I was asked by the company I work for to find a HDTV/Monitor that was 32″ in size and was LCD and wall mountable - easy I thought, I link to a large number of products and that’ll be a piece of cake! Off I went looking through the products in my little database, first I ran a filter on 32″ LCD and then filtered out the word TV Tuner - 156 results. So next exported this data to a spreadsheet and arranged it by price - here we go, an LG 32″ LCD monitor for £399 that doesn’t have a tv tuner - perfect!

I found a couple more but I know Lg are normally pretty good displays and just added another 2 displays to pad out the e-mail and give a couple of options to my boss; knowing he would go for the cheaper one. And so after sending the e-mail I though I’d read up a bit more about the display; it’s available from Dixons and they have a nice bit of info relating to this product - 2 x HDMI inputs, 2 x SCART inputs, 1 x Composite, 1 x VGA, 1 x digital tuner…… crap! It seems the details on this product I keep in my database only covered some of the information and I had taken that as gospel and figured that since it didn’t list a tv tuner than it didn’t come with one.

I checked the other 2 displays I had included in the e-mail, investigated a bit further and indeed both included a digital tuner, in fact it took another 30 minutes of hunting before I found one that didn’t.

This was all a bit of a surprise to me, having worked in a company just a year ago who purchased a number of LCD and Plasma monitors up-to 50″ in size, none of which came with a tuner I just assumed that the large displays of today didn’t either.

Now having all these TV’s with built in tuners is good for home buyers but for businesses it does cause a bit of a problem: many companies don’t have TV’s at there premises and as such have no need to pay for a TV license, and as many companies have a large number of employees if they did have a TV the license would be fairly expensive because I believe it comes under a public broadcast license. So having a 32″ monitor with a built in TV tuner means by law you have to have a TV license…… but finding a large screen without a TV tuner is quite a mission.

As such I’ve included a couple of links to models that don’t have TV tuners, on the off-chance that anyone here ever needs to buy one for their company. :o)

32″ LCD displays WITHOUT TV tuners:
SAMSUNG LE32R83BX LCD
Hannspree 32 Inch LCD HD TV
Matsui 32LW507 32″ HD Ready LCD TV