I've had my eye on Samsungs latest generation of rear-projection TVs for the last 6 months. In a couple of months time when my five year wait for my flat management company to install a communal sky dish comes to an end I'm intending to buy a Samsung SP46L5HX rear-pro TV. Hopefully by then internet dealers will be selling it for considerably less than the ridiculously expensive £3000 that Currys is charging now.
One oddity about Samsung is that their European models appear to have USA equivalents which are largely identical except that they all have DLP projectors instead of the LCD ones used in Europe. (Other differences is that the video processors in the USA models carry the Faroudja brand name, also presumably they don't have Scarts and may prefer NTSC to PAL - I haven't checked they can handle both, but I suspect this is not a problem.) In general I believe DLP is better than LCD because it gives higher contrast. The stats on their web site say contrast is 1000:1 for the DLPs versus 600:1 for LCD. On the other hand the LCDs are 25% brighter.
Now this evening I can across a link to a page on the Samsung European web site that referred to both LCD and DLP models and for a moment I was excited because I thought it meant DLPs were coming to Europe. I soon decided that they were just displaying a standard page of all their rear-pros borrowed from their world web-site. Anyway to get to the point, I did a Google search for the American equivalent of the SP4L5HX, the HLN467W and came across a shopping comparison site which knew I was in the UK (prices displayed in pounds) and told me whether dealers would ship to the UK. Amazingly, the cheapest who will is Amazon.com and the price is under 2000 pounds. (Presumably excluding VAT and shipping, but still...)
So would I be crazy to order an HLN467W from America?
One oddity about Samsung is that their European models appear to have USA equivalents which are largely identical except that they all have DLP projectors instead of the LCD ones used in Europe. (Other differences is that the video processors in the USA models carry the Faroudja brand name, also presumably they don't have Scarts and may prefer NTSC to PAL - I haven't checked they can handle both, but I suspect this is not a problem.) In general I believe DLP is better than LCD because it gives higher contrast. The stats on their web site say contrast is 1000:1 for the DLPs versus 600:1 for LCD. On the other hand the LCDs are 25% brighter.
Now this evening I can across a link to a page on the Samsung European web site that referred to both LCD and DLP models and for a moment I was excited because I thought it meant DLPs were coming to Europe. I soon decided that they were just displaying a standard page of all their rear-pros borrowed from their world web-site. Anyway to get to the point, I did a Google search for the American equivalent of the SP4L5HX, the HLN467W and came across a shopping comparison site which knew I was in the UK (prices displayed in pounds) and told me whether dealers would ship to the UK. Amazingly, the cheapest who will is Amazon.com and the price is under 2000 pounds. (Presumably excluding VAT and shipping, but still...)
So would I be crazy to order an HLN467W from America?