What TV should I buy?

[TheNuzziNuzz]

How does one select and buy a TV these days? I've always just used my gaming monitor but I decided it was time to actually have a living room with a couch and TV.

 

The couch about 10 feet from the wall.

 

What's a good budget for a TV? What are the price points and tech these days?

 

I want to get something of great value, prefably under $1,000 ideally around $500.

 

Thanks for the help guys!

[Heliian]

Sony all the way.  

 

 

[Chris Pratt]

The main differentiating features now are HDR and HDMI 2.1. 4K is a a function of screen size, and anything over 40" is basically just 4K now.

 

HDMI 2.1 is necessary for 4K@120Hz for the new generation of game consoles, and also has features like eARC that will be very beneficial if you get a soundbar or other home theatre speaker systems.

 

As far as HDR goes, the experience is very much dependent on the type of TV display technology you get. Your choices there are LED, OLED, and Mini LED/QLED. LED is the most basic type these days, and pretty much exclusively what you're going to find in the budget range, particularly at $500. LED suffers from an always on backlight, which makes it impossible to reproduce true black, necessary for any decent HDR viewing experience. Manufacturers compensate for this to a greater or lesser degree with local dimming zones. This allows the TV to selectively turn off the backlight in one or more zones to allow deeper blacks, but it's a very coarse grained control and leads to things like the halo effect you might have seen on displays when there's things like white text on black or a cursor, etc. Depending on the content, it can sometimes provide a passable HDR experience, but dark scenes will be a virtually unwatchable mess.

 

That's where OLED comes in. OLED doesn't have a separate backlight. Each pixel is individually controllable and can literally be turned completely off, which gives it the unparalleled ability to display true black. OLED however tends to be less bright than LED, making it a poor choice for a bright room with a lot of natural sunlight. It also can suffer from burn in, though that's actually very rare. Image retention is more commonly what people often mistakenly call burn in, but that's temporary and correctable. Virtually every OLED display has mitigation features to prevent even image retention from occurring, though. Regardless, if you want the absolute best viewing experience, nothing beats OLED,. currently.

 

Mini LED is a somewhat emerging tech that can provide a decent compromise. It's really still just LED, but the local dimming zones are increased from hundreds in the best LED displays, to thousands. It still suffers from the same artifacts like the halo effect, but to a lesser degree due to the many more local dimming zones. However, even then, thousands is a far cry from the effective 4 billion local dimming zones of OLED, with each pixel individually controlled.

 

QLED is proprietary to Samsung Displays and basically just combines the best of LED local dimming tech with quantum dots. That's a big topic in itself but suffice to say it just has better color reproduction than traditional LCD technology used in LED TVs (all "LED" TVs are technically LCD displays with LED backlights).

 

There's also Micro LED, but as far as I'm aware, there's still no commercially available TVs with that tech, yet, and the cost will be extreme when there are. However, it's going to be the display tech virtually all TVs will use in the future, as it combines all the benefits of LED and OLED, with none of the negatives. It's basically LED where each pixel has an individually controlled backlight LED, so you get the true blacks and infinite contrast of OLED, without the potential for burn in, as well as brighter displays overall. We're still years away from that being a practical reality, though.

 

All that said, at your budget, LED is going to be pretty much your only option. At smaller screen sizes like 42" or 55", you might be able to squeeze into OLED for under a $1000, but for watching from 10 ft away, you're probably going to want 65". 55" may be okay, depending on your personal preference. It's hard to speak for your here. I'm actually only 6 ft from my TV and I can't do smaller than 65” now, but I've also been on 65" for the past 6 years or so. Once you go bigger, it's hard to go smaller.

 

[Action_Johnson]

Just measure (diagonally) how much space you want it to take up on the wall, and get the best TV you can afford in that size-ish. 

 

I bought an LG 55UN7300PUF for about $500 a couple years ago, it's great. Calibrated it with my X-Rite, and the color's almost perfect. 

[IPD]

The conventional rule of thumb is that you want somewhere between a 1:1 and a 1:2 ratio for screen diagonal to viewing distance--with a TV.  (computer use can be below 1:1, and in my case, it is).  That means that a 10' viewing distance means that the screen recommendation for size falls somewhere between 60" and 120".

 

As 75" is probably the upper limit of affordability (at present), I'd probably stop there.  Your budget doesn't really fit a lot of choices--at least when you are up to 75" or so.  So I'd probably just go with whatever has HDMI 2.1 and call it a day.

 

I agree with Chris.  OLED is not in the budget.  Go for size and HDMI 2.1.  Anything else is gravy.

[Colty]

I used this tool. Not to find a TV size, but to find the appropriate distance to put my couch away from the TV. I prefer the THX recommendation as it has a more "theater" feel. 

https://www.inchcalculator.com/tv-size-viewing-distance-calculator/

Based off of "10ft", you should be looking at 65 inches and up. If you can pull the couch closer, you can get something smaller/a better display.

As always, I recommend using RTings to find the ideal TV for your needs.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/recommendation
 

[IPD]

Ba

3 hours ago, Colty said:

I used this tool. Not to find a TV size, but to find the appropriate distance to put my couch away from the TV. I prefer the THX recommendation as it has a more "theater" feel. 

https://www.inchcalculator.com/tv-size-viewing-distance-calculator/

Based off of "10ft", you should be looking at 65 inches and up. If you can pull the couch closer, you can get something smaller/a better display.

As always, I recommend using RTings to find the ideal TV for your needs.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/recommendation
 

Based on that, the "THX Ideal" (40 degree) is about right, I'd say.