thinking about buying a new tv

newegg.com has different sales every day on electronics. There will probably be that same tv on sale in a couple days.

Newegg and TigerDirect are both good to surf for TV sales and sheeit.

Dunno really what to suggest, but I likes my Toshiba. It has a lot of worthless features I wish I hadn'ta paid for; coulda paid a couple hundred less had I gotten a model without those. I don't really like 120Hz, not even for games. It totally fucks up movies, that's for sure.

I have a 42" Samsung. I love it, but the speakers are pretty terrible as I get a lot of rumbling-vibrations at speech-level octaves at some points for video games or shows. I'm gonna get a small sound-system for it, and the picture quality is really great.

I have a cheap surround sound thats pretty nice actually so sound isn't an issue.

Samsung was another brand I was looking at and have heard great things about.

I've got a Sammy but LG is good too. Basically if your TV is Korean it is good.

I don't know if shitty speakers are common with Samsung products, because my 20" standard def Samsung had really good sound. For this it is, but it can be easily rectified with a sound system. I might actually just get new computer speakers and put my current system for the tv.

So what is it you want to know exactly? Just what's a good tv similar to that price and size range in the link you already posted? Or if there's like any specific brand/model you should get? TVs by and large are just so badass these days it doesn't matter a whole lot which one you get, because the average quality is going to be pretty damn good. You just need to know what size you want and your budget, then after that it's mostly just what features you want and aesthetic appeal (which includes the difference between LCD and plasma, etc.).

As far as features and the 60/120 Hz thing specifically, it's a nice feature to have the 120 honestly. It's totally overblown by big box retailers for its best application (sucks for most movies and anything not HD; good for most HDTV programming and high framerate videogames), but what's cool is it's an option that can be toggled on and off to suit how you like.

roughdraft_zero wrote:

So what is it you want to know exactly? Just what's a good tv similar to that price and size range in the link you already posted? Or if there's like any specific brand/model you should get?

Pretty much that. If there's any certain thing to look for or stay away from.


Good to know on the 60/120 thing, thanks.

Love my 40 inch Samsung.

Like I said after that, don't research it to death. I'd just say stay away from house brands, like Best Buy's Insignia. They're mostly junk and have a pretty poor build quality and high problem-rate. Something else I found out about Insignia specifically was that they have compatibility issues with Comcast HDTV programming lol. So that's another thing to consider.

Like I said, features are probably what you most want to pay attention to. If you want to fork out the extra dough for the 120 hz (or higher), how many inputs you want, if you want good tv speakers or it doesn't matter cuz you're just gonna port the sound through a surround sound receiver, etc.. Specs don't matter a ton, again going back to most recognizable brands making pretty competent tvs on average. Although, three specs that are worth paying attention to and comparing with your viewing situation are response time, contrast ratio and viewing angle.

Response time, which is different from the 120 hz we were talking about earlier (which is a refresh rate), is how fast the screen refreshes. For response time, the lower the better, and considering the quality you can get for the money these days, I wouldn't recommend anything higher than 5 or maybe 8 if you found one for really cheap and with all the other features you wanted. Higher response times is what can produce motion blur that wasn't intended, meaning not because the camera was intentionally out of focus, but because your response time is too slow to keep up with that F1 racecar or quick camera turn that was in fact in focus.

Contrast ratio is huge. What is is, essentially, is a ratio representing the difference between the brightest white and the darkest black that the screen can produce. Because consumers got wind that it was important but didn't necessarily understnad why, it turned into a huge marketing blitz a few years back, of course for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong intentions. Most manufacturers upped and advertised only their dynamic contrast ratio and not their static contrast ratio, which is pretty much the same as speaker manufacturers only advertising their product's maximum wattage and not their nominal or RMS wattage, which means what it can handle consistently. Sadly, for many tvs, static is not what's advertised on the promotional spec sheet in the store, and sometimes not at all on the product spec sheet and owner's manual. Therefore, you often have to judge by the dynamic contrast ratio. One thing that's good to know is that there's no real industry standard, but that manufacturer's obviously have their own individual standard. Therefore, a Sony with 50,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio can look just as good as a Samsung with 60,000:1. A better thing to do would be to find one you like and then compare a few models above and below the one you found and see if a higher or lower contrast ratio is worth the cost difference. In the end, contrast ratio is supposed to give you a clue as to how bright, vivid and accurate your image is capable of being.

And viewing angle is just obvious I guess. 178 degrees, which that tv you linked has listed, is great. That doesn't mean that you can get right on the edge of your tv and stare at the screen perpendicular and it'll look just like you're right in front of it. What it means is that glare, ambient lighting and not being in the most optimal/straight viewing angle will be less of a hindrance on the quality of your image.

Something that's cool about that set you linked is that it says it has "24p Real Cinema mode". I've never seen one in action since I haven't been in the market for a tv myself for a long time and I think this is a relatively new feature. But what it does, essentially, is the opposite of what tvs were doing in that whole 120/240/480/600 Hz craze that was just complete overkill. Now remember, most films are filmed at 24 frames per second, and most tvs operate on 30 or 60 Hz (which is a direct tie to frames per second) and require what's known as a pulldown that essentially doubles six of those frames and adds those to fit into the 30 frames. Sounds stupid, and it is, but the naked eye can't tell and that's just how it's able to work with the electrical frequency. To get a 24 fps movie to fit with most 60 Hz HDTVs of today, there's even more conversion, and with the 120Hz, they do what's called interpolation, which is essentially the tv "guessing" what the blank frames inbetween the existing frames would look like and producing them so that they can fill the 120 frames per second (or obviously more in the higher Hz tvs). This is what produces picture that looks too fluid and unnatural. Some Blu-Rays actually have options for 24 fps playback, but since I own no Blu-Rays and don't know much about these newer tvs and haven't researched them too much, I don't know how the Blu-Ray playback would work in conjuction with the tvs 24 fps playback (if they're both supposed to be on or just one, and which one at that, and most importantly, how good a job they do).

I generally really like Vizio's. While they have bumped up their prices in recent years, they're still relatively moderate tvs with a very cheap price. The only issue with Vizio's is that the buttons on the side are prone to failure real quickly, which makes you stuck to having just the remote (or going out to buy a new remote the moment you lose yours).

Still, a 42" Vizio about a year ago with similar qualities generally went for $150 cheaper, which was always good. I was deadset on getting a Vizio until I got wind of a Black Friday deal for the tube I currently own.

Wow thanks for the book. The dynamic vs. static contrast ratio I didn't actually know about, or the response time. I'll have to take a look at shit in the store for sure

I had a vizio that died right away. Got refund on it and I think it was an isolated thing. I know people with vizios and they have been prob free.