[OT] HDTV recommendations?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 12:12:22PM -0400, Thomas Milne wrote:
> Anyone have some recommendations for a mid-sized HDTV? I'm looking for about
> a 32" at the smallest, preferably 1080p and also built in media/web browsing
> would be nice. Looking at Red Flag Deals, but if anyone has any cautions or
> otherwise, glad to hear it :)

Avoid 1366x768 displays.  That's just wrong.  1280x720 is OK (if such
even seemed to exist anymore), but 1920x1080 really is a lot nicer.

My parents bought a cheap 32" Insignia.  It has a few flaws for sure.
It looks good and works, but a few things I had never thought would be
relevant have become rather annoying.

The selection of input is done by hitting 'input' then scrolling through
an onscreen menu and hitting 'enter'.  This makes such a TV really
annoying to use with a universal remote such as the Harmony, since you
have to _look_ at the TV to know what the current input is in order to
know how to get to another input.  That's really stupid.  It's also too
many button presses.

The power button remote code is unfortunately 'toggle power state'.
There is no code for power on and power off.  This too makes life for the
harmony a pain.  It is easy to get out of sync and have to step through
the 'help' mode to fix the setting on one of the devices to get things
back in sync.  This too would have been trivial to implement.

It has no clue that certain resolutions should have certain aspect
ratios unfortunately.  So you have to always manually switch between
wide and normal depending on HD versus SD contents.  What a pain.
Why can't it be as smart as mythtv and go '720 or 640 x 480 means normal
by default, and 1920x1080 and 1280x720 means wide by default'.  How hard
would that have been to implement?

It does have a lovely display, looks good, is 1920x1080, but man the UI
design and behaviour is awful.

Compared to their old Sony CRT that this replaced, I can almost see
why Sonys cost more now.  Apparently they actually think when designing
things.  This just can't be right.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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