School me on TV's

I'm looking for a new flat screen TV. About the only thing I know is it must be HD (duh) and 40". But the rest? I have no idea.

The last TV I bought was a Sony Bravia, I think a W or a T series.

KBK

Well, I'll preface this by saying Google is going to be way more informative than I'll ever be. TV's are one of those technologies that change drastically in price and hardware on a pretty regular basis.

That said, I'm a firm supporter of Samsung. I've had some experience in owning RCA, Sony, LG, Panasonic, and Samsung, and the Samsung is really the best picture for the money I've found.

Here's my suggestion-make a checklist of what is important to youi. Something like this, only you'll put yes or no next to each-

3D-
Refresh rate-
1080P-
Internet features (Netflix, YouTube, etc)-
Size-
Durability (As in how long it's gonna last)-
Connectivity (Variety in input ports, number of input ports ,etc)-

And then match all of this to the price you need to stay at. The next thing you want to do is play your local electronics stores against each other. By pitting Conn's and Best Buy against each other, I was able to end up getting my 42" Samsung knocked down from 1400 to 900 by an ambitious Conn's employee. The main thing is to look for price matching, and then kind of manipulate the system as best you can. I was able to match the price of an earlier model Samsung 42" that had the same features on paper, but was less recent than the one I bought. A lot of times if the store isn't paying attention to the model number, you can work the system like that.

But mainly just make yourself a checklist like that, put it on your phone or ipad or whatever, and take it with you when you go shopping so you don't get home and realize you've just bought a 720P TV when you wanted 1080P, or got too few connection ports than you absolutely needed.

As far as my personal experience-my Samsung is my third flat panel, and it's been incredible. It's been on the large part of two years now, even to the point of staying on while I'm asleep (because I always forget to turn it off when I turn the cable / game system off), acting as a monitor for my laptops, and being left on when I went out of town. It's never given me a moment's trouble, whereas literally every other TV I've owned besides the Panasonic 3D we have in the living room has made a trip to the repair shop for something minor to major within its first few years. The quality is still as good as anything else, it has plenty of HDMI ports, and the only major feature it lacks is the internet ready stuff like Netflix and YouTube.

And as far as the internet stuff goes, don't forget that your X-Box, PS3, and computer can all act as hubs for those features, and you can save some money by skipping them.

3D is a whole 'nother story. I have yet to really use the TV in the living room, and my occasions using it for Black Ops haven't really impressed me. The movies and TV channels are impressive to an extent, but until they perfect 3D minus the glasses for TV use, I just can't recommend jumping on that bandwagon.

I have an 42" LG 1080p with a 60Hz refresh rate and its not too bad. 2 HDMI ports for Xbox and Blu-ray and a VGA port helps too. I run Netflix off of my Xbox perfectly so we didn't have to waste money on that.  I think it was around $550 at Futureshop (Canadian Best Buy really).

Kayback wrote: I was looking at a Samsung Series 7 3D TV, but the wife nixed that because the picture was "too clear and would give her a headache".