General Newbie Help Required About Wall Mounting Concerns / Ideas and HD advice

[about87]

Hi Guys,

First of all allow me to apolagise for being so new to all of this. I have recently purchased a new flat (my first property, scary!) and the very first thing I need to do before I move in is to get it decorated and put my plasma into place. Therefore I have a few real newbie questions for you guys.

First of all, I really want to wall mount it. Firstly becasue it looks cool but also becasue my living room is fairly small and a wall mount will save a few vital feet of space. However, the wall I would potentially mount it on is a solid masonary wall. Whilst this is good as it will hold the weight, from reading the forums I understand that the only way to mount it whilst hiding all the wirers is to create a channel within the wall around an inch deep, run the wires through some metal trunking and then plaster over the channel. The benifit is that it would obviously look nice, but am I right in saying that the downside is that whenever I want to rewire it (aka, plug in my shiney new Xbox 360, PS3, etc) I will have to rip open my wall every time I want to plug something new in. The screen I am looking at is the Samsung PS42S5HX - does anyone know if you can get an additional controller box for this screen which would allow me to run a wire from the screen to my controller box through the wall, and therefore allow me to plug in new devicies into the controller box without the need to rip out my wall every time I get a new toy? If you cant do this kind of thing with the PS42S5HX, do you know of any HD screens in the price range of around £1600 that can let me do this?

I am assuming that I am kind of screwed and will need to either wall mount it and rip open my wall every time I plug something new in, or bite the bullet and accept that it will be easier to add new bits if I just leave it on a stand.

Also, I have absolutly no DIY skills what-so-ever, is wall mounting my screen and making a channel to run the wiers though etc something a novice could do or is it best to pay a builder to do the work for me. If so, any idea how much I can expect to pay to get someone that knows their stuff out? I can do the geeky plugging the plasma bit in myself, I just dont know how to do the DIY hosue stuff!

Also, the reason I am looking at the Samsung PS42S5HX is becasue it looked nice in Currys and I have found it on the net for £1500 - any other screen recomendations for a HD set around the same price or is the Samsung offering a pretty good deal?

Final question - is HD actually worth an extra £500 to watch the football and play games... is it similar to the step from VHS to DVD or is it more more subtle?

Thanks guys, and sorry for all the newbie questions. Basically, I am a little lost and any help and advice is highly appreciated!!!!

Will

[shahedz]

i am not familair with your model, but in order to future proof you can always just plug in all the cables it takes and plaster over ( eg, s-video, compostite etc) regardless whever you need to use it now or not and then you will always have the option to use the sockets,

alternatively are you getting a home cinma amp? because you can plug everything into your home cinema amp including your video signals and then connect the video out put of your amp to the plasma, and use your amp to switch in between sources, this way whenever you upgrade you only need to connect things to your amp as opposed to your plasma

i cant really help with your other questions

best of luck with moving and getting it all sorted

[inzaman]

Will, welcome to the forums hope you enjoy.

With regards to the specific plamsa questions if you ask those in the plasma forum then you will get plenty of answers to help you on your way.

[about87]

Hadnt considerd the idea of putting an amp in place and running everything via that, sounds like a good plan. With that in mind, anyone know if the inputs for HD feeds from Sky HD and Xbox 360 etc will plug straight into a standard amp or am I going to need a HD compatable amp too?

[shahedz]

youll need a HDMI compatible amp i should think, theres a few out there i think but to be honest i havnt done much research on them, maybe you should post a thread in the amps section. there may be a HDMI swith so you can plug all your HDMI equipment into and then have one lead into your plasma, try keene electronics

[baldrick]

With regards to the DIY, the only difficult bit IMHO is re-filling and finishing the channel to make it seemless... Having said that their are more and more products for doing this sort of thing and I would tend to over fill and then rub it down and blend it in then after a couple of coats of paint it should be invisible!

The most important bit is making sure the mount for the screen is level and that you use the right size bolts/masonary fixings.

From the connectivity point of view, if you're thinking about running multi-channel sound (a must for movies and games) then you'll want an amp which as has been stated, will do your video switching for you...

Thinking about the surround sound, you'd might as well get the speaker cables chased in before you decorate even if you don't use them straight away!

BTW, cutting channels into walls for cables etc... is known as 'chasing'!

[about87]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the help, very much appreciated. I allways wonderd what people were on about when they refered to chasing the cables. I might have to do that, dunno yet... might get away with running them under the sides of the carpet, but thats allmost certainly a bad idea for many reasons. Ill figure something out. The other idea is a single unit with 50something speakers in it from Kenwood or someone like that, allegadly gives true 5.1 surround sound from a single box.... Im allways doubtfull about those kind of statments but its a small room so it might just work!

Should get the flat a week today, which means next saturday im going gadget shppiing for my screen and amp. The more I think about it the more I think non-HD might be the way to go for bang-for-bucks... either way, the amp idea sounds awsome!

Thanks again,

Will