New Sony Bravia 26-inch LCD TV set - lovely stuff...

Whilst I was setting up my new laptop, the trusty 24" widescreen CRT Sony Trinitron that I've got in the downstairs lounge started playing up. At first, I thought it was the twin digital tuner hard disk recorder I had attached via SCART, but after trying different SCART sockets and cables, plugging the analogue aerial directly into the back of the Sony CRT proved that it was the set itself playing up. The symptoms were increasingly frequent picture blackouts - though the audio remained on - and when it returned, the green channel/input info appeared on the screen as if the set had lost its signal/just been turned on/had its channel changed.

It had had nearly a decade of service as a faithful analogue-only CRT set, so it was time to look for a replacement. Well, I'm a major Sony fan when it comes to TV sets: even if you have to pay a 20% premimum on their prices, they just ooze quality. So it really was just a question of buying a Sony Bravia set that would be roughly the same width and height. I eventually settled on a 26" LCD set (yes, a tape measure confirmed its WxH is the same as 24" CRT set) that Amazon UK were selling.

It came with two tuners (one digital, one analogue, though bizarrely you can't do a live picture-in-picture of the two!), a swivelling stand (handy to angle it towards you), an excellent clear/sharp picture as long you view it from more than 5 feet away and one trillion picture and sound settings that you get tempted to constantly tweak in the hope of finding picture quality nirvana.

I've posted up a fuller review [url=http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-KDL-26S2010U-Widescreen-Bravia-Freeview/dp/B000F5UJTM/]here[/url] as the "rklrkl" user - it's now 4 quid less than when I bought it (I paid 529.99 pounds), but I'll claim that back via a 30 day price drop refund request :)