I tried to find an answer to my question in other postings without success; my apology if this has been indeed covered in other postings.
We are moving to Geneva from London and we have two relatively recently purchased SONY LCD TV sets that we were considering taking with us. However I understand that the Swiss TV standards are different from the UK ones and I was told that our TVs do not have the Swiss required PAL B/G capability. Sony has advised us to but a so called Set-top box to be able to view TV channels in Switzerland.
Has anyone on this forum imported UK TV sets to Switzerland and tried to connect it with a Set-top box? Any particular box recommended and what they approximately cost? Do you recommend us to import our TVs at all or we should buy new TVs in Switzerland?
Also there is a consideration that we will want to be able to receive UK TV channels so at some stage we will have a satellite dish but I have not researched that yet; first question was to see if the TV sets work in Switzerland.
Your TV will physically work. Same standard, same electrical requirement. With a Swiss cable or sat. system it is fine, built-in UK-spec Freeview/Freesat etc. I can't comment on in detail but beleive doesn't work.
This has been disscussed in lots of other posts so I wouldn't recommend getting into a "how do I get English TV" chat.
Check www.cablecom.ch to see if their service is available where you're moving. If so, then you can use their mediabox receiver for 6SFR/month to play channels as you would a vcr. They don't have many English channels, but it's also not expensive. Of course the extra feature offers from Cablecom will also work to get pay-per-view (in original language), etc.
Be sure to set up a Sky subscription BEFORE coming here, since they won't listen to you once you're outside their "area". Once you have a Sky card or free-to-view channel card, you can set up your Skybox in the normal way with your TV. I have an expired Sky card and it still picks up the free channels in Zurich. Our kids grew out of the Disney channel, so we stopped subscribing.
Bring the Sony. Worst comes to worst, you can use it like we do ours. We bought it as a TV, but found it makes even a better PC monitor (82cm)!
I would say it would work as all modern TVs I have seen have a country selector. It's easier for the manufacture these days I guess.
I brought my 20-odd inch 1998 Sony Triniton from the UK over a few years ago. That's PAL-I and doesn't switch to PAL B/G. Basically receives a picture, but no sound. However it doesn't matter because I have a digital set top box and it's connected via SCART so works fine now--you may end up doing the same if you want to receive UK channels via Cablecom or Satellite (via Sky for example).
This will depend upon what you mean by will it work.
Sony are a little bit funny with their TVs and if you get the long model number you will see that it is something like KDL-40W4000U. The last letter relates to the region the TV is designed for, where U is the UK and and E would be Europe. The only difference between the two is that a European TV has a cable decoder in there, the UK one does not.
Therefore, if you want to plug TV directly into your cable socket in the wall of your apartment it is not going to work.
As mentioned by the other posters, there are ways to make the TV work. Basically if you have any set top box, be that sky, freeview, cablecom, or who ever else is providing the service in your area, these will connect to the TV through a scart or HDMI cable, all of which will work.
The basic analogue cable connections are providing fewer and fewer channels as they push digital tv, which requires a set top box, and as mentioned cablecom's 6,- a month offering is pretty good.
So there should be no problem bringing over the TV, just don't plug it directly into the cable outlet in the wall.