Best cheap 37-inch LCD televisions

Round-up by: Ian Morris

Last updated: 11 May 2007

If you don't live in a castle, you might find a 42-inch TV a little too large for your front room. At the same time, you might feel that 32 inches isn't quite enough to satisfy your yearning for a big-screen experience.

The good news is several manufacturers make screens that sit between 32 and 42 inches. Welcome to the exciting world of the 37-inch television.

A 37-inch screen makes a lot of sense for most homes. For a start they aren't totally dominating, but they do have enough impact to impress your friends. High-definition material will look stunning, but it won't be too much of a stretch for the screen to handle Freeview well too. It goes without saying that DVDs will look very nice indeed.

All of our televisions weigh in at around £900, although no doubt some shopping around on the Internet will yield some bargains.  

The first TV on the shortlist is the Toshiba Regza 37WLT68. Although this model has officially been discontinued, you can still find it cheap online. We've included it here because it earned an excellent score. The 37WLT68 also features 100Hz technology, designed to make fast-moving pictures look smoother.

Like the Toshiba 37WLT68, the Hitachi 37LD9700 isn't a 1080p television. But when buying a TV it's easy to get hung up on the numbers. While 1080p is the way forward, it's not essential and 720p is capable of producing some amazing images. We would always advise buying a good 720p screen over a cheap 1080p one. We liked the Hitachi because it provides good picture quality, a funky motorised stand and a nice wide viewing angle. The viewing angle of a screen will be important if you don't sit dead on to your TV. With LCDs, every degree off centre reduces the quality of the picture, but this Hitachi impressed us.

The last two screens in our roundup are both 1080p sets. The Sharp Aquos LC37XD1E is a sturdy performer. We liked the high-definition picture quality of this screen a great deal. We also think it's one of the nicest looking TVs aesthetically. It's not perfect, particularly when it comes to Freeview performance, which we found to have some de-interlacing artefacts -- these manifest themselves as jagged edges on standard-definition pictures.

The Toshiba Regza 37X3030D is the newest and most impressive TV in our collection. It's a full 1080p television that will make the most out of HD DVD and Blu-ray movies as well as being a natural display for the PlayStation 3. We liked both the high-definition performance and the Freeview picture quality, although there's no 100Hz technology as seen in the other Toshiba.