Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

Hi,

First time forum user, so I hope I'm posting in the right place.

I inherited a house in St Lucia, and I hope to move to there in a few years permanently. In the meantime, I'm doing it up for holiday rental as it's in a great location in Rodney Bay, close to the shopping mall. I'm sending over new furniture, cooker, fridge etc. and a TV but am at a loss to find any useful advice about compatibility. I know it needs to be NTSC compliant, but can I buy a TV in the UK that will work in St Lucia? I was in St Lucia a few months ago and had a look but they were very expensive. I was advised that 'local' brands were unreliable, is this true?

thanks for any help
Alex

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

NTSC was never broadcast in the UK, but it was the standard used in the US until a few years ago, so anything related to NTSC will be easier to find, and cheaper than in the UK, where NTSC hardware was always a very small niche market.

That said, at some point NTSC transmissions are likely to end in St Lucia (I have no idea of the times scale), so if I were you, unless I could find an NTSC compliant digital TV, I would look for some sort of analog (NTSC) to digital converter, to enable a new digital TV to show NTSC transmissions.

Be aware that there are different digital TV standards that echo the differences between NTSC and PAL.

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

Thank you, that's very helpful, looks like a convertor is the way to go

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

The old days when tv’s were either pal a pal b or ntsc are long gone.

Any good brand of modern flatscreen will work with all the european japanese and american standards, i use samsung bought in the uk, and picking up both here happily.

Clearly you arent going to get any signal outside europe that works with a freeview or freesat tuner, just ignore that facility, they all have analogue tuners which is the stuff here.

Of more interest these days is pure digital video content. Most of my friends use one flavour or another of using the tv as a computer display to watch streamed or downloaded content from the bbc and american channels etc etc etc. Simplest is an apple tv box if you have apple laptops and ipads etc, there are android and mivrosoft solutions too, but IMHO not as slick.

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

To get digital content you will need a broadband connection and wifi, again, its a question of how smart is your smart tv, they vary greatly, even sony have lost it these days, their digital content codec management [what files will it play / handle] is a mess. Kaizen is an operating system used by several brands in their newer tv’s including samsung - pretty good. It can rapidly become quite technical, but suffice to say you will need to invest a smallish sum of real money annually in a decent vpn service, have at least a 10mb broadband connection, and have a laptop tablet or whatever that plays 1k [1080p] video well and a way of outputting it to the tv - which can be a cable or wifi usually.

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

Here and i suspect in st lucia, there are local co’s that will do it all technically for money, providing their box connected to your broadband, not entirely kosher one suspects, but for 30ec a month... but its reasonably easy to diy if you have the time and inclination.

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

Thank you all so much for the advice. I had the wi-fi and TV connected last year so that's all in place - the wiring/cabling was a total mess, will probably go for a Samsung.

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

Bit of a sweeping statement that. Many modern sets will indeed decode NTSC through their RCA phono sockets, but not so many can decode a broadcast signal through the aerial socket. Check very carefully.

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

I don't think such things exist. You can probably get an NTSC tuner that plugs into the RCA phono sockets however.

Don't know which digital standard St Lucia will adopt. Most of S America uses ISDB-T(Br), Columbia uses DVB-T2, Puerto Rico uses ATSC, Cuba is adopting DMB-T, and the French islands are using DVB-T.

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia
 

Fair enough, but as I said check carefully as many don't. Panasonic certainly don't.

Re: Advice on buying TV for use in St Lucia