TR Forums

pete_roth wrote:

I got you all beat, picked up a 27" regular tv for $100. Muahaha

Plus, Fantasy football hates you ~

I picked up a 37w3 from ecost a month ago. I guess the w3's are a bit more refined than the w1's and have different inputs.

For the lazy:

37w3 http://www.westinghousedigital.com/deta ... itemnum=56
37w1 http://www.westinghousedigital.com/deta ... itemnum=26
42w2 http://www.westinghousedigital.com/deta ... itemnum=44

Some of the better prices I've seen to snag them:

http://www.ecost.com/ecost/search/searc ... stinghouse
http://www.macmall.com/macmall/search/s ... stinghouse

I myself waited for w3's to become available and paid a slightly higher price to get one. HDMI input, yay. I guess the black isn't super black, but this was $600 so I managed my expectations accordingly. You can dink with the backlight brightness if it bothers you too much, but most of my viewing is not done in pitch black so it isn't very noticable. I guess one of the DVI ports doesn't do HDCP (or whatever the encryption is, I don't even care anymore) but hey, big whoop.

Mine is exhibiting the "once a fortnight randomly switch to VGA input even when nothing is attached or turned on" bug, but turning the TV off and unplugging it for 10 seconds fixes that for me so far.

I don't get any TV signals/cable (found out I was paying for the service but never watching it), I just play games and DVDs, so the lack of a tuner has been a non-issue with me. I have a cheap Walmart upscaling DVD changer which has lately been freezing randomly, but the upscaling on that seems about the same as the upscaling on the TV (shut up, I know it's a "monitor", but I'm using it as a TV ok?!?) though I haven't done any real specific anal-retentive testing.

I've hooked some laptops up to the TV, works fine, looks good. Xbox is connected via component, I am going to get my PS2 hooked up that way sometime too. Dreamcast isn't hooked up yet, but will probably use the svideo. Never bothered to get VGA box for it.

Anyway, I threw the xbox into 480p mode for the dashboard, I could tell the difference. Games look about the same, honestly, played a little Fable and some Burger King kart racing. Just... bigger, and a bit nicer. I haven't tried any 720p xbox games yet; not sure if I have any.

Since the 37" TVs are discontinued, all you'll find are refurbs. The 42" might be as well. I almost got the 42" since it wasn't much more than the 37", but some of the avsforums comments on their 42" made me shy away. But hey, many people had and liked the 42", so...

37w1 $584 at eCost, not listed at MacMall
37w3 $682 at eCost, $600 at MacMall
42w2 $800 at eCost, $770 at MacMall

FWIW, instead of paying $60 for an HDMI cable from Best Buy, I also opted to get this:

http://www.ecost.com/detail.aspx?edp=37024655

Came as a pack of several trinkets, but the price was too good to pass up. Might save some of y'all some bling if you need cables. Hell, even has a DVI/HDMI adaptor.

eCost and MacMall were the only 2 retailers I could find that had Westys in stock, just keep checking back as I know at least eCost gets (or used to get) regular shipments of refurbs from Westinghouse. Just call them and ask when their next shipment is.

I didn't know about MacMall until AFTER I got mine from eCost. I have not compared the warranties, the optional warranties you can buy, or the shipping. eCost sent mine fast, said it'd take like 2 weeks, I think I got it in 3 days.

The picture is, in my opinion, on par or better than the Dell 24" (2407WFP rev. 4) that I also have. There is slight banding (divide your widescreen into thirds, left middle right, you will see slight brightness difference at the "seams" of the segments where they intersect) but I only notice it on static, solid single-color desktop backgrounds and pretty much never on video/moving images. I don't think my wife has seen it yet and I wouldn't have if I hadn't known what to look for. No dead pixels that I could see. It has an older firmware revision, but hey, whatever.

Hope this info helps for those who wanted to know more. I have 200+ pages on the 37" avsforum thread to go through, find out what the issues I may have are and what the possible solutions are. Man, I wish there were FAQs there or something.

Looking for Knowledge wrote:

pete_roth wrote:

I got you all beat, picked up a 27" regular tv for $100. Muahaha

Yeah, but mine fits flush in my built-in book shelves.

LFK that reminds me of my grandmother's house :/

king_kilr wrote:

LFK that reminds me of my grandmother's house :/

Maybe it is your grandma's house......?



Here's one farther back....


This Westy fits my needs perfectly.

Nah, it doesn't actually look like it, it just reminds me

A little over 11 years later, and this set is still going.

Looking for Knowledge wrote:

I bit the bullet and grabbed one. It will replace a comparatively small but bulky <a href="http://800stereo.com/prods/samsung-txm3096whf.html">30" Samsung 1080i</a>. The Samsung will replace a tv in our bonus room that needs to warm up for five minutes before you can see the picture. It's a win-win. Now I just have to get my wife to agree and split the cost with me.

I still have my Westy 42" 1080p monitor as our "little TV" in the living room. The kids use it pretty much daily.

I've also still got this 37" 1080p unit, going strong. My daughter uses it several times a week for Netflix and the Wii U. This was a great purchase. Meanwhile, an RCA 46" unit I paid roughly the same amount for died in 4 years.

I bought this one, and 3 others.

The 47" died after 2 years, but I brought back to life without audio and am still using it.

The other 3 are still working great. I want them to die so I can go 4k.

I got a 42" Westy (the 1920x1080 large format display version) right around the same time this thread started. I ended up giving it away because I was tired of waiting to upgrade.

I got one of these too (contemporary to the post, almost certainly because of the post), it still works just fine.

Wow.

I blame the dark art of thread necromancy for it!