Yes. If I play a game at 4k it’s noticeably sharper.
I recommend you do the following :
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Shop slickdeals or a similar deal sight and pick a TV that’s on sale in your price range
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The king of the hill right now is a 55 or 65 inch 4k OLED with HDR.
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Always check RTings for any TV you are considering. Don’t buy one that sucks. If it’s an LCD TV, make sure it has full array dimming.
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It doesn’t matter what sort of “smart” features the set includes. You can plug a Roku stick in the back or other external streaming device, and it’s going to work better than whatever is built into the TV. Also, the TV’s “smart” technology will go obsolete long before the set itself typically fails. So you’ll need to use an external streaming device regardless. I would just not even consider the smart features, and if the included Netflix/Hulu support happens to be good enough for you when you get it, then use it, otherwise, don’t.
Moderator Note
jtur88, this is in no way responsive to the questions in the OP.
As has been pointed out, this indicates you don’t even understand the question.
Your response is certainly a threadshit, and so ridiculous (“If the screen is too small, sit closer”?) as to virtually be trolling. In the future, confine yourself to constructive responses in this forum. Do not do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
That does bring up a good point that many people ignore in their quest for the best. TV size should entirely depend on the distance it will be viewed from regularly. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking bigger is always better and they just get the biggest TV they can afford in their price range, ignoring all the technical stuff they don’t understand. Being a size queen, that’s gotta be the most common TV buying mistake there is.
Clearly there is an upper limit. Sitting a couple feet back from a Jumbotron - Wikipedia is sitting too close to too big.
But other than that, how big/close is too big/close? I’m sure various advisors have rules of thumb for “the ideal”. Which amounts to specifying an angular size of the screen. I have no idea what those RoTs suggest. I suppose the typical salesman’s RoT is “The biggest you can afford”, but that’s obvious BS.
But ISTM you can probably go a long way bigger/closer than the “optimal viewing angle” RoT before bad things start to happen. IOW, the slope of the “quality of viewing” curve moving away from the optimal is pretty shallow. Comments?
My current rig is 51" diagonal and it’s 14’ 6" from eyeball to screen. That’s about 20% larger diagonally than my mobile phone held at arms length. And much smaller than my tablet held at arm’s length. That seems a smaller angular size than most folks have. I’m not an avid TV watcher so wanted something smaller and less intrusive than I see in some folk’s places.
Well, this site - Viewing Distance Calculator - will give you a recommendation.
It points out that an optimum “theatre experience” is about 30º view angle, depending on whose standard you use. For a 55-inch TV screen, that means about 7.5 feet; for 65 inch, 8.8 feet. Measuring my TV setups, mine are about 11 feet for both sizes…
But as I pointed out about Imax screens - the key is that a movie imparts a more convincing “reality” too your visual interpretation in the brain if it fills more of the peripheral vision too, so you are only losing some effect by being further away; you are not failing to experience the movie, it’s just not as immersive.
Which of course brings up another point - if it’s tripe like “The Hangover III”, “Meet the Fokkers” or “Gilligan Island” reruns - do you need an immersive, 3D, surround sound 4K experience? Even serious drama does not often need the full experience. Save that for eye candy - “Titanic”, high resolution environmental documentaries like “Blue Planet”, or visually complex presentations like the recent spate of science fiction movies. Are you looking to set up a true cinema experience, or just watch “The Bachelorette”?
One thing to be aware about HD TV’s is that they typically have motion smoothing set to on. The purpose is to make the picture sharper, but it often has the effect of making the image flatter and more plasticly looking. The scene may look like it was lit for a cheap soap-opera. If you don’t like that look, make sure you turn off that feature.
Be aware that the big weakness of built-in smart apps is the user interface. With the remote supplied with the TV you will be given an on-screen alphabet and you will use arrow keys on the remote to enter a search item. It will take you ten minutes to type in “Schwarzenegger”.
There are newer third party remotes that have a qwerty keyboard, but best and cheapest is to use Apple TV, Roku, or my favourite Chromecast ($35). These let you use your phone or tablet to run the TV apps.
@LSLGuy IIRC Roger Ebert said your distance from the screen should be twice the width of the screen.
They don’t make TVs that are too big yet. It’ll always look smaller in a month, so go big.
So I ought to have a 7+ foot wide TV. :eek:
I’d be afraid of falling into the thing and never returning. Like the old Time Tunnel series or whatever thing Syfy(?) has now whose name I can’t remember.
… and that’s why my TV has a setting where you can watch those old shows like Gilligan’s Island in a format closer to the original - a smaller image so you don’t weird pixelation artifacts when the machine is trying to upgrade something that was low-rez to begin with.
Really, my late husband is the one who picked this TV out. I’ve really loved it. I suppose that’s just an example where you need to do your research and pick out something that fits your viewing habits and desires.
It is, in fact, called the soap opera effect.
The “scathing review” linked to on the c|net page expresses the phenomenon more simply.
Peoples’ sensitivity to the effect varies. When I got my 4k smart TV a couple years ago, the first one in the family, my brother had no idea what I was talking about even in a scene I picked as a demonstration because it had jumped out at me, making me look up the phenenoma in the first place.
I think 4k is absolutely noticeable to the human eye (at least mine anyway). A great way to experience 4K is to watch “The Hunt” on Netflix as it’s streamed in 4K. It’s amazingly gorgeous (plus narraton by the awesome David Attenborough).
I replaced my 50 " 13 yo Panasonic Plasma (720p) with a "55 LG OLED (4k) last year during Black Friday and I honestly have no regrets. My advice follows most of upthread, to wit:
- At normal viewing distances, you probably can’t tell the difference between a good 1080p (HD) and a 4k (UHD) picture. Where it is discernible to most people would have you sitting 5 ft in front of a 55" TV. So this is less of a concern than the next bits. This link to reference home theater explains it well.
- Smart TV features are a nice to have but as noted a Roku, media server, or Chromecast Ultra will get you there and is more easily upgraded. I use the Youtube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime options the most on our LG. I disabled the voice control and Plus features after reading the rather invasive Terms of Service for them.
3)HDR, Wide Colour Gamut and Dolby Vison are the must haves and if your budget allows, OLED. The black levels are amazing, and the picture is crisp and crystal clear once you’ve done a little calibration. www.rtings.com is a great resource for this. - A good UHD source on a properly set up TV is simply sublime. I can tell when the source switches from 1080p to 4k on The Grand Tour as there is just this added richness and depth. It’s almost like looking out a window which would seem to contradict what I said earlier but there is just something to it that makes a slight difference.
Chefguy, here’s the chart for recommended viewing distances. TV Size to Distance Calculator and Science - RTINGS.com Technically I should have gone to a 60" set at 9 ft but that would have meant moving wall mounted speakers and a bunch of wiring which I didn’t want to do.
One reason it looks better despite the various eye charts suggesting otherwise is there’s also a big increase in bit-rate for 4k netflix. It’s around 25 megabits instead of around 8-10 megabits. This means less encoding errors and a sharper picture…even sitting back at a distance where you only barely are able to see the extra details from the 4k in itself.
It’s possible that 4k blu rays don’t look much better, from far away, on an identical in spec 1080p display vs a 4k set. I mean, I dunno, blu ray is such yesterday’s tech. Who wants to pay so much to ‘own’ a plastic disk you might lose and have to wait for it to even ship to your home, etc.
What about a projector? All that bullshit about newfangled 4D-trixels and such can’t beat a screen that’s 3x larger. 1080p projectors are quite affordable now and offer a pretty neat experience vs some tiny incremental improvement in TV resolution…
They’re pretty cool, my old man has one in his media room. It’s 167" and takes up an entire wall. It’s augmented with nine high-end wall mounted surround speakers, a giant subwoofer in the corner of the room and is powered by a massive five channel amp.
The resolution hasn’t caught up with 4k yet in terms of mass production and affordability, but I’m sure it’s on the horizon.
ETA: what I meant is that they are available, but terribly expensive. The higher end model 4k projectors can easily run over $20,000…or more.
Eh. The advantage of these swanky new 4k sets are :
a. The picture quality has continued to be improved on. HDR makes a huge difference. All the new, high end sets are 4k, so if you want to get improved picture quality with the latest sets, you’ll end up with a 4k one either way.
b. If you ever do connect a (recent model) game console or computer to one, you’ll be able to instantly tell it’s 4k. Makes a huge difference for that.
c. The quality of a 65" OLED, so long as you aren’t sitting at movie theater distances, blows the doors off a projector. Vastly better contrast, less washed out of an image, you don’t save any money with a projector + screen that is remotely competitive, the screen is in much better focus.
Quite often, you can get a better price on a TV by buying it at certain times in the year, as you can see in this graph. One of the lowest times just ended, which is the Christmas buying season. You can see the prices may return to that level around Feb/March as the manufacturers start to move out their old inventory.
If you’re not too picky about TVs, check out Craigslist. Everyone who just got a new TV for the whiz-bang features will be trying to get rid of their old one, and often at a pretty good price. Just make sure you give it a good test run to make sure the picture and features work as expected.