Essential Basics To Get Right When Buying A Flat Screen TV.

OK you have made the decision that you are actually going to go and buy the TV of your dreams and what do you do next?

Unlike other guides here we believe in giving good old plain common sense and want you to think about the money aspect first.

Now this might sound like heresy and no doubt all advisors will be counselling that you consider Picture sizes, LCD or Plasma, Aspect Ratios, Screen Resolution etc and these are all vital but none of it matters if you haven�t got the dough and you get suckered into spending more than you had planned to.

Think about one small important fact.

The financial expenditure that you are about to embark upon is probably going to be one of the major items of expense that you are likely to encounter (after the House/Flat and Car etc) so it is important to get it right.

Plan well in advance how much you have got to spend and how much of a leeway / margin of error you can play with.

The theory behind this is that if you make a mistake now it could cost you more than just the financials in the long run so decide how much room for error you have budget wise.

Conversely you are also going to be left regretting the fact that you let the salesman sucker you into spending an extra thousand on going Plasma rather than LCD and now you are having trouble with the mortgage payments.

The single most important part of the proceedings is plan and get it right now or live to regret at leisure!

So let�s get started with looking around at what is on offer at the moment and let�s start with the Goodmans GTV27W3LCD

The GTV27W3LCD is a 27in LCD TV and currently these TV's can be found for 350 pounds sterling or 700 US dollars. The resolution of the screen is 1260 X 720 and with regards to being HD Ready the answer is no. The Goodmans has 2 (2 RGB) scarts and the type and number of Multimedia interfaces the GTV27W3LCD uses is HDMI and no connections are available. The type of Tuner for this TV is Analogue and the Goodmans is available from limited outlets only.

So how would we rate the Goodmans GTV27W3LCD?

Well to start with our score for the picture quality is 6, and for the sound quality we would rate it at 6. Taking a look at the number of relevant connections and their availability, our score would be 4. If we take a look at the overall "feature ability" our score would be 4 if we then take a look at the ease of use and overall value for money then our scores would be, 8 and 8 respectively.

Taking everything into consideration our overall view of the package would be that this TV is well away from the latest models in terms of bleeding edge technology and performance but the overall package including the price makes this not a bad deal.

With regards to the prices in this article we have tried in all cases to take an average across the industry from a number of well known web sites and so we ask you to bear this in mind and treat these prices as advisory only rather than absolutes.