Moving to my own place... Need TV

MG2R · October 16, 2017

Looking at ~50 inch sizes. Would be sitting about 3 to 3.5 meters (10 - 11.5 feet) away from the screen so I figure that size should do nicely. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Do want:

picture quality (probably OLED but not sure if hard requirement)
inputs for at the very least set-top box, HTPC, and a laptop
low input latency (separate mode if necessary)

Don't care

audio quality (happy to hook up external audio solution if audio quality sucks)
smart TV privacy nightmares (will NOT be hooking this thing up to the internet)
design
3D
actual TV tuner

Budget: eh, lower is better, anything over 2k EUR is a simple "no".

Suggestions?

As you can probably tell: I'm not well-versed in TV hardware. Feel free to point out mistakes in my reasoning.

Blasteque · October 27, 2017

I'm not too familiar with what's available right now, but I can say your viewing distance is probably too far for that size of a screen. A 50" should be viewed from 2 - 3m if it's HD, 1.5 - 2m if it's 4k. This might seem crazy close (especially if you grew up with CRTs), but if you want to fully utilize the TV's resolution, that's the recommendation. This is from Crutchfield:

For HDTVs, we suggest a viewing distance between 1-1/2 and 2-1/2 times the screen diagonal.
Screen size	Viewing distance range for 1080p HDTVs
40"	5.0-8.3 feet
43"	5.4-9 feet
50"	6.3-10.4 feet
55"	6.9-11.5 feet
60"	7.5-12.5 feet
65"	8.1-13.5 feet
70"	8.75-14.6 feet
75"	9.4-15.6 feet
80"	10.0-16.7 feet
85"	10.6-17.7 feet

To see the extra detail of 4K TVs, you should sit closer — we suggest from 1 to 1-1/2 times the screen diagonal.
Screen size	Viewing distance range for 4K Ultra HD TVs
40"	3.3-5.0 feet
43"	3.6-5.4 feet
50"	4.2-6.3 feet
55"	4.6-6.9 feet
60"	5.0-7.5 feet
65"	5.4-8.1 feet
70"	5.8-8.75 feet
75"	6.3-9.4 feet
80"	6.7-10.0 feet
85"	7.1-10.6 feet

Obviously, you can watch it however you want (your own happiness is all that is important), just be aware that there are sound reasons for the common recommendations and a better experience may be possible if they're followed.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_HDTV_viewing_distance

Tadrith · October 27, 2017

I don't know what prices are like in EUR, but in the US, you can often find LG's 55" OLED screens (B6/C6 for 2016 models, B7/C7 for 2017 models) for $1500-$2000 on sale. Game mode on 2016 models is around 28ms input lag, while input lag of 2017 models in game mode is 21.4ms.

Kawaii Koneko · November 1, 2017

I would check out the Sony X900E. For the price, this seems to be the TV to beat. It has an excellent price to performance ratio. It isn't OLED it looks pretty good. The biggest drawback is that it doesn't support Dolby Vision but this may or may not be an issue for you. If you really want it, you could step up the 930 (I can't remember the exact model number but it is the next model up). This should still be within your budget for the 55" version.

I personally just bought one and so far like it. My biggest complaint is that it doesn't seem to handle upscaling lower resolution content that well. I'm not too happy with how the picture looks when upscaling. However, from what I understand, Sony is really good when it comes to upscaling so I imagine it would only be worse if I went with another TV.

Anyway, check out some of the reviews for these units. They are getting a lot of praise.