Hello Digital Spy peoples! Could you help me please?

My grandmother's sight is rapidly deteriorating and due to other recent health issues she has to spend more and more time indoors. At present she is complaining that her 32 inch CRT is increasingly hard to see. When she was in hospital there was a LCD of some sort that she was able to see far far better. Therefore we intend to get her a 32 to 36 inch flat panel TV. Preferably with Freeview included.

My question to you fine folk is this - which TV in this size range does the best job of displaying Freeview signals? I've seen some in the flesh and they're absolutely abysmal. Many thanks for any advice you can offer.

It's hard to say since you can get two people with the same TV with opposing views. It may be that your granny was just responding to the much larger pure flat and undistorted screen after all a 32" CRT is likely to only have a 29" viewable picture where as a 32" LCD is 32" viewable.
No chance of contacting the hospital and asking a friendly admin peep to find out the make/model of the TV?


As for the overall performance most retailers do not show the HD screens in the best conditions, factory pre-sets tend to be very bright and high contrast for impact and poor terrestrial feeds can be used, sounds daft but that's what happens.
Those that don't may feed a HD source making the TV look far better than it would ever do with a SD (Freeview, Sat or cable) source.


HDTV Reviews is a good review site and AVForums have a dedicated LCD or Plasma forum which are far larger and active than DS gets.

The bottom line is that seeing a TV in the flesh should be the first option regardless of what other people say about their screens, see it working with the source of your choice then go online and buy cheaper

Thanks for the advice, going to ask there, and unfortunately, no chance of asking the hospital, my parents kinda burned bridges when they found out she had infected MRSA!

My guess is that she was using a Patientline LCD TV, which can be just a few inches from your face. If so, then closer proximity to the screen is likely to be what is needed.

Thats not so easy at home, really. Balancing a 32 inch TV on the end your nose (whether it is a flat panel LCD, or a CRT) is not really viable. Patientline TVs are suspended on a long moveable arm from above.