Decide what to buy | the Reevoo.com blog, featuring news on TVs, cameras, laptops, mp3 players & other gadgets, shopping tips and deals, reviews and more

After some Reevoo shenanigans on our canoeing trip yesterday, we’ll have to relive the best moments with this deal:  Matsui PF-A701W photo frame - down from £40 to £25 with free delivery at Dixons.

I’ve been looking at the prices you can expect to pay if you buy a TV from the top brands. This will help if you’re shopping for a TV by brand - how much can you expect to pay for a Sony these days?

This data comes from thousands of purchases from Reevoo’s retail partners in 2008.

There’s no suprises at the top and bottom of the table - you can expect to get a Matsui TV for just over £200, while the average price forked out for a Pioneer set is over £1000!

Here’s the full list:

Matsui - £209
Goodmans - £250
Hitachi - £282
Philips - £522
LG - £547
Samsung - £578
Sony - £627
Toshiba - £639
Panasonic - £717
Sharp - £841
Pioneer - £1,258

This list tells us a lot about the screen sizes where manufacturers are selling the most products. For example, Matsui make televisons from 14-42″, with prices ranging from £60-550, but on average people are paying around £200, so I’d be cautious if I was looking at a £500 Matsui - not many people are buying them.

While that’s helpful, it’s also really valuable to look how the average cost for each brand varies within a particular screen size. Here’s how things pan out in 32″ TVs:

Toshiba - £414
Hitachi - £418
Philips - £445
Sharp - £455
LG - £456
Samsung - £458
Sony - £538
Panasonic - £600

Overall the average price paid for a 32″ TV was £465. Within a screen size, you’d expect to pay more for extra features, like 3 or 4 HDMI ports rather than just 2; higher picture or sound quality; or perhaps just to get a shiny logo on the front.

Of the top manufacturers, it’s interesting to see that only Sony and Panasonic sets are selling for above the average price. Although both manufacters produce models available for around £400, they stand out as the premium brands at this screen size.

On the budget end, few manufactuers are selling 32″ for much less than £400, but Hitachi and Toshiba’s low end models are very popular, making them the value-for-money pick of the 32 inchers.

Which brand do you think offers the best value-for-money? Who do you think is just charging for their logo? Share your thoughts with other shoppers.

Following on from our dodgy designs story last week, I came across more catastrophes in the MP3 department. The poor people that purchased a 2GB Matsui MAT120 definitely had a few negative things to say about their purchase.

From a massive 248 shoppers reviews on Reevoo, this MP3 player only receives an overall score of 5.3/10. Complaints seem to focus on the fact that the player deletes all of your songs on its own, its terrible battery life and how long the player actually lasted without breaking. Not good news here.

Although it seemed like a bargain – you can pick one up for around £25 - Paul from York pretty much sums up everybody else’s experience when he says “Doesn’t last more than a month. Bought 2 of these both did the same thing, after a month the memory goes, and you are unable to switch it on… You get what you pay for in the end”.

And just when I thought this was a one-off, I came across the 6GB Logik HDD60. This may have a higher score of 5.7/10 from 51 shoppers who bought it but it also had its fair share of negative comments. The biggest problems seemed to be that it’s pretty useless when you try to put music onto it – not great for an MP3 player - and that the battery life is also useless.

So if you want a MP3 player that works this summer, here’s two wasy to save you some money. If you want to find a quality MP3 player, make sure you read MP3 reviews first so that you can avoid the problems these poor shoppers had. At the moment, the top MP3 player is the 7GB Sony Walkman NWZA818. It has 49 reviews and a rating of 9.1/10.