Question What options for 40", ~£300-400?

Ellis

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Want:
  • 40"+, happy to go for 43" or similar. Will be in my living room, replacing my flatmate's £100 32" Sainsbury's TV!
  • Good 1080 picture quality, mainly from Blu-ray source
  • Ability to handle different refresh rates properly with no major motion issues, e.g. 24p, 25p, 30p, 50i, 60i
  • Freeview HD
Don't care:
  • 4K, the content isn't there yet and I don't think it'd be worth it at this size. Plus I've not even owned a halfway decent 1080p TV before :)
  • Sound quality, I have external speakers
  • 2016 model, as long as I can find it for sale and it ticks the right boxes I'm happy to buy an older model
Somewhere in between:
  • Quality from SD sources, which would mostly be live or catch up TV, I guess I'll just have to put up with it. Doubt there's much difference between how different TVs handle this.
  • Smart TV functions - I already have streaming sources, but would definitely be nice to have some smart functions/apps built in e.g. iPlayer. But if the UI is not the best or is a bit slow, it's not the end of the world for me, I'd value picture quality more.

All I've really come up with so far are:

Panasonic TX-40CS520
- seems to get good ratings for quality and value, only has 2 HDMI ports which is a bit disappointing, and a 50Hz panel it seems (so how does 60p content work?).
Sony KDL43W755 - a bit more expensive, and people seem to say Sony's Android TV implementation isn't great

Some of the Samsungs and LGs put me off with their stands at the edge of the screen, I'm not sure would work where I want to put it, so this is a consideration too.

Anything else I should be looking at? I know I'm not going to get a top 1080p model at this budget, but looking for the best I can as I don't really want to spend more.
 
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Problem at that price bracket might be obtaining a TV that does 24p without judder. It's hard to know which do and which don't since there aren't many reviews at that price.
 
Problem at that price bracket might be obtaining a TV that does 24p without judder. It's hard to know which do and which don't since there aren't many reviews at that price.
Ah, I thought that may be the case. I could be wrong about how much I'd actually notice it, maybe I wouldn't find it very noticeable. But I'll see if I can find any info on how well that Panasonic does with 24p for example.
 
Been having another look around including searching these forums where I've found plenty of useful posts from Dodge, I'm now wondering whether it's worth trying to find either one of these two models at a reasonable price:

Samsung UE40H6400 - hard to find, 48" seems easier to get, but not sure if it would be too big. More recent J6300 seems worse in most ways.
Sony KDL-43W805C - seems hard to find at a sensible price (i.e. not £500), and plenty of complaints about Android TV.

So the Samsung seems like the best option, apart from the stand which I don't like, but the question is whether I can find one. Has anyone used www.studio.co.uk? They have it for around £350.
 
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