1080p TV

cherrio

Hey guys,

can any one suggest a place to buy 1080p TVs in Ireland? Checked out loads of the online sites (Komplett, Elara, Dabs, Aamazon, etc...) but they either don't have any, don't ship to Ireland or are crazy expensive. Can any one make some suggestions?

Cheers,
R

Kintarō Hattori

Peat's sell sveral Sony models and these will be available in the Sony Centre's too.

copacetic

yep, the sony centres have them, seen one or two in currys too.

savemejebus

www.technikdirekt.de

Best customer service I've ever encountered

P.S be very careful about Currys, the one in Limerick is currently advertising a 42" Toshiba 1080i tv as a 1080p set.

cherrio

Cheers, I'll check them all out

Skyuser

If you have a local "Expert" store then you can buy a 37" Toshiba 1080p LCD for €1999. They'll also give you a free stand AND free HD-DVD Player. Although I believe Blu-Ray will be the winner so that player won't be much good in a few years.

Ice_Box

www.did.ie currently have the Sharp 1080p TVs. There are other threads on this here.

Padraig Mor

Aldi have a 47" 1080p LG next week for €1750!

JackieChan

Padraig Mor wrote:

Aldi have a 47" 1080p LG next week for €1750!

As long as you don't mind queing at 5am!

Duffman'05

Padraig Mor wrote:

Aldi have a 47" 1080p LG next week for €1750!

Im also looking for a 1080p television at the moment and LG sets seem to have great prices compared to others.

But is this a trusted brand?? Ive heard of many LG sets malfunctioning after a very unreasonable period of time. What im wondering is: Do the cheap LG prices mean cheap quality?

Anyone have experience with LG sets (LCD or plasma)?

meathman 007

can i ask why youse are after a 1080p tv?. Theres no doubt that it delivers the best high definition picture - however a 1080p tv will only perform well if it is fed with the correct input.

Some people do not realise this: - the following are the only native 1080p equipment currently available in the market:

1. ps3
2. xbox360 - however theres only about 3-4 games that supports 1080p natively
3. Blu-ray player
4 - material downloaded from the internet

The following equipment will not display 1080p natively

1. hd-dvd player - 1080i
2. Sky hd - 720p and 1080i
3. xbox360 - the vast majority of games do not support 1080p natively

So you have to ask yourself the question -why do i want 1080p. You have to be mindful of the fact that standard defintion sources will look worse on a 1080p tv - because of the scaling required. So if you have a sd dvd player, sd sky etc - you will get a worse picture than if you were to buy a 720p tv....

Personally i would save my money and buy a decent 720p hd tv and wait for 1080p to become more prevalent. In about 2 years time you can then buy a 1080p tv with the money you saved and a bit extra.......

feckidyparp

I picked up that aldi one yesterday first thing in the morning. I'm working nights so it was no problem getting there early. Just popped in on the way home. My jaysus its some size. I had to take it out of the wrapping to fit it in the car. NOt sure what the quality is like tho cos I haven't had a chance to mess with it. I plan to hook my 360 up to it with Gears of War and see how pretty it is. Will let you know.

Oh and as far as Im concerned LG is a trusted brand. I have a few LG products that work just fine after ages. Not tv's tho. God help them if this is dodgy.

Skatedude

hd-dvd does support 1080p, but only the xe1 or xbox over vga

Arciphel

I am in the markey for one of these at the moment, want to be able to view the following on it

xbox360
wii
pc
ntl (although possibly Sky HD next year)

I have been looking at the samsung m87 series, they are available in power city at the moment at €1899 for the 40" model which seems like good value. anybody have any experience with these?

i am looking to wall mount it too, the info on their website talks about an auto-wallmount which you can adjust from within the tv's software GUI, but i can't seem to find anyone that sells these on the web, anyone have any ideas?

xanthor

Arciphel wrote:

they are available in power city at the moment at €1899 for the 40" model which seems like good value. anybody have any experience with these?

IIRC, you can shave another €100 or so off the price if you order it from their website. It's a pretty good price even without the discount,

As for reviews:

(m86 and 87 are the same model with a different bezel)



http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/Samsung-LE40M86BD/

Arciphel

thanks xanthor, i managed to get one for €1785, didn't need to order it online just printed the quote and brought it into the shop. should have it tomorrow, will set it up and let ye know how it looks. they had a HD demo disc playing on it in the store and it looked incredible, am looking forward to playing some xbox360 and HD-DVD's on it

xanthor

Arciphel wrote:

thanks xanthor, i managed to get one for €1785, didn't need to order it online just printed the quote and brought it into the shop.

Let us know what you think.... I've been sniffing around a 1080P tv for a while now, and this seems like the one to get.

Arciphel

okay spent the weekend playing around with the m87 and i have to say i am fairly impressed. watching standard-def ntl digital on it and it's perfectly watchable, some of the higher-compressed channels show artefacts alright but most of the channels are quite good, however i have the TV about 2 metres or more away, which is supposed to be better for watching SD on an LCD. make sure to trun "movie plus" off, it adds a weird speeding up effect to pictures, why they included this ihave no idea!

Pc input works well, i connected it using a DVI-HDMI cable which wasn't cheap as it needed to be quite long (cost over €80 in maplins!) but the picture is great and it's 1:1 pixel mapping. samsung have updated the software on the set so now you can adjust all the brightness/contrast/solour/gamma on the pc input just like any other channel.

Connected my xbox360 using vga cable at first, but the set won't do 1080p over vga. according to the folks on AV forums this is MS doing, and may be remidied by an upcoming dashboard update. I bought a componet cable and am running that to the tv and it is doing 1080p (1980 x x1080 @60Hz) no problems. Image is gorgeous and colours are more vibrant than with VGA (in my opinion!). one tip, make sure you turn off the "edge enhancement" option as it makes everything look kind of silvery and embossed, you don't need it with 1080p anyway.

have also connected up the wii to it using component, it will only do 480p but the image is nice and clear (i used the madkatz component cable for this).

I have an upscaling hdmi dvd player (one of the ones from lidl from last year) and have that connected up by hdmi, looking good on dvds and also on divx files, as long as you don't set the "sharpness" value too high, then you start to get some artefacts.

Unpacking the set and setting it up is no problems, although you need the manual to connect all your av cables at the back as there was no sticker on mine to show what inputs are what, maybe this is just mine though? backlight bleed and stuck pixels were not present on my set in any shape or form. as you may have read in other reviews, it is a dust magnet but at least they give you a cloth with it! sound is perfectly fine too, i noticed some people saying it was not great but i disagree. just give the high frequencies a bit of a boost in the sound menu and you will not be disappointed.

all in all i would give it 4 1/2 out of five, only thing i was annoyed about was the inability to get 1080p working over vga on the xbox 360 (but i am sure this will be resolved everntually).;)

savemejebus

Sounds like a great set, it is a pain that the 1080p won't work over VGA but good to hear it is not the fault of the TV. What is the theory on AVforums about it being MS's doing?

Slaanesh

I bought the same TV at the weekend and I am very impressed.

I did find the sound to distort depending on what type of audio was going on at the time. I have it hooked up to a surround system so it's not much of an issue. The PiP mode is great, I was watching the snooker yesterday when my mate was playing his Ps3. The image was astonishing with 1080p from the ps3.

Next step was hooking up a 17" all-in-one pc that I was going to use as a media center. I had a DVI-D to HDMI cable as it's the only output on the machine. I couldn't for life of me get it to work. Some crappy graphics card in it. The Samsung just told me "mode not supported".

So I carted down my main computer that had a 8800 GTS. Plugged straight into the VGA port and was running the full 1080p over VGA. Tried it from DVI to HDMI but it was fairly blurry. One thing I noticed was a slight clouding issue when the set was not displaying a picture or was a very very dark scene. 4 blobs of slight whiteness on the right hand side of the screen. Not much of an issue though.

The snooker was very nice and vibrant in colours, I had to make it softer though because it was so intense. I find the remote to be slightly lagged which gets a little bit annoying when switching between sources. The options seem to be endless for adjusting colour and picture but I wouldn't know anything about it so tend to leave it near default. Sky is my SD and it looked surprisingly good, I was only about 6-8 feet away so could make out most of the MPEG compression artifacts but it didn't seem to bother me too much.

The set itself is a very stylish sleek design and as Archipel said, it's a "dust magnet" but you get a nice cloth with it so that should keep it dust free for a while. Downloading some HD goodness now so looking forward to looking at that.

I'll give it 4/5 because the delay on the remote really bugs me

Arciphel wrote:

okay spent the weekend playing around with the m87 and i have to say i am fairly impressed. watching standard-def ntl digital on it and it's perfectly watchable, some of the higher-compressed channels show artefacts alright but most of the channels are quite good, however i have the TV about 2 metres or more away, which is supposed to be better for watching SD on an LCD. make sure to trun "movie plus" off, it adds a weird speeding up effect to pictures, why they included this ihave no idea!

Pc input works well, i connected it using a DVI-HDMI cable which wasn't cheap as it needed to be quite long (cost over €80 in maplins!) but the picture is great and it's 1:1 pixel mapping. samsung have updated the software on the set so now you can adjust all the brightness/contrast/solour/gamma on the pc input just like any other channel.

Connected my xbox360 using vga cable at first, but the set won't do 1080p over vga. according to the folks on AV forums this is MS doing, and may be remidied by an upcoming dashboard update. I bought a componet cable and am running that to the tv and it is doing 1080p (1980 x x1080 @60Hz) no problems. Image is gorgeous and colours are more vibrant than with VGA (in my opinion!). one tip, make sure you turn off the "edge enhancement" option as it makes everything look kind of silvery and embossed, you don't need it with 1080p anyway.

have also connected up the wii to it using component, it will only do 480p but the image is nice and clear (i used the madkatz component cable for this).

I have an upscaling hdmi dvd player (one of the ones from lidl from last year) and have that connected up by hdmi, looking good on dvds and also on divx files, as long as you don't set the "sharpness" value too high, then you start to get some artefacts.

Unpacking the set and setting it up is no problems, although you need the manual to connect all your av cables at the back as there was no sticker on mine to show what inputs are what, maybe this is just mine though? backlight bleed and stuck pixels were not present on my set in any shape or form. as you may have read in other reviews, it is a dust magnet but at least they give you a cloth with it! sound is perfectly fine too, i noticed some people saying it was not great but i disagree. just give the high frequencies a bit of a boost in the sound menu and you will not be disappointed.

all in all i would give it 4 1/2 out of five, only thing i was annoyed about was the inability to get 1080p working over vga on the xbox 360 (but i am sure this will be resolved everntually).;)

Arciphel

savemejebus wrote:

Sounds like a great set, it is a pain that the 1080p won't work over VGA but good to hear it is not the fault of the TV. What is the theory on AVforums about it being MS's doing?

I think the theorey is that the way the 360 outputs 1080p over vga is in a certain frequency/polarity which means most 1080p sets can't see it. there is also a rumour that this is because up until recently the only 1080p sets at the races were sony and ms didn't want people to be able to buy sony for their 360's, although that sounds a bit ridiculous to me.

In the manual to the M87 it gives all the PC input resolutions and the H sync and V sync frequencies it can accept, along with the polarities. i don't know much about this to be honest, but i read that this may be fixed with the xbox live dashboard update coming in the next few days.

i had mine running at 720p over VGA and 1080P over component to compare. i don't want to risk being flamed by somebody who knows a lot more about these kind of things than me but i thought each had it's own pros and cons. the vga to me looked slightly shrarper with less jaggies, whereas the component had deeper, more vibrant colours. having said that, on this panel you can adjust all the video settings on the vga input just like the other inputs, so with some tinkering i am sure you could correct this. also, i heard that MS had implemented some kind of fix to get rid of the washed-out look of graphics over the vga interface...

the big advantage of having 1080p over vga is that you get 1080p for games, hd-dvd and even normal dvds through upscaling. i think over component that due to copyright protection, you can get 1080p for games but your resolution is capped at 1080i for hd-dvd and 720p for upscaled dvd's.

my god, haven't we come a long way from blowing dust off of high-speed dubbed tapes and playing bubble bobble on the commodore 64 on a 14" portable telly!!!!

Paul.

soSolid

I've just ordered the M87 this morning - €2,099 from Komplett.ie, but I got it for €1,634 inc. delivery, CC surcharge and sterling conversion from 1stAudioVisual

Slaanesh wrote:

I bought the same TV at the weekend and I am very impressed.

Slaanesh

Nice price, mine was €136 more from powercity, but I didn't have to wait

soSolid

That's a small price to pay to avoid the pain I'm gonna feel till this arrives...

Slaanesh wrote:

but I didn't have to wait

Slaanesh

You're in for a treat though, great set.

TellyAddict

Hi Guys, great to see we have an Irish forum :-)

I was looking for any information on the Samsung LE46 in the M87 range, I get all kinds of spurious answers and scratching of heads when I ask, does anyone know in the Republic where you can get one, or if there is any good Website with good reputation that I can import with.

Thanks for any help (I got the go ahead from the lil lady to get such a huge TV as she likes the look of it, and want to strike while the iron is hot )

Thanks again and if I'm in the wrong place go easy on the newbie