New TV

[Mercutio]

Anyone have a strong opinion on newish Television sets? My 27" presentation display is losing vertical synch maybe one power-cycle in five or when I leave it on too long, and I think it's basically going to die.

I think I'll just buy a standard-issue TV to replace it (unless it's worth fixing, I guess, but I doubt that. I only paid $300 for it), since it's basically just used to watch movies.

Amazon.com has free shipping (= delivery, for those of us without SUVs) and a free satellite receiver with electronics purchase right now.

Best Buy (Evil-Mart) has 1-year financing, so I could buy something irresponsibly large/expensive from them.

I'm thinking a 27" or 32" set. 36" is probably too big. I don't particularly have a budget for this. Whatever seems like a good deal.

So has anyone bought one recently, who wants to share an experience?

 

[Fushigi]

I've had my current TV, a JVC AV35BP6 (35" tube) for a few years now and it's been pretty darn good. I've done all the calibration that I can do w/o opening up the chassis using the Avia & Video Essentials DVDs and I find the picture to be just fine. Plenty of detail in blacks, colors that don't oversaturate, etc.

Audio is typical TV stereo .. OK for sitcoms & the like but for movie watching I switch to my Denon.

- Fushigi

 

[CougTek]

Panasonic TAU are probably the best you can currently find nowadays. Toshiba's flat screen TV are supposed to live forever, but the colors are lavish.

Zenith also has high definition TV models, but I haven't seen them and I cannot comment on their reliability. Zenith is apparently a hit or miss brand, or so did I heard. It might be worth checking anyway.

None of the above has the outrageous price premium of the Sony Trinitron (which is probably of lower quality than all the other too).

 

[Mercutio]

I was asking the guys in my class tonight (many young-ish, unmarried men). Those that had opinions were mostly of the "stay away from..." variety.

thanks for opinions, regardless.

 

[blakerwry]

I don't consider myself too much of a videophile when it comes to TV... I just like to enjoy a rerun of the simpsons or sienfeld once in awhile... But we've had good luck with JVC in the 27-29" department.

I don't know exactly what you're looking for ... flat screen? high definition? do you have a requirement for video/audio inputs or outputs?

 

[skeet]

TV's

I spend about £30,000 a year on monitors and TV's.

Listen to Cougtech. Here is a man who knows his onions.
Never buy a Sony. I have several grade 1 Sony monitors and they are excellent but £11,000 a piece. Anything less than stratospheric pro monitoring from Sony has serious flaws. Their geometry is appalling. Image is twisted, they are very poorly clamped so sharp transitions from black to white distort the picture to an unacceptable degree (all domestics do this but Sony must be the worst), the picture blanking is horrendous on all current Sony TV's (you can lose as much as %25 of the picture because they are screwed in so far to negate the geometry problems, but often the left hand side will lose %12 and the right %6. Some of these are adjustable if you want get into the service menus but the Panasonic is spot on out of the box. And it right across all aspect and zoom settings something that the Sony is unable to achieve, no matter how much tweaking.

They win on colour temperature, which is what Sony made their name in professionally. But your going to crank the contrast and up the colour anyway (shame on all you punters. I spend days colour grading and you crank the contrast so you can see something when the sun is shining through the window) so it doesn't matter.

Sony is capable of making the best televisions on the planet, but they don't, choosing instead to trade on their professional dominance and reliability record (reliability is something the Panasonic can rightly claim the crown to as well) and charging a premium for.

There are many manufacturers of Televisions now. Much like computer bits, there are now manufactures that make huge quantities for other people and they are largely unknown.

Which is why a punter doesn't really know what he is buying unless you spend a lot of time with these things. Pretty much the reason why I listen to you blokes first before moving in the computer world.

Buy a Panasonic.

 

[Tannin]

You have convinced me, Skeet, or you would have except for one thing.

As you will be aware, I know nothing about TVs and care less, but I've been a rusted-on Panasonic fan for more years than I care to admit to. For a long, long time, if in doubt about any product, I'd just buy the Panasonic sight unseen, and that philosophy did me proud. Over the years we have moved quite a few truckloads of Panasonic gear, countless hundreds and thousands of items, mostly floppy drives, CD drives, and CD burners, but the odd other item too, such as monitors. And they always used to be excellent.

But this last year or so, they have gone downhill. The floppy drives are still as good as ever (how hard can it be to make a floppy drive, after all?) but we have had to stop selling their CD ROM drives because of the return rate - it used to be tiny, but around the end of 2000 it jumped to about 25%, which is completely unacceptable. At much the same time, we started having problems with their burners too. By about March or April, we found ourselves forced to drop the brand. (Replacing the readers with Mitsubishis which have been truly excellent, and the burners with first Mitsubishis (which were great in the 16X to 24X ranges but seem to have dropped off a trifle with the newer, faster ones), and now Lite-Ons.)

Two or three years ago we bought a Panasonic cordless phone for the office, which was excellent. Before too long we found ourselves using the $150 Panasonic in preference to the $600 Uniden. (We need two, so that if the batteries run down or something else happens we have a spare. Also, it saves walking if you happen to be at the other end of the building when the phone goes.) (Which is all the bloody time, damnit!)

Late last year or early this year, we retired the old Uniden, and happily bought another Panasonic. It was a little cheaper ($99?) and a fraction slimmer than the bulky and ugly but very practical older one. And it is - forgive me for the term but it is the only one that fits here - absolutely ratshit. The sound quality is such that it can be difficult to hear people, it has inferior range, and worst of all it is unreliable. It just stops working for no reason, then goes again. It fails to ring even though the light comes on, or it rings and you can press the answer button and nothing happens. Shit like that. We still have it because it works 70% of the time and is (just barely) good enough to get by on for half an hour while the old one charges, and also because I'm not sure what to replace it with. I can't use my old motto of "if in doubt buy a Panasonic" because it is a Panasonic.

So: their optical drive division has suddenly started making crap, their phone division has suddenly stated making crap, how can I be confident that their TV division are still any good?

Also, what do I do about getting a cordless phone that works?

 

[Fushigi]

Late last year or early this year, we retired the old Uniden, and happily bought another Panasonic. It was a little cheaper ($99?) and a fraction slimmer than the bulky and ugly but very practical older one. And it is - forgive me for the term but it is the only one that fits here - absolutely ratshit. The sound quality is such that it can be difficult to hear people, it has inferior range, and worst of all it is unreliable. It just stops working for no reason, then goes again. It fails to ring even though the light comes on, or it rings and you can press the answer button and nothing happens. Shit like that. We still have it because it works 70% of the time and is (just barely) good enough to get by on for half an hour while the old one charges, and also because I'm not sure what to replace it with. I can't use my old motto of "if in doubt buy a Panasonic" because it is a Panasonic.

Also, what do I do about getting a cordless phone that works?

Siemens Gigaset. I went high-end and got the 8825 with extra handsets. 4 digital voicemail boxes, up to 8 cordless handsets + corded base station, all do speakerphone & have headset jacks, 2 line capable, intercom, xfer calls between handsets, each handset has it's own dialing directory, etc. The handsets can be named for convenience. Never a dropped call & we've yet to run down the battery during a single conversation even when using the speakerphone. The major downside is cost .. its expensive. The minor downside is the slimline design is a little less comfortable to hold to your ear .. it's still OK though and the skepaerphone can always be used. Haven't tried with a headset yet. And most current phones have that slim design anyway.

Oh, for me the Siemens replaced a Panasonic KX-TCC912-B 900MHz unit. It works fine, although batteries seem to drain fast. Anyway, our house is large enough that I wanted something expandable with intercom & the Siemens' room monitor will be handy once we have a baby.

- Fushigi

 

[skeet]

Bone, there are loads of examples of bad Panasonic gear. The BBC bought 300 D3's at £28,000 a pop and they all went bad. That’s a big mistake, then Channel 4 bought 80 D5's that are even more expensive and they dumped them all soon after and bought Sony Digital Betacam. Panasonic professionally have an appalling reputation (they expected to trade on their bigger clout - apparently they are 5 times the size of Sony, or were). But their TV's and domestic VCR's are far superior products when compared to the Sony equivalent.

Phones and CDR's, Panasonic are crap, duly noted...

 

[Mercutio]

The 32" Tau is $800 from Amazon or $900 locally. It also weighs over 70kg (most 32" TVs weigh around 50kg). That seems a bit steep for its size, and JVC's 36" offering, with similar specs, can be had for less money.

As far as specs in what I'm looking for: 3 line filter, no "enhanced" sound (TV = monitor as far as I'm concerned), full set of inputs (component/svideo/composite, stereo out. In a perfect world, VGA, but somehow I doubt I'll find that one) Haven't made up my mind about flat screen - that's a pricey option and I'm not sure I care that much.

But I plan to go look at JVC, Toshiba and Panasonic.

 

[Mercutio]

In case anyone cares...

Talked myself into a 32" JVC, since I made more money this weekend than I thought I would.

In the end, I liked the brightness and color separation of the JVC better than the Panasonic or Toshiba models. White looked "more white" and black seemed "more black" on the JVC, even after I played with all the controls on the others.

The real adventure ended up being getting it into the car and then into my apartment. They should put handles on big TVs.

 

[Pradeep]

Nice Merc.

I ordered one of these over the weekend:

JVC XV-FA902SL DVD player

Can't wait to hear what DVD-Audio sounds like. And being able to watch 7 dvds without getting up to change will also be handy.

 

[Mercutio]

DVD Audio sounds like, er, 6 channels of audio. Lots of sound from the center channel speaker, so make sure you have a good one.

I have the same unit. It's a little bit noisy and very slow when it changes disks but otherwise an excellent piece of equipment.

 

[mubs]

I have, for a long time, also bought Panasonics.

Then, years ago, they came out with CD-Changers for PCs, and I bought one. This was in the days of Win 3.1. Of course it never worked right. The thing would constantly shuffle discs, eject and close the tray, etc. After 6 months of harassing their Tech support, they had me send it in and one month later I had a refurb with different firmware on my hands. Well, that didn't work right either, and I just trashed it.

18 months ago I bought a Panasonic 2.4 GHz phone that has been reliable (as far as buttons, etc.), but the signal will fade suddenly, even 6 feet away from the base. There's something fundamentally wrong with the handset design--when I speak into it, I can hear some sound in the ear through the earphone part!

With the rise of China, Inc., many manufacturers have opened factories there with a significant drop in quality.

Supercaffeinated had a horror story about a Siemens multi-set phone over at SR. I guess YMMV.

BTW, I have a Sony 20" TV purchased new in 1986. It works flawlessly, and it more than adequate for the hour or so of use a day.

 

[Dozer]

And being able to watch 7 dvds without getting up to change will also be handy.

Just get some Depends undergarments and a portable fridge and you'll never have to leave the couch!

 

[Pradeep]

And being able to watch 7 dvds without getting up to change will also be handy.

Just get some Depends undergarments and a portable fridge and you'll never have to leave the couch!

Already done! Depend is my friend.

 

[Pradeep]

DVD Audio sounds like, er, 6 channels of audio. Lots of sound from the center channel speaker, so make sure you have a good one.

I have the same unit. It's a little bit noisy and very slow when it changes disks but otherwise an excellent piece of equipment.

I ended up skipping the JVC and got a "Cyberhome DV-500" for less than a $100. It playsback PAL on NTSC and is region switchable (which the JVC isn't without spending $350 on a modded player). Single disc only tho, so my lazy ass will have to get off the couch.

http://www.cyberhome.com/products.asp?Product=500&Page=specs