So my 5 year old TV just went tits up on me and the repairman said it would cost too much to repair it realistically. So can someone briefly explain 4K and curved and all the other new bells and whistles in new TV tech to me? TV is the one extravagance I allow myself, my one indulgence, and I’d like to know what to look for when I go to Best Buy tomorrow.
The new big thing in TVs is high-dynamic range or HDR. It increases the colour range so the picture looks amazing (when paired with appropriate HDR-enabled content, like UHD Blu-rays and some streaming content). 4K is higher resolution than 1080p (aka FullHD) so it offers increased picture sharpness.
Pretty much everyone follows the advice on TVs: Best - RTINGS.com.
Some random thoughts:
-OLED is amazing because of the contrast ratio and basically infinitely fast pixel response. It probably isn’t worth it yet since it’s $$$, but I’m Canadian so my sense of prices is off.
-HDR is 100% worth it. It’s the most legitimate improvement to TVs since HD.
-Curved TVs and 3D were both unsuccessful gimmicks and no one makes those TVs any longer.
-Full-array local dimming (FALD) is good if the number of zones is very high otherwise it’s useless. 256+ is solid.
-A good Smart TV ecosystem is nice. Android-based models are probably top dog now, but webOS is also highly regarded.
-IPS sucks because the contrast ratio isn’t very good (1000:1) compared to VA panels (3000:1). FALD doesn’t solve this unless the number of zones is very high. Get a VA panel (if not OLED).
-True 120 Hz (rather than subpixel interpolation) is probably worth it and definitely worth it if you connect a PC to it for gaming.
Any TV worth buying will be 4K so there isn’t a decision to be made there. Panel quality isn’t something you can judge in-person and won’t be advertised and that’s where rtings comes in. Panel quality is only slightly correlated with TV price.
Go to Walmart, buy a TV for a hundred bucks. If the screen is too small, sit closer. Get out an old set of computer speakers, because the speakers will be shitty even on a better TV. If you buy a $4k TV, youre buying a $100 TV and $3900 worth of other functionality, most of which you’ll never use. Like really, how fast does your pixel response have to be?
It is important to know
- 4K signals are not available via antenna or cable, only streaming and the new 4K Blu-ray Discs. So, the TVs end up doubling the image from most sources.
- My experience has been that eventually, ‘Smart’ TVs (and DVD players) stop getting updates and fall behind. I have had better luck with separate streaming boxes which I can update/replace independently.
Yeah, I wouldn’t base a TV decision on smart TV features, unless there’s some specific unusual app you’re looking for. Our newer TV has good smart features, but for the older one we just picked up a Fire TV Stick for $35 Canadian.
4K TVs are not $4000 TVs. It’s a technical term. A super crazy expensive tv today would be about $1000 but you can get something amazing for around $500.
How much do you think a 100 Grand candy bar costs?
AWK-ward. . .
one other thing … oled looks better in darkened room. while the old-style plasmas had rich dark blacks … leds failed miserably in that regard. oleds, because of how they work, retain the rich dark blacks. one may/mayn’t be able to discern a dramatic difference while gazing at 20-30 tv monitors at the local walmart, because the surrounding region is fairly well lit. much more noticeable in a dark theater type environment. leds with ‘black’ background would look medium-dark grey … instead of a rich dark black. let’s face it, watching “star wars” or the science-channel illustrating deep space … rich dark black is the way to go.
Is the human eye capable of distinguishing the difference between 1080 and 4k?
Seems kind of gimmicky to me.
Thanks all. I do have Apple TV, but not properly installed, so the plan is a smart TV, streaming and cutting Dish to save some $$$ in anticipation of retiring soon. I’ve been lazy about doing that, but the tv made that decision for me now. Curved seemed gimmicky, glad to see that confirmed. The repair would’ve cost $600, so the repairman wisely suggested simply replace and was kind enough to not charge for his visit- he even set up my old set in place for me in the interim! I was surprised to see how much tv you can get for that amount!
Wait…wait, don’t tell me… I know this…
I’m so old I remember when it was a 10 Grand candy bar 
I foresee the return of lava lamps.
Actually, I like my 3D capable TV…
… but mostly for watching 3D movies, which are getting harder to get on BluRay.
Obviously, it was a small niche.
Our Vizio 4K (which we use mostly as a digital picture frame) has a feature where the LED backlights can be turned off in dark areas of the picture, to increase contrast.
I found that this feature causes more annoying artifacts than it improves the picture quality, so I turned it off.
Actually, to provide ambient light - I found a 60-watt (equivalent) LED lightbulb for the lamp near my rec room TV. each time you turn it off and on it cycles from 60W to 40W to 20W to provide a dimmer ambient light for TV watching. Ah, technology.
At a certain point there’s the law of diminishing returns. 4K is good when you get into the realm of (indulgent) 60-inch and larger TV’s.
As for 3D, the study done during the development of IMAX films found that binocular vision for depth perception was meaningless beyond about 15 to 20 feet. After that, what screams “realism” to our brain is high definition and lack of jerkiness. So IMAX was shot with three times the film area of regular 70mm movies; and then is seen closer up, and twice the frame rate, so the picture also reaches more of the peripheral vision. Watching high resolution in IMAX is enough to sometimes induce motion sickness. (When the first IMAX movie was shown to Queen Elizabeth at Ontario Place, they cut out the roller coaster scene after Indira Ghandi had thrown up while watching it a few weeks earlier.)
(Same number of frames per second, but the same frame is flashed on the screen twice to simulate 60fps)
So that is the ultimate destination of TV - a large-screen, full-wall IMAX experience. I’ve already seen adds for 8K, whatever that is.
Standard HD is 1920x1080. 4K doubles both dimensions, 3840x2160. Just as a fun side note, I am using a 43" 4K TV as my monitor. If your PC can do HDMI (or you buy a DVI to HDMI cable) this is like having 4 regular monitors on your desktop. And, at $379, it was less than a 27" 4K hi-res monitor.
but for you - buy a 4K, and if you use a darkened room to watch TV - look for a higher dynamic range like OLED. There are various streaming devices (like Apple TV, Roku Premiere) which do 4K and Netflix (among others) offers assorted content on 4K.
Keep in mind too, if you get an android TV, some android devices are vulnerable to viruses depending on how secure the manufacturer made it. I’d rather have to throw away a $100 streaming box than a $1000 TV. Plus, you can upgrade the box (as others have mentioned) more cheaply. You don’t need a TV that ends up like my WII, with most of those fancy online services “no longer supported”.
My advice is to put aside a hundred bucks a month. In less than a year you’ll be able to afford a 5K TV when they become available.
mmm
Obviously depends on screen size, but the truth is that for most home TVs it really is at the point of a severely diminished return. The only real reason to get a 4K TV is that that’s what most of them are anyway, the technology having become cheap enough that the premium for 4K instead of 1080p is hardly noticeable. Personally I’d rather the manufacturers have put the money into 1080p screen quality, but that’s marketing for you.
One way to keep this in perspective is that for a long time – and in fact still today, to some extent – digital theaters used the DCI 2K standard, which is exactly the same vertical resolution as 1080p and only slightly greater horizontal resolution, and that was considered good enough for a giant theatrical movie screen. And suddenly it’s not good enough for a relatively tiny home television? Sometimes I can hardly tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, and indeed the difference in film quality between different movies can be much greater than the difference between these two resolutions.
We only wish we had 10 Grands, for us it was Sawbucks.
Do you have a budget or screen size in mind? The TVs are so competitive today that price can be a good indication of quality (although you might not find the extra benefits useful).
Most TV’s will be 4k and Smart, so it will be hard to find a TV which doesn’t offer those features. The ones which don’t do that will be the more basic ones and will likely not have as good of a picture and other shortcuts to save cost. Get the HDR version if you care about picture quality since it makes a noticeable difference.
One benefit of a Smart TV is that you can stream whatever format it recognizes. So if your TV can do 4k HDR, then you can view streams at that resolution on Amazon or whatever. If you depend on an external streaming box, then you might not be able to get the higher quality stream. But really, unless you’re above 50-55" or so, the 4k difference won’t be super noticeable.