I’m not referring to any specific TV, but is there really that big of a difference between a $500 TV and a $2000 TV? I’d hope that if the two were side by side, the difference would be apparent and striking but it’s really hard to imagine that much difference in picture alone. I also can’t imagine $1500 in additional features. So what’s the deal with really expensive televisions?
Comparing identically sized TVs the difference would be probably be at least weakly apparent to most. Whether those differences would be striking is very much in the eye of the beholder.
Basically you’re mostly paying for incremental improvements in picture quality. There are also as you note sometimes little features and doodads added on more expensive models, but mostly you are paying for those modest upgrades to the picture. And for modern TVs they mostly are modest. Deeper blacks, better response times/less “soap opera-y” motion interpolation, better viewing angles, etc.
Is it worth it? It is to me, up to a point. I can be persnickety about performance (and in TVs I’m used to the now defunct plasmas, which adds a high minimum performance bar on picture quality to get over) and in most things electronic I usually try to aim at the bottom-middle of the upper tier of quality. I generally won’t shell out for the absolute top shelf because there can be an exorbitant cost premium associated with being the latest and greatest.
But for others who view TVs (or cars, or stereos, or computers, or any of a number of things) as purely utilitarian tools where okay is good enough, it’s a ridiculous waste of money. Personally I have no problem with that POV. Horses for courses.
+1
Incremental changes that require educated tweaking, i.e recommended setting, calibration disc, properly darkened room) or professional calibration for that last nth bit of quality.
Top of the line reference quality sets, typically don’t have many or any Smart TV features as the cost of the set is optimized for picture quality.
Unless you go to a specialty video store or go into a Bestbuy Magnolia room, comparing sets side by side in a showroom is pointless. Most of the sets will be set to the overly bright, colorful, overly sharp Display or Vivid mode overcome the overly bright, you’ll never have at home lighting of the store. When the store has a set on sale or one they want to push because of overstock or manufacturer’s incentive, they’ll put that set in Display or Vivid mode and the rest in standard mode to make it stand out as most customers go: “Oh, bright and pretty!”.
The technology might be different. $500 might buy you an LCD or LED set while $2000 might get you an OLED set. Either way I think you’re getting 4K resolution, as that seems standard nowadays.
Like audiophiles, goldeneyes want their sets to most accurately reflect what’s in the video, which may not be what the general public thinks is visually correct, because they’re used to the $500 Black Friday sets.
When I first got my plasma and finished tweaking it, I thought the picture was a little flat and dull. So on a lark I cracked up the settings so the picture was so bright and vivid that the actress on screen looked like she was in the room with me. It only took a minute or so before my eyes were burning and I switched back to my tweaked settings.
I realized that the over the top settings weren’t like how you perceive the real world. If you want, you can concentrate and count each hair on someone’s head, but that’s not how you normally see people. It’s like turning up your stereo so loud that the sound distorts and doesn’t sound like live music.
I sit about 6’ away from my 55" plasma, in my darkened room and can watch multiple hours of videos without any fatigue. Same with when I had my stereo setup. As Cerwin-Vega said in their ads: Loud is beautiful … if it’s clean
Resolution is only one small part of the viewing experience. Clean deep blacks, clean whites and proper color reproduction are far more important and are what more money gets you. HDR is meaningless unless the set is capable of properly handling it.
That’s true, but if you’re upgrading from a ten or fifteen or older set, even a $500 set is going to be a massive improvement.
Right. I bought a $1500 OLED 3 years back and it blows away any other LCD TV I’ve ever seen. The true blacks really make it shine - especially when viewing HDR and Dolby Vision content.
No $500 set today will outperform my 8 year old plasma in blacks, whites and color accuracy. Just because the improvements are with the newer technology, doesn’t mean it’s implemented in lower end sets. A high quality picture requires high quality components combined to quality specs and tweaked for the best picture quality.
I loved my Panasonic plasma but the room I had was way too bright for it. I’ve moved since then and my new house would be perfect for a plasma but mine died and they stopped making them. 
We just bought a TV… for less than $200. My advice? Don’t get spoiled. If you never watch the $1500 OLED, you’ll never know you’re not getting the blackest of blacks.
I just watched The Good The Bad And The Ugly. I was totally swept up in the setting, the cinematography and the soundtrack. I never once thought about the technical specs of the new TV.
What you watch on it is much more important than the box.
Corollary:
Where you drive is more important than the features of your car (other than a clean windshield, most won’t improve the view from the car).
“Don’t get spoiled. If you never watch the $1500 OLED, you’ll never know you’re not getting the blackest of blacks.”
Until you watch a movie that requires it and you can’t see what’s going on. For example, the original Halloween which has Michael slowly appearing from the dark. On your set, you probably won’t see his face until he’s in the light and would have no clue he was there until then.
Edit: As I recall, they had to brighten the dark scenes for the TV broadcast because they knew they would be lost by most viewers.
I’ve told this story before. I was watching a Korean movie set in a morgue. The main character was hiding in pitch black doorway and I was thinking about how clever the lighting was that you could see here. Then I realized that I if hadn’t been watching it on my plasma, I wouldn’t understand the scene because all I’d see was a black doorway.
I agree that content and context is King. Years ago, I watched 300 on my 20" CRT and it was one of the most enjoyable movie watching experiences I had because my friend absolutely loved the movie.
However, since I primarily watch movies by myself (and prefer there not having someone there as a distraction), I appreciate knowing that my set (in general, excluding 4K HDR content) isn’t the limiting factor in my viewing experience. As I stated above, to the extent that my set is capable, I’m viewing my movies to fullest extent of the media they’re provided on.
You sound like you know your stuff in general, but are you sure this is still true? I shopped extensively for TVs in 2014 and again in 2020, both times purchasing what I believe is considered a fairly high-end set, and I found the higher up the ladder you go in price, the more features they had, which included being smart TVs. I was actually kind of annoyed by that fact in 2014 because at the time I didn’t think I wanted or needed a smart TV, but it was not possible to get the “best” picture (at that time a Samsung plasma, as Panasonic had already stopped making plasmas) without getting a smart TV.
I also think many of these features that don’t have anything to do with picture quality are an integral part of what you get as you move up in price point. For years I kept encouraging my mother to get a new TV, as she was paying the cable company for an HD signal but didn’t even have an HD set. She went out and bought some $500 TV from Walmart, and I was dismayed to find it didn’t have many features I take for granted, like full-fledged smart TV support for all the latest apps, ARC support, and HDMI-CEC.
I stand corrected as Smart ability has apparently become a standard part of HDTVs because it’s so cheap, less than $100, probably only 10’s of dollars to implement. My plasma is a Smart TV, but that had no bearing on my purchase decision.
Note that price alone doesn’t mean it’s the best set available. The $30K price tag on that LG is because it’s so difficult to make a panel that large without defects.
To be clear. There are inherent limitations to LCD technology that will never allow them to begin to come close to OLED quality and potentially QLED will surpass OLED in quality and so on and so on.
If you really want more info. Visit avsforum.com where there are goldeneyes and industry professionals.
Despite my plasma (knock wood) is still going strong, I was ready to update to OLED until I learned they’re also prone to image retention. A huge issue for me because some of the Asian variety shows I watch weekly have huge bright logos that cause temporary burn-in on my set after less than an hour. I have to watch them on my 40" LCD in another room.
If you want a quick demo of what makes OLED black levels so impressive find someone with an iPhone ten or higher that has the OLED screen and a phone that does not. Put them both on an image of something with a black background (i.e. picture of earth). Take them into a pitch black room like a bathroom or closet. The earth on the regular screen will appear as the earth sitting in the middle of a dimly lit gray rectangle. The earth on the OLED screen will appear as just the earth floating in the blackness of the room.
TV is a visual medium, so picture quality and the aesthetic quality of the picture may be just as important as content. For example, most people wouldn’t be interested in watching much anything in Standard Definition 4:3 these days because it looks like crap next to High Definition 16:9. And with so many options and choices, all things being equal I’m watching the stuff that looks amazing over the stuff that looks so-so. And I am not alone in this I’m certain.
I don’t regret my OLED purchase for one second. One of the better things I’ve ever bought.
I thought OLED TVs were like ridiculously expensive 3 years ago. Like closer to $15,000? Or was that further back?
I’m just finding out about this stuff yesterday. I was going to order a TV for Black Friday but decided to wait until I knew more about the differences between the technologies…and until they were back in stock.
My HDTV is over 10 years old so anything should be an upgrade anyway.