Save money when buying LCD TV

It is time for taking out the trash and the old stupid box needs to make way for the smart and sleek LCD TV. But you can’t buy any TV, can you ? After all it is in front of this, where you are going to spent most of your time. So you go to this shop and check out the latest arrivals. To your surprise most of them looks kind of the same, so you decides to take a closer look and finds out that at least the colors feel different in each one. But unable to choose, you read the labels of each one; LED, IPS, Full HD, HDMI…(but you have no clue what each one mean). So you just stare at everything, confused. Then comes the smartly dressed guy; after asking a few questions he takes you to a nice looking TV and starts describing things which you already read on the label, but you just hear out the guy anyway. After he is done, you ask the price hoping you could settle for one. But as it turns out, they are either too cheap or too expensive and the ones priced just right doesn’t have the Full HD label (you can’t settle for something less than Full, can you?). The time is running out, so you decide to choose the brand you heard the most. And within seconds you are in front of either a Sony or a Samsung, you like it and just before closing the deal the little ‘cheap’ in you wants to check out how bad are its cheap cousins. You can’t believe your eyes; the cheap ones actually look the same and you are confused again.

What most people doesn’t know is that companies doesn’t build everything by themselves and often buy components from other manufactures and sell them along with the ones they manufacture (and that is how you end up witha Samsung that is actually an LG, at least the for the panel part). Almost everyone does that, so don’t go with just the brand name. Most stores have their display models set to a 'high saturation' mode, which makes colors stand out, so before you zero in on one switch through the modes and see how it looks on the settings that you would probably use.

A feature rich HD Ready TV is better than a basic Full HD TV and the differences are far less what you would expect.Full HD or not, it doesn’t matter much when you are looking at anything less than 50” size.(There is noticeable difference when you stand close to the TV, but you are never going to watch that close, are you ?). Also insisting on Full HD is meaning less (unless you are movie buff), when none of the DTH service providers in India offers you a Full HD service (even the number of HD Ready channels is skimpy). Also what is called an LED LCD TV, use LED technology for lighting up instead of a fluorescent lighting and is not actually an LED TV (which is awfully expensive). So don’t pay a premium for an LED LCD TV when you can have almost similar quality for a lot less. The advantage for LED TV is that they consume less power, produce deeper blacks and is comparatively compact (unless you are a movie junky and style 'does' matter to you, give LED a pass).

USB support and SD card playback are pretty common now, so when you are going to buy one, carry a flash drive loaded with some videos you watched recently, so that you can check them out on  the TV (even formats like .mkv are supported in most models). DLNA (which lets you play your music, videos and pictures from you DLNA enabled phone on the TV) and support for youtube, skype and facebook is pretty common now (most budget models comes with a LAN port and an optional Wifi adapter as an accessory) and the remote is used for input (USB keyboard may be an optional accessory). HDMI port lets you connect your laptop or projector which has the HDMI connector (usually HDMI cable doesn’t come as an accessory, buy a cheap HDMI cable if you own a laptop with HDMI interface). Buying a TV that can play contents out of the box can save you the money for a new player and all you would have to do is plug in a flash drive or pop in a memory card to get started.

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