TVs New TV (Update: TV arrived, mini review added)

Hi all, I'm looking for a bit of assistance in picking a new television.

I'm roughly looking to spend around £1,000.
At the moment I'm mostly flicking back and forth between two sets:

Sony KDL-40HX753

Samsung UE40ES6800
(note the link is for the 46" version, mostly the same specs though)

The Samsung is slightly more expensive, however it comes with two pairs of active shutter glasses.

Any thoughts on which one I should go for?

New TV bought: Panasonic TX-P42ST50.
Pictures and review to follow when it arrives later in the month.

Edit
It's arrived!

 

From what I have read about the two sets the Sony comes out on top.

Clouding issues - Samsung has worst of it although the Sony is not absolutely perfect.

3D crosstalk - Again the Samsung has issues with this whereas the Sony is sharp and much improved over the terrible sets from the previous 2 years.

Colour reproduction - Sony has the advantage out of the box in terms of accuracy.

Gaming - both have about 38ms (+-4) lag when gaming mode is on. (which is not bad apparently although I can't comment).

Both have great connectivity, 1.4 HDMI's etc.

If you want to max the budget, you can get the 40HX853 for £960* (no glasses) @ Curry's atm. That TV has had amazing reviews and is the best one Sony have produced in quite a while.

Edit: *Using TV1000 gets you 15% off

 

I bought my EX703 from RGB Direct and they have a good deal on the Sony you are looking at!

http://www.rgbdirect.co.uk/ProductDetails.asp?SKUNumber=113597&Model=SONY-KDL40HX753BU

I have always preffered Sony picture, Samsung is too bright and saturated.

 

Thanks for the feedback and for the brief comparisons on some of the features/issues.

I think I'll give the Sony a whirl.

 

May I perhaps point out the Panasonic P42UT50?

Plasmas still have the edge in image quality.

 

Managed to find out my local has the Sony screen in their store along with a couple of other models.
They've got a similar one to the Panasonic plasma tv as well (ST50 I believe) so I'll swing by and have a look at them in person.

 

Best thing to do, I've found, when buying a TV is to actually look at the sets that interest you in a shop.

When I bought my new TV last year, after reading reviews and user comments I was all for getting a particular Samsung model, but when I went to John Lewis to actually look at the set the picture quality was not as good as I was led to believe, it was sat near a Panasonic which had far better colours and image quality to my eyes than the Samsung as was about the same price. I eventually got the Panasonic model online.

I went to a few shops to compare quality just in case (but unlikely) they had been set up better in one shop than the other to help sell units.

 

I'd echo what a few have said; get down to a shop and take a look at the sets, side by side if possible. I have a 6 Series Samsung (6530 I think off the top of my head) which I use with a PS3, 360, HTPC and general viewing.

There are ALOT of snazzy features with the tv; like being able to plug a hdd into one of the usb slots and it will act as a set top box (pause, rewind, record live tv). Up-scaling of non 3d content to 3d, ...etc.

The price of the Samsungs are very competitive. Buy from somewhere like John Lewis if you can; 5 yr warranty and excellent customer service is worth paying for.

The biggest drawback for me though, is that my TV displays ALOT of ghosting of faster moving objects. It was particularly noticeable watching the Euro's; the ball would become very indistinct when travelling at pace. You can see the same when playing Fifa also. It's less noticeable in other types of games though.

 

You don't want a bigger screen than 40" no? £1000 could buy you a lot of telly.

I understand not everyone has the space/desire.

 

Thanks for more feedback.

Had a quick trip into the store this morning, I quite like the look of the Sony and the picture quality was pretty crisp.
Going to head back over after work for a more serious look as the guy on the shop floor said he'll hook up a PS3 to the display so I can look at how games look on them.


I'd say 46" is the biggest screen I'd want, my room isn't terribly big and I sit either 7-8ft or 4ft away (depending on how I've got the sofa-bed setup).

 

Ah ok. Just mentioned because my housemate has a 46" and its absolutely magnificent!

 

I just bought a Panasonic ST50 screen.. I'd tell you how awesome it is but richersounds still don't have it in stock! (But all the reviews say it's awesome so i'm really hoping it is)

 

After having a bit of a play in the store yesterday (I think we were messing on the PS3 with a few screens for well over two hours), I'm very impressed with the Panasonic 42" ST50 model. So impressed I went and paid for it while I was there.
Managed to haggle a deal that included a 5.1 sound system and 4 pairs of 3D specs as well so I should be having some fun when it all gets delivered.


Thanks for all the help.

 

What hifi has some reviews this month on 46" TVs, for me I'd go samsung as it has a great smart side to it with good apps and performance, plus if you buy before August you get a Samsung galaxy tab 2 7" tablet free also which can be remote, alternate screen etc. only downside is it only has 3 HDMI.

EDIT - the tab only comes with 46" 7 and 8 series unfortunately not the 6 oops

 

Cool, post a pic when you get it. I shied away from a 3d tv cuz it gave me headaches and didin't work that well. You can always turn it off though and I am sure its fun if it works for you. I went with a 42" Vizio and I like it very much with a sound bar. We also have a 52" Toshiba which still works great.

 

Don't bother with 3DTVs. Not only does it have terrible input lag, it's got some really wonky picture quality.

 

sandys;
I've got a Galaxy Tab already but thanks for letting us know about the deal.

maestro0428;
I'll definitely put some pictures up when it arrives (I may do a full review of it if my workload drops a bit).
They only had the shop floor's display model in the store so they're ordering one in for me, should be arriving late next week but they said at the very latest it'll be the 26th.

I'm mostly good with 3D, it usually depends on the film/game for how good it looks. Fast action shooters tend to not be so great as the motion blur thrown on top of the 3D effect usually clashes. Not so bad on films but games aren't so enjoyable with the blur messing with the focus.
I used to get the headache problem (still do at cinemas, I think the greater distance of the screen's position and the poor brightness account for that) but after a few months of frequent use my eyes seem to have gotten used to the 3D effect.

I like 3D films and a few of the current 3D games.

Passive 3D seems to give really bad quality but using Active-Shutter technology the image is fairly clean looking... for me at least. I may have gotten used to it from having played with a 3D monitor for the past 6-7 months though.

The ST50 advertises 16ms in 'Gaming' mode, though in the store I'd say it looked closer the response time of a 20-22ms screen. It seemed to play clearly in the store though so I don't see input lag being too much of an issue, I don't do competitive play on a console so no worries if I do get a bit of lag.
I'll be giving it a vigorous test with Fifa, Battlefield and Wipeout to see how well it handles the lag and ghosting when it arrives.


Thanks again for the help all.
Rep to follow.

 

Trust me when I say that 30+ms of lag is pretty noticeable. It isn't ghosting, but rather delayed input. That's an annoying killer. At any rate, get what pleases you in the store.

 

Well the new TV has arrived after a slight incident at the retailer's warehouse where they broke one and had to load up another set.
The courier service was great, they called me up to know there was a slight delay due to the accident and that they'd try deliver it a day later. On the day of delivery (Friday), they called up ten minutes before reaching my place to confirm I was in and let me know they'd be arriving shortly.

I couldn't check the package right away due to needing to run out to do a job, so as soon as it arrived I put it safely in my room and rushed off.
Getting back at 6pm, I immediately got to unpacking the TV and setting it up.

I won't put up photos of the entire packaging and things in pieces as there's nothing particularly special about how this set was packed (also, I apologise for the poor quality of photos taken on my Galaxy S2, I'll buy a decent camera one day):


The base stand for the TV is a nice silver glossy style, it looks like metal from a distance but it is actually made of weighted plastic and glass and has four inch square rubber feet to grip to the surface.


The stand has a nice slotting mechanism, it holds the panel in place while you screw it in without having to lay it on its front or back. A quick slot in and four screws and it was all set and ready to be transferred to a unit.


As you can probably see from the photo, as soon as I put the TV down on my unit I quickly found out that the base for the TV has a slight swivel feature... I didn't notice that when purchasing so that's a really nice bonus as I sometimes sit to the side of my bed in my office chair and usually need to turn my whole entertainment unit. No more dragging my unit around!


A quick side shot shows how thin the panel is, compared to my previous LCD screen this thing is amazingly thin. The very thin bezel at the top does pose the slight issue that I can no longer place the sensor bar for my Wii above my TV but it sits quite nicely on the base so that isn't the end of the world.

The very thin bit around the bezel is a clear transparent plastic edge which doesn't seem to have any real purpose at a first glance. I'm considering putting an LED light strip behind the TV to make the edge light up though.


Inputs at the back are fairly standard, the AV1 & AV2 in ports at the bottom are a little disappointing due to needing an adapter cable to be plugged into them to allow a SCART or Component cable to be plugged in.
AV1 has an obscure (HDMI style port, though shaped a bit differently), while AV2 uses a two-prong adapter... I have no idea why the two ports are different.


After plugging everything in, I positioned the set and switched it on for the first time... after 2 minutes of trying to work out where the buttons were.
I felt a little stupid feeling all around the edge for buttons before looking and seeing they're labelled.
The buttons stick out a little from the back of the unit, so that means switching on the TV in the dark won't be a problem as I'll be able to feel where the power button is.

The first thing to come up when I turned on the screen was a scan for channels; I don't know why I let it waste a couple of minutes scanning as I knew there was no aerial plugged in.
Anyway, when that finished I went straight after the menu to see what settings I could play with and all I can say is that there are a lot of menu options. I think I spent a good 20-30 minutes messing with all the options before doing anything productive.

After a bit of messing, the next step was to set the TV's wireless to connect to my router. It kept failing to connect for a fair bit of time initially, I eventually told it to connect with the manual settings which it did but then failed to connect to the Viera server. After that, I switched it back to automatically choosing it's own settings on the already connected router and it worked without fail and immediately went into a software update before opening up the Internet features.


Rather than sit playing on the Internet features for the TV for the next few hours (I can easily waste a whole evening on YouTube like that), I decided to switch on the Sky box and see how the picture looks and all I am more than pleased with the quality on both the HD and SD channels. It looked great in the store, but they usually set things up to show them at their best so seeing it perform just as perfectly in my own room was very satisfying.

I moved around all over my room to see the different angles and distances and apart from when standing right up (1ft) away from the screen it looks clean and almost flawless.

Even capturing a picture of the TV from the side angle seems to pick up the image quite clearly:


The next thing to test on the screen was my consoles, so in a somewhat random order I turned them all on to check the quality of image and played a few 15-20 minute games.



The final thing to test on my new TV was how the 3D functioned in my home environment, a quick charge on the active shutter glasses and then I popped into the TV's Internet screen to see if I could find any worthwhile 3D videos on YouTube to test it out.
The search was very short as almost immediately a set of fantastic test videos came up and instantly after setting the television to 3D mode I was blown away by how clear the image was... I could almost stand at any distance while running 3D and the image would stay as clear as if I was watching the TV normally and the effects were very convincing. At one point I was tempted to reach out and grab an item a person was holding out to me.

Sound quality of the television isn't revolutionary, it's good enough for general use but that's exactly why I got the store to throw in a surround sound system. I'll be plugging that in next month when I new entertainment unit comes so for now I'll have to survive on the basic sound that the TV makes.
It has a virtual surround sound feature, but I can't recommend anyone using it because it just sounds tinny and as if the sound is coming through the window next to my TV.

Oh, I almost forgot about the TV remote.
While it's overly large, seriously why is the remote so big? It is nice to have large buttons and as I found out late at night there is a button in the top right of the remote to activate a red backlight so you can see all the buttons. A very nice touch for people who spend most of the time watching or playing at night!


Overall these are my ratings on the Panasonic TX-P42ST50B:

Packaging - 6/10 (Good but nothing special)
Ease of assembly - 9/10 (Very quick to put together, the only downer is the base stand has a hole at the back to screw your TV into the unit but they don't provide an extra screw)
Intial Setup - 7/10 (Fairly straight-forward, the wireless was a pain to start with)
Menu Navigation - 7/10 (Lots of options to tweak the settings which is nice, however the navigation is slow and you have to go through so many menu levels to see everything)
Picture Quality - 10/10 (Fantastic! I am very impressed with how crisp the picture is on this set)
3D Feature - 8/10 (The image quality and responsiveness of the 3D is great, unfortunately it is a little fiddly to get it started up as it doesn't always automatically detect when you switch on the 3D glasses)
Sound Quality - 6/10 (Good but quite average, this is definitely a TV where you'd want to invest in a surround sound system if you plan on watching epic blockbuster films or immersing yourself in a game)
Gaming - 9/10 (The TV is very responsive and shows a nice clear image when gaming, there's very little input lag when in the dedicated 'Gaming' mode but even using the set's standard viewing mode games run quite nicely)
Connectivity - 7/10 (There's a good selection of input connections at the back of the screen, it does however have a somewhat irritating method for connecting SCART/Component cables which results in a small (8cm) adapter being added which results in cable routing being more irritating. The TV could also do with the addition of a third USB and potentially a fourth HDMI port)
Design - 7/10 (The TV is nice to look at, I'm not sure what the point of the clear rim on the bezel is for as it seems somewhat pointless and the bezel itself is overly glossed so it's a fingerprint magnet and picks up light in the room)

Overall Score - 8/10
A very nicely built television, packed full of features which can be either a benefit/flaw depending on how much you like navigating large menus. The set runs smoothly with a crisp image though sound falls a little short from expectations when comparing to the picture quality.
With the Active-Shutter glasses only retailing for around £40-50, they could have easily afforded to put two pairs into the box. I was lucky to get them thrown in free by the retailer with a bit of haggling, other buyers may not be so lucky to get a friendly salesman though.

Response Times:
As the last little bit of talk in the topic was about the response speed (ms) of the panel. I did a little test on this TV when I finished setting it up my recordings put this televisions response times at the following:

In standard viewing mode - 34ms
In gaming mode - 23/24ms
In 3D (standard) mode - 37ms
In 3D (gaming) mode - 26ms

The above are estimates based on my own experience with monitors and TVs at various speeds, the response times that I experienced felt a bit slower than the Gaming Mode's advertised 16ms but this doesn't reduce any enjoyment from playing games for me.

 

good to know that you're enjoying your new TV. Also Plasma panels don't have viewing angle issues. Inherent in the panel. Enjoy.