Video Asylum

Posted by JvanOtis on July 08, 2003 at 21:09:48

In Reply to: Re: Toshiba 27AF43 -- different from AF42? posted by me on July 07, 2003 at 09:48:09:

Hey guys,

I have the AF43 and did quite a bit of research before I bought. First, I want to suggest you check out www.agoraquest.com. It's a Sony review site that's quite good. It's very active and the trouble shooting forum has lots of good information about many makes and models of TV.

Next, the 27AF42 was quite well regarded by consumer reports and loads of user reviews I read. It was the front runner in my research before I saw the 43. 16:9 compression was one of my criteria and partially swayed me to the 43.

Essentially, if you configure your DVD player to display at 16:9 (letterbox mode), 16:9 compresses the video into the 16x9 aspect ratio and takes better advantage of your resolution. I'm no TV tech, so I can't explain it much better than that but I can say that it makes a difference. My DVDs look great.

The 43 is not manufactured in Japan. This largely accounts for the lower price. I can't recall where the manufacturing is done but it might be mexico. Again, I'm not sure of that. When I saw the 43 retailing for about $550 canadian and much in store evaluation didn't reveal any serious problems with the image, I bought one.

Honestly, the image isn't perfect but it's close. After a couple of weeks I'm very satisfied with the product for the price.

On the topic of Sony, I had a KV-27FS300 that I returned to the store due to some serious quality issues. After some reading I'm convinced that last year's wegas had major design flaws that make them pretty much lemons in my mind. Those issues are well documented in the forums I mentioned above. There's now a KV-27FS310 that at least one owner is reviewing well at agoraquest.

That's my 2 cents worth hope it's worth something to you guys.

JvanOtis