked and took away the very large box it came packed in. 

Great Service which is hard to find these days.

My OH also can second that - his TV's (Sony's) last for years...
My Nan has a Sony (old analogue) it's been going donkeys years
and never gone wrong.
OH's Mum on the other hand has gone through 2 new TV's, Bush and Phillips.
Both had faults.

I think from these experiences if you can afford Sony go for it.

I bought a Sony FST when my daughter was born and it only died last year when she was 18, only ever had one thing go in it, the on button which was replaced about 10 years ago.

who wants screen quality to see the hairs up Beckhams nose??? :-p Well stick to your portable then :-D :-D

Beckhams legs will be the size of match sticks then ;-)

I know what you mean about TV's and gadgets I get a bit tired of them just now also. Although I got a new company phone today that looks very nice. Took me 3 hours to see where the battery went and that was with the instructions :-) :-D

Oh gawd...... Im still none the wiser!! :rolleyes:

>Well stick to your portable then :-D :-D<

ROFL!! :D

What is HD

i'm not very technological

I'm glad someone else doesn't know!

HD stands for 'high definition' but thats about all that I know!. Its meant to be the future...bit like garlic bread :D

is garlic bread the future then?

i thought garlic bread had been around for ages. show how much i know about these things!

psssst Helen.... its from the Comedy show Peter kaye's Pheonix Nights. :D

>Its meant to be the future...bit like garlic bread<

"Gerry!! Gerry!!!!! where's me Zantac!!?" ;)

HD TV explained
(think thats a bit out of date now,as I believe Japan has the largest number of HD use)

Hollywood are quaking in their Manolo Blahniks, as every little imperfection will show. like they need anymore excuse to become 'Plastic fantastic' :rolleyes:

and you'll see Brad Pitts name is apt! (horrendous pock marks) still gorgeous tho!! :D

*hangs head in shame*

i've never seen Phoenix Nights (there i've said it)

or 'The Office' or even 'Little Britain'

whilst i am in the confessional, i dont find Desperate Housewives amusing in the slightist.

*creeping away with head down to avoid the barrage of comments about how out of touch i am!*

Hey that's my link! you were faster HG. You win the garlic bread!

I'm no TV geek but HDTV is a new format that has about twice as many pixels in an image. If you think of pixels as little boxes than the more you have the smaller they are. The smaller they are the less you see them and image appear sharper. If you compare it to a digital camera, or your PC monitor think 600 X 480 versus 1280 X 1024. If that all still sounds like Martian I found this link which even has some nice fish pictures to illustrate.

I think the BBC is going to broadcast the WC in HDTV but you have to have a provider (like Sky or Telewest) that is going to send that along to you.

We bought out HD ready TV before Christmas ..but it doesn't make any difference unless you can get hold of an HD receiver :) SKY's HD receivers are on sale but I did hear that they wouldn't be sent out until July ...

We're hanging on grimly to our old TV until we move..........it doesn't bother me whether it works or no, but OH gets a trifle twitching without his ration of goggle-boxing :rolleyes:

He hankers after one of these ENORMOUS thingies .....he's been told that in that case, we'd better be looking for an ENORMOUS shed for it to go in :D :D

Margot

Just a bit more on HD tv's (I know this thread is old now, I only just found it!).

We bought a HD TV a couple of months ago, but not on purpose, we just wanted a big telly and weren't going to bother with HD because we're many, many years away from watching HD TV as a standard broadcast, but it happened that the cheapest BIG telly we could get was a Sony HD ready.

Anyway, we've established on here that its better quality (and apparently its not just the picture but the sound too, you're meant to see and hear things as though you were actually on the set of the movie you are watching), and also that you need to have a Sky HD box to get HD programmes (which as said is about £300 for the box plus a monthly subscription charge).

However, there are very few channels you can watch in HD - there's Sky 1, Sky Movies 9&10, a couple of the Sky Box Office channels and I think a BBC channel - if there are any more, we haven't found them yet.  Seeing as we don't watch any of the channels anyway, there's little point forking out £300 and monthly subscription to be able to see them in HD. 

However in the meantime, until HD broadcast becomes the norm, you can watch HDMI DVD's for the HDMI experience.  For this you will need a HD telly, a HD DVD player (about £250 I think) and the DVD purchased in HDMI format (you do need to have all three for it to work).  There are only a small number of DVD's currently out in HDMI format but it is steadily growing (I think Amazon has about 24 titles in HD format, to give you an idea).

So if you are into gadgets and technology, and the 'movie' experience and fancy buying a HD DVD player as well its probably worth it, or you watch a lot of Sky One, Sky Movies 9&10 and Sky Box Office. 

Or if you want the telly you buy now to last you longer than about 7 years (the time they expect HD telly to be the norm) then its worth getting one now to save having to buy a new telly in 7-10 years when everyone is watching in HDMI.  But if none of the above apply, I would say don't make HDMI a priority in choosing as it won't necessarily benefit you.  We have one, but only by coincidence and we have seen nothing in HDMI yet and having just bought a new DVD player, it will probably be many years before we see anything in HDMI to even know if its any good!

Wow, thanks for all that. We were really into buying a HD tele but that was before we knew anything about it. Hmm.....not sure what kind of tele I want now! Is LCD teles better than normal teles? Or plasma....Theres so many to choose from!

Now that bit I'm not so good at!  My mum has a 21" Sony LCD and I was shocked how awful the picture was - its not as defined as an old-fashioned telly.  We have a 50" Sony Bravia LCD Projection and the picture is really good but then its not a normal LCD, its an LCD projection, though I don't know if that should make a difference!  I really wanted a plasma but have been warned that you need to replace the tubes or something approx every 3 years and its very expensive to do so.  Rear projections are usually better in that respect as their equivalent part (I think its a bulb) that needs replacing lasts many years longer and is only something like £30 to replace (although I've read this on the net so not necessarily true!) however they are usually HUGE as they come with massive big base parts and are really wide and take up half your house, so they can't be fitted on the wall like a plasma which is again where plasmas have benefits   We were lucky in that our particular one isn't like normal projections and is only as high as the screen which was why we bought it.  Also, the cheapest 42" plasma around at the time was about £900 (which wasn't HD ready) so we felt it made sense to pay £200 extra and get a 50" LCD projection which hopefully won't cost us so much in tubes or whatever it is that blow, and it was HD ready to boot.  As you can tell, I do like big telly's :D

Some more cons:

Rear Projections - have a fan that whirr in the background

Plasmas - are difficult to get a good viewing angle, too near and you can't see, sit sideways on and you can't see - I think the bigger the living room you have the better as I think you get a better picture if you sit a long way away from them.

I think LCD's really are the 'trend' at the moment, and maybe there's a certain reason why my mum's picture quality looks so rubbish.  They probably have the benefit over plasmas and RP's in that you shouldn't have to replace any parts (subject to normal wear and tear).  You probably need to go on a browse in Comet and have a look at the picture qualities but I would say if you want it to go on your wall - go plasma.  If you want a big telly but don't want to replace expensive parts, go projection but try to avoid the bulky base ones - if you aren't worried about size and want a HD ready telly - go LCD and if you want the best picture quality, go old-fashioned widescreen.

Having said all that, my telly has a really good picture and is superb for watching films on.  But I'm guessing not everyone wants a 50" square piece of furniture in their living room :D

we've recently bought a panasonic viera (the 42" one). Bit of a downscale from the 50" samsung DLP projection we had before, but the picture is better-its not as pretty as the samsung though (that was my dream TV that i'd been eying up for 2 years, but had to go back because me and rich were suffering from 'The Rainbow Effect').

if you're going for a large screen, i would say that plasmas are better than LCD. I've found that with the large LCD's (had one and sent it back before the samsung), you lose the contrast, and anything dark just becomes black-you struggle to make out outlines, to see parts of a face etc. The Vieras pic is fantastic, but the sound's a bit naff. We run our sound through an amp, sub and speakers, so we don't have to listen to it. Its actually probably quite good, but we've not listened to a TV through its own sounds for years. DLP projection tv's are good (we had a standard rear projection, which are ok, but you have to sit right in front of the screen, and they're bulky), but because of the 'cinema technology', some people are sensitive to The Rainbow Effect (the image is projected from the back rather than on to the screen, which is why you don't suffer it at the cinema. Apparently.), and it can make watching TV a chore-when you look at one part of the screen, then look at another, you see rainbow trails across the screen.

LG have a gorgeous 50" LG plasma (which we would have got over the one we have now, but couldn't justify the extra £600-until comet reduced it by £300 only a week after buying out viera!!!!!). The picture is really good, and it looks pretty too (its all about looks for me!!!).

as for Sky HD, we ordered ours in the middle of April, and got the installation day of 10th June. A few weeks ago, we received an apology letter moving the date to the 23rd June. Depending on where you live, i doubt you'd get an installation date during the world cup.

another thing you might want to consider is if you're going to buy an HD ready DVD player. If you are, you'll need to either swap between the sky and dvd HDMI cables when you're watching one or the other, or get a TV with two HDMI inputs (the viera has 2, most have 1).You can get HDMI splitter switches which allows you to connect two HDMI leads to the the TV, but they cost a fair whack-about £100 i think.

good luck in finding one!

I was in currys at the weekend to take back a dodgy dvd player and we asked about the various tv's. The bloke we spoke to says that it is a myth about replacing the tubes in a plasma tv when they go that is it you have to buya new tv. He also said that the screen will burn if you were to leave a logo(something like sky)on it then you are left with a mark. He said that lcd is the way to go,better qaulity picture than plasma.

he's right about the picture burn. We never leave our sky paused for long without the TV being turned off.

to be honest, even with the rainbow probs, i'd still have the samsung dlp back at the click of my fingers-it was stunning, and i loved everything about it. I could have lived with joesph and his technicolour dreamcoat, but OH couldn't, so......

having had projections, lcd's and plasmas, i'd have a small lcd, but a big plasma. Our 19" lcd is great, except dark images are really really dark (no matter how much adjustments are made on the settings), and we had the same prob with our 42" lcd, which was a completely different brand. We must have bought two pants ones!!