On Monday I staged another clear out of junk from upstairs above the shop. A load of horrible LCD TVs removed. There is one set I might consider keeping, a mid-2000s Toshiba. This set is quite unlike the LCD sets made today, it's quite a heavy beast. Complex electronics inside. This was very expensive set in 2005.
Till Eulenspiegel.
Is it actually made by Toshiba rather than Vestel? I have 2 Toshiba LCD’s, both small ones, I think one is 17” and the other 20”, both seem to be Vestel internals. I can remember in the early days that they were selling some 4:3 LCD’s alongside the 16:9 ones.
One that I bought many years ago was a little 15” Panasonic, that had a fault where it would come on with a really dim half lit screen, then shut off, but would stay on if you unplugged the backlight inverter, obviously with no light on the screen! Took me a number of years to fix it, but I eventually got a service manual for it and after some tests discovered a knackered mosfet that was supposed to switch the supply to the inverter, I shorted it for a quick test and the set came on! New mosfet and all was well, the set saw some use in the kitchen at our old house, and unusually for a small set it had really good sound quality, it even had a built in little subwoofer! Picture was pretty good for an early LCD too, good contrast and the colours looked nice too.
We are currently looking for a new set for the living room, as the old Sony from 2006 is starting to look like the screen is on its last legs! It’s surprisingly difficult to find one that fits in the space of the Sony, I think 43” is the absolute maximum size we can fit in, which narrows down the sets on offer quite a bit! We had a look in Curry’s last weekend, and it looks like it’ll be another Sony, as it had the nicest picture of the ‘small screen’ (!) sets, the Samsung next to it looked awful, there was a clip of a football match playing on them and the Samsung made the pitch look a luminous sickly lime green colour with no detail visible. There were some LG sets too, but both of those had shadows along the top 3rd of the screen which made it look as bad as what we are replacing! The big LG OLED set was rather impressive though, don’t know what resolution it was, but I was stood about 2 feet from it and the detail in the picture was quite amazing!
I remember one my friends buying a small early LCD set about 20 years ago that had a case as deep as a CRT set. I can't recall seeing many others like this.
When my house move goes ahead & I'm settled I'll be buying a new TV as my Wife has been wanting a larger screen set than our current 32" one.
Luckily I'm not far from a Richer Sounds who have a good selection, and we had a look around Currys when we were in the area.
I'm very impressed by my LG OLED, it would be hard to imagine a display that could actually improve on it.
I bought a Cello LCD set for the kitchen in 2001. I got it cheap as a graded disposal it was the first LCD I bought. ISTR the full retail price was quite high. It was about 15" but a square screen not "wide". It was only useable on a Sky box which was in the lounge after the analogue shutdown so it was a PITA if you wanted to change channel . It went in the skip when the kitchen was replaced just over a year ago. it had never been any trouble and gave a good picture. I wish in some ways I had kept it now...
It was replaced by a 24" JVC which was £79!
@till Earley Toshiba LCD sets were made by Toshiba, most common fault was the black plastic cap breaking on the on off switch.
My Mum still uses a Panasonic LCD set she & my Dad bought in 2008, which still works OK.
The LG 28" set I bought in 2010 still works alright, but has not been used much since it was relegated to a second set.
We sold early Tosh LCD's ... awful lip sync issues.
