Buying a new LCD... The joy n the pain(mostly pain)

The experience left me wondering where on earth i can buy a LCD in a Bricks n Mortar shop with the confidence that I know the staff are gonna help me, know what they are talking about and give a good service...

In my experience, you can get the reassurance of somewhere to bring it back to if something goes wrong, but the helpful staff who know what they're talking about are non-existent.

I'm in much the same boat as yourself, have the dosh for a new screen (currently mulling over the plasma/lcd debate, is it a biscuit, is it a bar....) and have overheard any number of technical gems being spouted to the unwary on the now familiar rounds of Powercity, DID, Harvey Norman's etc.

I have found a couple of the guys in Powercity Malahide Road to be helpful enough though even if their technical knowledge isn't quite at the enthusiast level.

One of the difficulties in making any judgement about the performance of the screens is that they all have their brightness and contrast jacked up to the nines so that they look nice and snappy in a showroom floodlit with flourescent lights. They're also set up jostling each other for floor/shelf space so it'd impossible to get a look at one in isolation from the others and they're typically being fed a fairly crap signal. In Powercity (Malahide Road) they do have a couple which seem to be getting a Sky HD feed and the difference between the picture on those and the picture on the umpteen others all sharing the same standard Sky feed) was stunning. I also noticed that a number of the screens had been "zoomed" (i.e. the Sky logo was half out of shot) meaning that the screen was scaling (pretty poorly) an already ropey feed - the result on LCD screens that I saw was atrocious........

I'm trying to do as much research as I can online and will narrow it down to a couple of 42" screens. I intend to ask one of the guys in Powercity who I've dealt with before if I can tote in my pc and hook it up to one of the screens to get an idea of what it really looks like - I have a shed load of HD material, test screens as well as SD stuff recorded off satellite on the PC from my own set up. That way I intend to get an idea of what the thing looks like with a "real world" feed. I'll probably try to do this at about 8.30pm, and get the guys to turn off some of the nearby screens, try my luck anyway.

As for the online option, I bought my projector sight unseen from the UK, but I had a very clear idea of what I was buying and already had a relationship with the supplier so I had no qualms whatsoever about it. I'd be a bit more reluctant to go that route with a big screen............

Good luck with your quest, tell us how you get on.


Ritz