As requested by @sirsteveyoung, a heads-up on our new LED telly. I'm probably not best-placed to say how great the picture is, since I've moved from one of these:
rusty old Toshiba CRT beast, to this. So as far as I'm concerned, the picture is a billion times improved. I got a Blu-ray player as a birthday present, and an old CRT just wasn't going to do it justice - especially lacking an HDMI input - hence the upgrade.
Anyways, the first thing of note is the picture quality. It's just miles better. So much so, I'm still a bit freaked out by how real some things look. I'm not even watching an HD channel. Colours are more vibrant, motion more fluid, everything's just...think back to when you first compared DVD to VHS, the difference seems even more marked than that. This is all something to do with fully-surrounding LED backlight magic, or something. I dunno. Surprisingly for a techie, I don't really give too much of a shit for that sort of thing. I just stood in the shop watching the same thing on different tellies until I found one that looked the best, at the size I wanted, for about the right price.
Sound quality, to be honest, isn't all that. The built-in speakers (yeh, it's at least stereo) seem somewhat trebly. There's an EQ, but hasn't made a massive amount of difference, managing to make the sound merely flat. Of course, really the sound should be coming from a 5.1 setup, but I haven't got one, and probably won't bother until we move house later this year, so I'm not really holding poor sound against it.
Features-wise, it's pretty loaded. Freesat HD, Ethernet - hello, Youtube, apparently - games (?), bluetooth - can stream music from iPhone, use BT headsets and, that's about it, but still - and 2 USB slots. That last bit's quite handy, really, since I happen to have a 2TB USB drive kicking around, with a massive amount of downloaded content on it.
On a practical note, it's a hell of a lot smaller than the old Toshiba. Despite having the same size screen, it takes up a fraction of the space, and weighs a fraction too. Moving a 32" CRT is no picnic, and really needs 2 people to move it any meaningful distance, but a 32" flat panel is trivial to pick up and move about. They cost a fraction to power, as well, apparently. That should balance out the 5.1 amp when it comes :-)
All in all, it's a pretty good purchase. Without the Blu-ray player, I'd probably have convinced myself I didn't need a new telly for a while yet, but certain significant others intervened there so I've got a new telly, and that's that. Now I've got it, I wouldn't go back to CRT, even without having Blu-ray in the equation. Of course, now I've got to get a SkyHD box, and amps and speakers and stuff, and buy Blu-ray instead of DVD, and download HD torrents, but never mind, eh.
edit: On a highly personal note, I'm happy I can now watch DVDs without constantly and unintentionally adjusting the volume on the TV. Wut? By a massive coincidence, the controls on my old DVD player interfered with our TV, and would move the volume on the TV in whichever direction you last moved it on purpose. Annoying,
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