GRcade

KK wrote:Seems you have to weigh up whether the imroved picture quality and overal uniformity is a worthy trade off for greatly reduced longevity.

I think you need to consider the price in that trade-off. Surely no consumer electronic item that costs in excess of a couple of grand should be failing after a couple of years.

My Panasonic Plasma is coming up to nine years old now, and cost me about £600. It's hugely showing its age in some respects - the TV guide is dated as strawberry float and the HDMIs are old (don't support ARC, even). Newer displays look sharper, but mine isn't failing in any of the areas that really matter: decent source material still looks really sharp.

This may have turned into a 'they don't make them like they used to'-type post, but I wouldn't even spend £500 on a TV set that I knew had a significant chance to fail (as a typical characteristic of the technology) after two years.

TVs today are certainly glitchier than they've ever been in history.

Like yesterday I got a message that kept popping up on my TV that said "Unfortunately Google Play services has stopped". I had flashbacks to my Android phone, which has also encountered this irritant. Hilariously it only ever provides you with 2 options: press OK or Report Error, neither which solves anything. In the end the fix is to uninstall the update in the menus and reboot the TV. But people shouldn't have to put up with this technical bullshit. If you look this past year, the number of software related bugs from the big 3 manufactuers is really unnactepable.

Definitely a huge gap in the market for a company like Apple to exploit by simplifying and streamlining the whole process (not that they're also prone to software issues, but you don't get these meaningless error messages and general clunkiness). See also the way TVs change input signals.

It can be incredibly frustrating, and at times is anything but a £2000-quality experience. When it works, it's marvelous, but when it doesn't you just want to sit there screaming "strawberry float YOU!" at the TV.

Poser wrote:

KK wrote:Seems you have to weigh up whether the imroved picture quality and overal uniformity is a worthy trade off for greatly reduced longevity.

I think you need to consider the price in that trade-off. Surely no consumer electronic item that costs in excess of a couple of grand should be failing after a couple of years.

My Panasonic Plasma is coming up to nine years old now, and cost me about £600. It's hugely showing its age in some respects - the TV guide is dated as strawberry float and the HDMIs are old (don't support ARC, even). Newer displays look sharper, but mine isn't failing in any of the areas that really matter: decent source material still looks really sharp.

This may have turned into a 'they don't make them like they used to'-type post, but I wouldn't even spend £500 on a TV set that I knew had a significant chance to fail (as a typical characteristic of the technology) after two years.

I totally agree with this. I have my old TV sat on the floor next to my new one as I don't want to sell it for only £100 or just throw it out. In some ways it's better than my new one (colour brightness, blacks etc) while not as good in other ways (picture seems more fluid in like a weird unnatural way)

I've disabled all of the extras on my new TV and the picture is really dark compared to how it comes out the box. I've reduced my screen response time down from 240MS+ out of the box down to about 40MS now (same as my old screen at the cost of the brightness, contrast and other things)

my current samsung 1080p is also old, probably about 11 or 12 years now in fact. Picture is still absolutely fantastic, especially with a good bluray.

Actually dont know what i'm going to do with it when it gets replaced with this new one. I could put it on the wall of the bedroom but it's pretty thick and 40" may be overkill for the bedroom (kennith.jpg)

Ordered a nice oak tv unit which will be here in a couple of weeks. Once that's in then i'll order the TV

ItsHappening.gif

Got a 7% John Lewis discount.. the only problem being it's by buying small denominations of gift vouchers, so I've got FIFTY gift vouchers to put in at the checkout

This was a while ago when I used it, but John Lewis used to have a cap of 25. Worth checking.

Oh strawberry float

It all worked perfectly.

As it comes with a free UHD bluray player, i've just realised i'm not sure if that means I need new HDMI cables. Does anyone know?

Ad7 wrote:As it comes with a free UHD bluray player, i've just realised i'm not sure if that means I need new HDMI cables. Does anyone know?

Is that supposed to be a joke?

https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/do-you-nee ... s-for-hdr/

That should cover everything. The answer is probably not. If the cable you have isn't good enough it just won't work, if HDR works then your cable is fine.

EDIT - Did you buy that 65" QLED then? If I had the space (and money) for a 65" TV, I'd go with the Sony ZD9 I think. Probably backlighting zones has got to be better than an Edge lit TV.

EDIT 2 - Did you get John Lewis to price match Richer Sounds £200 off offer?

> snarky remark about my question
> posts wrong link

I just read about the cables, didnt realise it was the socket and not the cable itself thats the standard.

Yes i got the QLED. I dont like Sony things, never have.

It wasn't supposed to be snarky, just remember people moaning about places trying to get them to buy 'HDR' HDMI cables in here before.

Don't know what happened with that link, I hadn't even been to that page.

It was just because I know there's new standards, didn't realise it's just at the port.

Time for dat buyer's remorse.

Ad7 wrote:Oh strawberry float

It all worked perfectly.

As it comes with a free UHD bluray player, i've just realised i'm not sure if that means I need new HDMI cables. Does anyone know?

Sort of. It’s called HDMI 2.0A apparently.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-thea ... explained/

Very clear thank you.

Been looking at the Sony KD55XE9305 myself, its either that or one of the LG OLEDs for a similar price.

Was going to go for an OLED till the possible issues with burn-in came up.

Having spent more time with my Sony TV and Google Android OS, it really is epically shoddy in places. When it works it's really swish and loaded with a wealth of options (literally everything you could hope for), but it feels fragile and temperamental as hell. There's a load of games and apps on the Google Play store but no way would I ever download them. It's so glitch ridden for a start. Background programs, some you've never knowingly used or even knew about, will just cease to work. You'll get a message pop up saying an app or some background code has failed. Sometimes you can just get rid of it and carry on as normal. But earlier this week I got a "Unfortunately leanback launcher has stopped working" which is complete wank speak for the actual Google menu system of the TV, resulting in the error message being stuck on a constant loop of selecting either "Report" (to who? Is anybody there?!) or "OK" and therefore requiring it to be turned off at the mains.

You go into the menus and it lags and slows down, but you then have to start selecting things like "clear cache", "force stop" and so on. It's very technical stuff; effectively a bad PC.

I rarely use all this in-built stuff so it doesn't affect me that much, but I couldn't recommend the Android TV OS for someone who wasn't knowledgeable about such matters or wanted the Smart TV aspect because it'd be a nightmare. To be greeted with vague error messages is the realm of Windows, not a TV.

So basically you've got a great TV from a visual perspective, lumbered with an operating system not fit for purpose. I don't know who specifically is at fault, or the TVs are underpowered for the OS (and you delve into the menus and it's astonishing how many Google-based programs are actually running in the background), but maybe Sony seriously need to consider dumping Google for somebody else. And it becomes more unacceptable the higher you go up the spectrum. All of Sony's TVs use the same core Android operating systems, so what is acceptable at £600 is a bloody outrage at £3000.

(and yes, the satellite TV guide is still broken)

On both the Sony Smart TVs I've had I've "Force Stopped" or disabled every possible app I can apart from Amazon and Netflix.

But sony tvs were 15 out of the top 10 tvs of 2017!!111

If Apple were to launch a TV range they'd all be strawberry floated within 5 years.

I agree, if never buy one of those either.

KK wrote:If Apple were to launch a TV range they'd all be strawberry floated within 5 years.

5 years? They’d look so sexy they’d be strawberry floated within 2 minutes.