My Quest to get a Television for the PS3 has finally come to a close, playing the console on the main living room TV (42″ LG) interrupted the normal TV Viewing, playing via my 23″ Dell Monitor worked but was not perfect. I did try and fix my 37″ Toshiba but that failed and would prove too costly to fix. I spent a long time looking around for the right sized TV at the right price and I think I finally found it.

Picking the right size

I currently have a 42″ LG TV in the main living room and while this is great size for TV while sitting on the sofa, this would be way too large for a bedroom. You can buy TV’s ranging from 19″, 22″, 24″ and finally 32″ and some of these have extra features such as DVD Players built in or recording via USB Stick. I had my mind set on 32″ TV, this meant now I had to find the best priced half-decent TV for the least amount of money.

HD Ready or Full HD

On many of the TV’s that you may see around, many have the word ‘HD Ready’ – what does this actually mean?Checking the Web reveals the Wiki Definition and you can see that this really means that the TV can only do at best 720p. You need to discount these Televisions in my eyes when you can buy for the same or less money a full 1080p TV. As this TV I am buying will be designed for the PS3 – which can output the full 1080p, it was important that the model I choose had the ability to do full 1080p (1920×1080).

Branded versus Unknown makes.

Next on my check list is do you buy a TV made by a company you have never heard of or is tied to a store (Such as Medion) or do you in fact stick to a well known named branded TV. I know from past experience with some items that the unknown makers are sometimes a lot better than the branded counterpart. My problem was finding reviews for the long list of Televisions I had seen advertised – either on the internet or in a store. Personally I moved away from looking at the unbranded models, I just felt these would disappoint in the end.

Fixing a Price point

Of course I had in my head a rough idea of how much I wanted to spend and £250 seemed a good price for a 32″ TV with Full HD. There was no shortage of offers no matter were I looked and there would have been many that could have fitted the bill of the price point plus the Full HD plus the 32″ Screen. If I had picked a model from one of the local stores, I could have picked that up while I was out shopping but I learned from the past that impulse buying without researching on-line is not a wise thing to do.

EBAY Wins

I did a quick search on E-Bay and came across a 32″ LG Full HD (as per title) for £259 Buy it now with free delivery. The Store was in fact EBUYER, this been a new product with full 12 month guarantee and shipped and delivered in a couple of days. The Full Specs of the TV were as follows:

• Resolution 1920 x 1080
• Brightness 500
• Contrast Ratio 4000
• Dynamic Contrast Ratio 50000
• All format Converter 1080p/1080i/720p/480p/480i – 1080p
• HDMI input 3 (480p/576p/ 720p/1080i/1080p) 1 port PC mode

• HD DivX
• USB (2.0) Only SVC
• RoHS
• Auto off/auto sleep
• Front LED Clock

For anyone interested in checking out what else they have on offer (UK Only) – You can find there EBay Store and maybe bag yourself a decent bargain as well? I may write a full review of the TV once it arrives if anyone is interested – due to ship to me by Tuesday coming (14th Dec 2010)

On the 4th Feb 2010 ALDI have a special deal on a desktop PC for the price of £399.99. This is a Core i3-530 CPU running at 2.93Ghz, 3 GIG ram, 1TB HD and so forth. As is always the case with anything at ALDI, once it has gone, you won’t see it again – so be quick to get this deal.

Specs

Powerful Intel^® Core^® i3-530 processor (2.93 GHz, 4 MB Intel^® Smart cache, Intel^® Hyper-Threading-Technology)

This is a New CPU by Intel which is a dual core CPU but has hyper-threading which in real terms means it acts like a quad core CPU.

Powerful NVIDIA^® GeForce^® G210 DirectX^® 10 graphics card with 512 MB graphic memory and D-Sub VGA, DVI-I and HDMI interface (HDCP support)

The G210 is a low end unit compared to today’s cards but it can still play games should you wish. The machine will feature a PCI_Express slot to allow for upgrading later.

Massive 3 GB DDR3 SDRAM

Although not amazing – at least it is DDR-3 and 3 should keep you going until memory prices drop again.

Large 1 TB (1000 GB) S-ATA hard disk for more than 200,000 music title or photos

1TB is nice to have, you should not run out of room too quickly with this.

Multiformat DVD/CD burner² supports all the usual DVD/CD standards, incl. dual layer DVD-R and DVD+R

No Blu-ray but not to be expected at this price point.

Wireless on a dekstop is not common and odd to include but if you are wanting to go wire free, this allows you to put the machine in any room without having to wire in cables but if you need the speed, the GIGABIT wired network is a nice addition.

No Monitor included.

Remember this is the computer only, no monitor is supplied, so you will need to buy your own or use the one you have if you are upgrading a machine.

Worth the price?

What they have done, as with any PC builder these days, is take a few components and plugging them to make the machine sound amazing for the price but remember a computer is the sum of all parts. The Core i3 Is new and have received some good reviews. Do not expect true Quad core performance and do not mistaken this for a Core i7 by any stretch.

The NVIDIA^® GeForce^® G210 DirectX^® 10 graphics card will play games but the numbers on the various benchmarks are low indeed, as is common with Nvidia, they just rename an old part. The good side is that the Graphics Card will be very quiet and if you do not play many games, this will suit to the ground.

1TB drives are very cheap indeed, you can get one for £57 for example online. Wireless is like £14 and so on – so you can see them big numbers don’t really mean much in the big picture.

For more technical Info – head off to HERE