I have a 55" Panasonic plasma and a 54" LG plasma. I’d give a slight edge to the LG, but I love them both.
I’ve had Samsung, LG, and Sony TVs that have all performed well and lasted a long time.
I voted Sony, cause that is what I own in a 52"
I didn’t buy it due to the name. I bought it after shopping at a bunch of different stores and looking at tons of sets all playing the same Blu-Ray demo disc.
The Sony had hands down the best display from both up close and almost 20’ away.
I suggest you do the same thing, go to lots of places and watch the sets from at least as far away as you will be sitting in your house, further if you can manage it.
Buy the set that has the clearest picture.
Pretty much what I came in to post. If you believe the reviewers, anyway. I have a Panasonic plasma and am very happy with it.
Sony! My father’s choice of TV since forever, and now mine. Neither of us have had a single issue. They don’t die, they get replaced with bigger and better.
I currently have a 46" Bravia LCD TV. Running full 1080 HD on bluray is insane. Everyone who’s seen it always ooh and ah.
I have a Panasonic and a Samsung. Both seem to be perfectly designed televisions.
I’m going to also suggest NOT going into a box store and comparing sets side by side. You have no idea what the settings on each of the televisions are, the lighting conditions are nowhere near what they are in your house, and the sets are typically optimized to make you pick one particular set over another. Read the reviews by the experts - they’re paid to rigorously test sets, they have stardardized metrics by which to measure the different variables, and have carefully reviewed far more models than you’re going to be able to compare inside a Best Buy.
I’d agree with that. Stores calibrate some of them to be as bright and high contrast as possible, so the screen ‘pops’ when compared to others. You’re probably not going to watch TV with these settings at home.
I’d go with Samsung or LG as I’ve had good experiences with them, though I’m sure some of the other brands are good too.
Plus they show HD videos for optimal picture. Ask the salesman to switch to just a regular TV channel.
I think this is some sort of urban legend. I worked for BBY for years and knew people at plenty of other retailers and nobody did any sort of adjusting the settings to make the tvs look better. Not at the store level. It was pretty much take them out of the box, hook up a source, plug em in, and turn em on.
The settings on the sets at the store are the same as the unit a customer pulls out of the box at home. And 98% of customers never change those settings.
*manufacturers may have them preset to look good in a showroom however
Goodness - why would you do that? If you’re buying an HDTV, you’re going to want to phase out any SD sources in your life - if anything, ask for them to switch to a digital HD broadcast station. But if you’re going to do anything, ask them to switch every set to the Cinema setting. And turn off all the lights in the store. And plug them all into exactly the same source.
Because I’ve known people – no, NOT me – who were devastated when they got the TV home and saw that the regular TV shows didn’t look the same as the nice HD video in the store. (Of course, it’s not so easy to phase out the SD sources in Thailand. We’re a little behind the times.)
I’m staying with my CRT set-organic LEDs will be out around 2018…there will be a lot better options around then!
You know what I like to view when testing a screen? Plain black-and-white text. Are the letters sharp and monochrome, is there no color fringing on the edge, etc.? So bring up the menu!
HD natural images are a terrible way to judge a screen. They all pretty much look the same in a store. The types of images that show differences the most are generally not available. E.g., explosions, flashes, etc. are a good way to judge motion artifacts. But they love to show things with lots of trees and such. Even a football game is pretty low demand on a set.
So, yes, looking at SD images on an HD set is actually not a bad idea. I’ve seen it many times where some sets handle SD really poorly, because they are poor sets in general.
this. bundling items together that are on different upgrade paths is dumb. better to get a tv based on the display, and whatever content source you can upgrade separately.
I want to point out that a major difference between the top two choices, Sony and Samsung, is whether the screen is matte (Sony) or glossy (Samsung). At least as of a year or two ago, and not sure about the others. No poll is going to tell you which you prefer, so anyone using this poll to select their new TV should take that difference into account.
We bought a 42" Vizio 3D last year, and have been quite happy with it (my only complaint is lack of web browser app).
We just got a 46" Sony HD TV, so I voted (in more than one way) for Sony. It replaces a 26" Philips, which has been fine.
It’s less a matter of which brand, and which models. Do your homework CAREFULLY - most makers have an ‘invisible line’ of models that are the same size and share a model number… you have to get into the suffix letters to distinguish them. Often a line has a top-end, latest-tech, max-features model, AND a lowball model that has almost nothing in common with its big brudder. If you think you’re getting a MX1000 at a killer price, it’s probably an MX1000C.
I’ve been extraordinarily happy with Panasonic and Samsung. Pick and choose other brands very carefully by model and trusted reviews.
Did you ever get a TV, Mean Mr. Mustard?
I chose Toshiba and Samsung simply because I’ve owned a Toshiba for the living room for 5 years and a Samsung for the basement for 4 years and neither have crapped out.
It’s less of a question of what brand to buy and more of a question of which one gets better reviews. Before you buy a particular model of a TV, check out that particular make and model on Amazon and if it has 100+ reviews and 4.0+ stars (4.5 stars+ is preferable) then you know you’re in good shape. Also be sure to read the nature of people’s praises and complaints.