My family's 12yo rear projector is dying so I'm looking at a 50-55" 120Hz LED, preferably Samsung, as a replacement. Browsed around a little but haven't found any 'word' on a good deal on LED TVs. So I'm curious if anyone knows of a sale for this weekend. Also need a Blu-ray player, so if anyone can strongly recommend one that would be cool.
Yeah, not interested in a console for the player. I'm at home now, too much stuff is blocked at work. Googling around the Sears and Best Buy ads that were leaked don't beat Amazon's prices for the Samsung LEDs. And no sales tax if I go with Amazon.
I have this exact same question. bfads.net is the site for Black Friday info, but it looks like Amazon or Best Buy are pretty much the best choices as far as I can tell.
Amazon had their 55" 120Hz Samsung LED (the 6000 model) for $800 and it sold out fast. Same price as most list the 50" for.
Well, the aged 55" rear projector finally gave up its ghost yesterday morning; according to my Google-fu, its blinking power light indicted a bad IC regulator in its power supply, a blown lamp, a dead lamp fan, or just too much Scinemax pushed across its surface over the years. So I ordered a Samsung 55" LED off of Amazon for $800, along with a Sony Blu-ray player. TV should arrive tomorrow, already swapped out the older cable box with a new HD box that will let me use HDMI. Wife went to a Morris furniture and got a $600 stand for $299 after walking away from the sales person. So there was an unplanned $1200 spent on President's day, the day before we put our house up for sale.
Well, got everything in today, let the TV sit out of its box for a good 3 hours to adjust to room temperature since it was out for delivery all morning and felt cold as hell. Put the stand on, connected the cable box and Blu-ray player, and then followed suggested settings from Amazon's most helpful review of the series (which actually made a noticeable difference in quality). What kicked my ass? Getting most cable channels to stop displaying 4:3. It was defaulted to 480p, flipped it to 1080i, set its ratio to 16:9, no difference, went into the TV's menu and flipped its picture option from fill screen to wide fill and that did the trick. Watched my first Blu-ray, The Dark Knight, and the image quality was fantastic. My 9yo daughter laments the loss of the 1" since the old rear projector was 56" (I mistyped it as 55" in my last post), but since she's a woman that life glass is always half empty. :/
I've gone thru every option on the TV and don't see where I can turn the 120hz feature off. Wife didn't care for the TV's sound, and I'd warned her that the speakers were going to be much smaller than those in a big rear projector's cabinet, so I snagged the Sony CT150 sound bar for $190 on Amazon. Should show up tonight so I know what I'll be doing.
It's usually listed as some kind of frame smoothing. You would have to look it up in manual or on Google maybe. Really depends on if you or your family thinks that every movie looks like it was shot on a camcorder.
I see an auto motion plus feature, no frame smoothing. I've got it set at custom for blur reduction at 7 and judder at 5 (1-10). I'll try turning it off and see how it looks. The helpful Amazon review I followed for most settings mentions that this causes really bad tearing in games if you have a console connected to this particular TV. Thanks for the info.
Got the sound bar installed and tweaked it a bit, cranking up its center channel and bass a bit. Big difference. It's only 150w but our living room isn't that large so it fills it nicely. I turned off the auto motion plus and fired up Game of Thrones 1.1 and it looked gorgeous. We didn't expect to spend $$ this week, but really nice upgrade over the ole' 2001 rear projector and regular DVD player. Now I just need to find some good deals on Blu-ray movies. I'm actually tempted to buy the Lord of the Rings extended set since I heard New Line did a great job on it.
LOTR EE is great. I only have Blu-rays of movies I want in total archival awesomeness, but that's one of the few.
Judder reduction! That's the codeword for it. Turn it up to 10 and maybe you'll see what I mean about movies looking like they're shot from a camcorder. Blur reduction is actually a nice feature that works, especially if you play any videos like DivX or fullscreen YouTube from a media center. Forget the Amazon review, I tried setting it at 1 and then at 10 while playing Trials: Evolution on my friend's 360, there was no screen tearing. Maybe it might be different but I doubt it.
I had Batman Begins playing, the scene where Scarecrow sets him on fire, while I moved the judder setting from 0-10 and the difference was stark. You weren't kidding about how it made each frame look like a poorly lit amateur shot. Left it at 0 and blur reduction at 7. That review recommended putting flesh tone at 4, but I thought that gave most skin an orange-y hue so I put it back down to 2, which looks much better.
Picked up the blu-ray of Fellowship and popped it in last night. My 9yo daughter didn't seem to appreciate my imitation of "YOU SHALL NOT PASSS!!!!!" for some reason. Kids these days. Looks incredible on the new TV though. I love the opening and its fade-away to the Shire with Howard Shore's score playing.
Future Shop Currently has this Samsung tv on sale for $1399 down from $1699. Worth it, y/n? Is there a better alternative for the price?
Have you ruled out plasma for any reason? If not, you can probably get one that's better, bigger, and/or cheaper.
Bigger is a bit of a non issue as space is at a premium in my living room. 55" is about as big as will fit. I also didn't know plasma still existed and figured everyone had moved on to LED, as perusing the TV section of the nearby Future Shop and Best Buy, everything seemed to be LED + a bunch of useless "smart" tech. edit: A quick poke around the Plasma TV section of futureshop.ca shows only two tvs in the 55" range: http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/prod...d4689ad4b365e01a787de4den02&SearchPageIndex=1 and http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/prod...6cd37215df7192c200747f0en02&SearchPageIndex=1 Neither to me seem to be all that superior to the Samsung I originally linked (which had, quite frankly, a remarkably good picture when I saw it in the store).
Plasma is in that awkward phase where it's definitely on the way out, and is relegated to dusty back corners of showrooms -- but where reviewer after reviewer ends up rating plasmas higher than LEDs, which is reflected in rankings and meta-reviews. Here's CNet's "best HDTV: picture quality" ranking. It's worth noting that they only got an LED on there by giving it its own category (and even then, it's a $5,000 model, and it's not as good as the much cheaper plasma). Looking at their overall ratings it's a plasma-fest until you get to the "Best LED" categories. The Wirecutter's recommendation is a plasma, with LEDs dismissed outright. In general, unless you have a specific reason that you don't want a plasma, you probably want a plasma.
And every single tv in those lists (with the exception of one) is significantly more expensive than the one I'm looking at buying. :)
The ST50 is $1100 for 50" and $1600 for 60", so seems in the same ballpark as what you're looking at. But it's a little awkward right now because they're closing them out and bringing in the newer models. The model down is already out for this year, the S60, and Amazon has the 55" model for $999.
Shopping on Amazon is unfortunately not an option since they don't ship things like TVs across the border. Edit: I see the S60 on the bestbuy.ca website for $949, maybe I'll swing by tomorrow and check it out. edit edit: that's the 50" version. The 55" is $1199 and the 60" is $1700.
It gives you an idea of pricing, anyway? The local retailer I bought my TV from a while back was willing to price-match Amazon, so they're not crazy out-there prices. I have no idea what Canadianicity does to pricing, though, I confess.
I have one of the Panasonic plasmas, ad have been very happy with it. We looked at LED sets as well, but if picture quality is your prime driving factor, the plasmas are still the clear winners. And if price is a consideration as well, plasmas are the really clear winner.
I went out and had another look around yesterday. Plasmas are hard to find, locally. I may end up ordering something online and shipping it to Blaine or Point Roberts.
Well, would ya look at that. Amazon.ca does indeed carry tvs. Buried deep in their cumbersome navigation menus there's a listing of various tvs. Sadly, it's pretty much the same as what I've seen at Futureshop, Best Buy, Costco, and Walmart locally (and for similar prices).
Yeah. I picked up the Panny 65VT50 over xmas and absolutely love it. Try http://www.paulstv.com/ . They usually have decent coupons and I had it shipped free to FL.
Well, I was out shopping tonight and a local shop had a demo model of a 50" GT50 on for a grand. VERY tempting! Hopefully it will be there tomorrow.
