Question for the experts: These Flat Screen TV's

[DimPrawn]

shirley the NTSC/PAL thing won't be an issue if you're connecting to a Sky or Freeview box as you're bypassing the built-in tuner?

No, the TV signal is still encoded as NTSC/PAL/SECAM regardless of it being demodulated due to the fact that the USA TV expects a signal based around a 60hz timebase and a UK tv based around 50hz.

I know this as my mate found out the hardway.

[VectraMan]

No, the TV signal is still encoded as NTSC/PAL/SECAM regardless of it being demodulated due to the fact that the USA TV expects a signal based around a 60hz timebase and a UK tv based around 50hz.

Technically PAL and NTSC (Never The Same Colour) refer to the colour encoding schemes and not the frame rate or resolution, though they tend to commonly be used to refer to the resolution and frame rate standards.

The answer is to look at the specification. I don't know how true this is of modern flat screens, but I understood that in the past hardly any NTSC equipment supported PAL, whereas NTSC support is commonplace on PAL/European TVs and DVD players. But it may be that economies of scale means the Japanese now make the exactly the same TVs for everybody (Japan uses NTSC BTW).

Also both now use the same resolutions for HD, whereas they didn't for SD. Which means a 1080p NTSC TV is no different from a 1080p PAL TV, it's just a case of whether the electronics can decode the PAL signal.