Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

Hi sunflwrgrl13, just googled your TV and looking at the sony user guide I am not sure the TV is PAL capable, according to Sony it just has the NTSC/ATSC tuner. Now maybe PAL support is something Sony are not advertising?

My TV is advertised with..
Power Requirements (frequency) : 50/60Hz
Power Requirements (voltage) : AC 120-240V
So from a power plug point of view would work fine.

I suspect this is the 50/60hz you are referring to as written on the back of your TV. This is the power input and nothing to do with the TV signal input (which for complication is also 50/60hz UK/US).

There is a number of views on whether it will work, ranging from it will work with up to 720 (not full HD - 1080i) to the signal will not be detected, some say depends on the cable you use (component vs HDMI)
Try googling "will us hd tv work in the uk" lots of differing opinions. Link below sounds reasonable from the technical discussion.
(http://www.avforums.com/forums/tvs/1...es-matter.html)

As you say the whole risk is enough of a headache for me to say mine is being sold on craigslist and a new one being purchased in the UK. Definitely don't want to be left with a TV that doesn't work or doesn't work with full HD.

Hope that helps.

Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

HDMI is a standard. There is no such thing as UK HDMI and US HDMI. There is HDMI 1.2, 1.3 or 1.4 for 3D (later versions are backward compatible).

If you have a device that is compliant then it will work.

For example, I had a US PS3 which I connected to my UK TV and it worked without any issues.

When i moved to North America I took my UK TV and it still works as it supported PAL and NTSC as well as having dual power as did.

If you have incompatible devices PAL vs NTSC, you can purchase a converter.

Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

britsnake, I don't mean to question you but if you google US HDMI vs UK HDMI you will see lots of discussions how the TV frequency that comes over the HDMI signal differs and US sets tend to be just setup for the US market, as opposed to UK sets that are dual PAL/NTSC and therefore handle the different frequency.

Just reread google, change frequency in the text above for frames per second, and this is the difference, yes the HDMI cable is the same but the output fps is different between US and UK. US TVs (60/30fps) on the most part do not handle 50/25fps (UK standard), whereas UK TVs do handle this.

Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

Call me chicken (bok-bok) but I would not want to drag a huge 40" flat screen 4,000 miles only to find it was just an expensive paperweight or piece of garden art.

Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

You are right about the frame rate.

PAL usually has a frame rate of 25 fps at 50 Hz and NTSC at 29.976fps at 60 Hz.

The problem is not with the HDMI standard but relates to watching Standard definition content which in the UK is PAL rather than NTSC.

If you try to watch a Standard definition channel on an HD skybox for example, it would not display correctly through HDMI unless your TV supported this (many US TV do not support this. Check your documentation). The only way around this would be using component output for standard definition TV with a converter.

Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

If your TV does not support PAL, You can of course buy an HDMI PAL to HDMI NTSC converter to get over this problem, but they can be a bit more pricey around $100 on ebay or over $200 if you want to upscale to full HD as well.

Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

Exactly our fears as well. I'm wondering if the volume that would be consumed by the tv would be better utilized with other items.

Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

We brought a 46" Sony Bravia back from Canada just over a year ago. Looked at selling it, but the amount that we could have got for what was originally a $2500 TV bought 2 years previously was derisory (we saw tham being advertised for $300 :( ), so we thought that that we would bring it back anyway, and in the worst case my son would have the coolest screen for his Xbox360. In our case shipping cost was not an issue since it was a company funded move.

This TV is 110/240 V 50/60Hz compatible but definitely not PAL compatable.
We got a Sky+ box which does not have HDMI outputs. Upon reflection it might have made more sense to go for Sky HD to make the connection easier,
but we bought a Scart to HDMI converter from Interneed Direct (cost about £100 at the time). This takes the Scart output from the Sky+ box and feeds the HDMI connector to the TV. It works perfectly and I have no problems with the picture quality. Only issue is that perhaps a 46" TV is a bit big for the average UK living room :)

Thinks can get a bit more complicated if you want to feed multiple device to the TV.

- Our son's XBox360 connects via the VGA input.
- We have a second satellite receiver for European TV and a DVD player.
We use their Scart connections and have a Scart switch box to swap inputs
to the HDMI converter. Interneeds have a cool one that works with a
remote control, but much cheaper manual alternatives are available.

Looking on Amazon, a 46" Bravia would have cost of the order of £900 to functionality as near as possible to what we have. OK, newer TVs have
1080p, but we don't care about that. Second hand could have been of the order of £650, but you never know what you are getting :( So, we have a
fully functional working 46" Sony TV in the UK for an effective cost of just under £150 whereas it would have cost us a net of between £450 and £700 if we had replaced it with a similar TV.

Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

I guess the deciding factor for many people, then, would be the additional copst of shipping. In a 20ft container, this may not matter, but if someone is sending a partial shipment, the extra cost of shipping a TV might not be worth the risk of damage in transit or incompatibility.

Re: Taking US tv to UK
 

I quite agree. We overflowed a 40ft hi cube container such that we had a dozen or so suitcases on the flight back, so volume was not an issue for us.