Just before Christmas I wrote about having no desire to buy anything else techy for a while thanks to the void that the iPhone fills. But, on Boxing Day it was necessary to buy something out of need rather than want.

After months of being on the blink, our bulky 32in CRT television in the living room finally gave up the ghost, on Christmas Day night. The picture started to roll and I had to bang on the TV every 10 minutes to adjust it. We’d been eyeing up smart HD LCD televisions for a while but since the old TV was working we couldn’t justify the purchase.

The demise of the CRT came just at the right time. I caught an advert for a 32inch, 1080p, Full HD LCD television by LG – and in piano black finish. The price was just £349. On Boxing Day I headed to the PC World website to see if there were any in stock at our local stores and to my surprise there was. I reserved it online and we went to collect it an hour later. Good job we were on the ball as a couple of hours later they’d sold out everywhere locally and nationally it turned out.

It’s the LG 32LG7000 Scarlet Series.

lgtv

It has built in Bluetooth, Dual XD Engine, 4 x HDMI and USB 2.0 (JPEG / MP3 Playback). You can see the full spec sheet here.

After getting it home and setting it up which was very straightforward, I popped a DVD on to check out the picture quality. Monsters Inc. is a great movie with tons of detail and it showed superbly on the new TV. I then started to look around for HDMI DVD players to enhance our viewing quality even further. Blu-Ray will be nice, one day, but after forking out £350 unexpectedly I think it will be a while before I’m in the market for one of those.

During a weekly shop at Sainsburys I noticed they had a HDMI 1080p upscaling DVD player for just £24.99. It’s Sainsburys own brand, RED, but it was a good price and a lot cheaper than other HDMI players I’d looked at. That coupled with the new TV made for amazing viewing. This time I popped in Shrek 2 and the detail was astounding. I wish I could get a photo of it good enough to display the crispness and sharpness of the picture, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. For something cheap it’s certainly very cheerful.

So, despite all my best laid plans, I did have a very Techy Christmas after all. I hope you did too – and Happy New Year :)