I am looking for a new TV for a spare room. 32 inch, full HD with HD channels. My budget is £200. Any ideas?

SAMSUNG UE32J5100 32" LED TV or SAMSUNG T32E310 32" LED TV

Neither are smart TVs but I'm assuming that's not important to you as you did not mention it.

Can televisions like those above be used without a sound bar, because that can make a big difference to the actual price?

Any TV can be used without a sound bar. All TVs have built in speakers.

Thanks, I had a look in my local Curry's. Surprising how rare a full hd is for under £200. There are even some over £300 which are just HD ready.

Simply because Full HD isn't that important, and a good quality HD Ready set will give better pictures (in both SD and HD) than a cheap Full HD set.

So how can you tell a good quality hd ready set?

In terms of resolution, an HD ready set can be perfectly fine, the critical factors are screen size and viewing distance.

There's a chart on this page (scroll down a bit) which may give you an idea if an HD ready (720p) set will be okay for you.

32 inch size samsung are the ones to go for.

'Good' ones would be Sony or Panasonic (but NOT the Vestel made Panasonics), middling makes would be LG and Samsung, pretty well everything else is cheap crap.

Picture wise, the thing to do is compare the pictures - on both SD and HD - cheaper sets are usually a LOT poorer on SD, it's not important on HD, as downscaling is easy and doesn't produce artefacts.

Avoid Panasonic. They frequently make sets that don't conform to the DVB specs and then try to blame anyone but themselves. Terrible customer service. See this long thread:

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2124224

This is one of Winston_1's hobby horses. IIRC the issue with Panasonic only affects those TVS with a Freesat tuner where the customer uses a satellite dish rather than an aerial feeding the Freeview tuner. At £200 I doubt any of the Panasonic TVs you may be considering will have a satellite tuner anyway, so it's pointless to worry about something that won't affect you.

On the question of what makes a good TV it's a case of knowing what to look for in the picture and being able to set up the TV properly so it displays good contrast, decent shadow detail, no additional sharpening, and realistic colour rather than the Dale Winton Tango-orange over-saturation that's often the default on most TVS preset picture modes. I have a Vestel-made 32" HD Ready Sharp in one of my rooms which I chose in preference to similarly-priced Full HD sets because it does a better job of displaying a natural image. Then again, I calibrate TVs and projectors for a living so I know what to look for.

I am looking at this Sony 32 Inch KDL32RD433BU. Any good?

Yes it's a good TV, we've sold lot's of them, and had no faulty ones.

Thats good, I bought it for £200.

It is a fact, not a hobby horse. Read the thread.

Prievous problems have been DVB-T sets with an MPEG 4 decoder that would not work on MPEG 4 transmissions in Ireland.

Then there was the split NIT issue on DVB-T sets.

So it is not just Freesat sets that Panasonic don't make to spec.

We can only guess what their next problem that they will try to blame someone else will be.

What makes you think the o/p wants to take his TV to Ireland? Split NIT problems were donkeys years ago. You obviously have a personal grudge against Panasonic, I think it is time you explained why that should be the case.

I never said it wasn't a fact. You should check the definition of hobby-horse:

The point is that the problems you're banging on about aren't relevant to a lot of buyers in Great Britain.


Exactly.

They probably refused to honour the non-existent 2 year EU guarantee which is another thing he bangs on about

Make sure it is "freeview hd " whatever you choose otherwise you won't get all the channels.