The Sony X900E is a very solid choice if your budget allows approaching $1000.
I had a brand avoidance when it came to their TVs for a while, but after a week of cross-referencing specs and reviews I went with a 55 inch for 900$ nearby.
It’s been gorgeous with pc and PS4 hooked up, HDR. Besides optimizing a variety of things for picture and latency, disabling or removing a lot of the smart tv stuff was easy enough. The only strike against it is that the picture very noticeably fades at an angle. As long as you’re viewing at I think something like a 55-60 angle out from the center, it’s vivid. Witcher 3 and God of War really strut their stuff. The December trailer for Death Stranding (4K) gave a whole different level detail on their suits material wise.
Upscaling all manner of SD content and 1080 is also a key factor imo which is why I went with Sony as they supposedly do it very well. Though I haven’t been able to contrast with other TVs most sources do look decent to well done.
I believe those were both abandoned some 3-4 years back, at least for now. The big next-gen technology is micro-LEDs, where each pixel is an individual LED light, which would have all the deep-black advantages of OLED but with the potential to get much, much brighter. That looks to be ten or more years away (i.e., Samsung says they’ll sell a 146" TV composed of 4 bolted-together displays soon…and it looks like it’ll be $350,000).
Yes, the late model 1080p Kuro still compete. A really good local dimming LCD would be a better overall choice in a bright room with a lot of windows. And HDR is a thing now.
But the overall consistency of a Kuro is still tough to beat. No back light bleed. Uniformity in the backlighting (with a pure black screen, you have trouble telling it’s even on. and extra wide aspect ratios dont result in a glowy band obviously seperate from the unused part of the screen) Not simply a dark black, but nuance in shadow detail. Zero image fade at angles. That’s stuff which still only the better and best TVs do well.
Lower cost LCD indeed look similar in picture. But there are clear differences, after a point.
This is a very informative thread! I don’t know if I’ll ever have enough money to buy a TV but if I do in the next years I’ll know what to look out for. But before I get a TV I’ll get a 4k HDR 144 hz monitor. And a graphics card that can utilize it. That would already set me back 2000 Euros, probably!
The deal with ARC is that someday HDMI will live up to its promise of being a single-cord solution but haha, actually you’ll never not worry about passthrough audio with HDMI and the DRM handshake and all that rigamarole being on the Sam tech cadence and it will never ‘just work’.
I use optical/TOSlink from the TV to speakers but that’s a dying standard and I’m not getting the newest audio encodings this way. Still, on my last TV i couldn’t do anything TV->speakers and juggled an optical cord directly to speakers every time I switched devices, so this new world where everyone is HDMI in-> shared TV out to speakers is nice.
I’m perfectly happy with having gotten a 144hz 1440p GSync monitor (two years ago) and a 4k HDR projector (this month). It seemed like the best way to divvy up that feature set given that getting it all in one product is still not really viable
If you have a car buy from Best Buy because they have a very generous 90 day return policy. I tried three or four TVs for my circumstances before I settled on one.
I had a weird desk and needed the TV to fit that weird desk.
fwiw, i am pretty happy w/ ARC, as well as MHL, and wouldn’t want to miss it.
Setup is as follows:
2013 (iirc) Sony W805 47" LCD <=ARC/MHL=> Yamaha Rx601 receiver <=> everything else.
why am i so happy with it?
well, with either my TV or Receiver remote, i can do basic control stuff on the PS4 and PS3 (nice for e. g. prime, netflix, other streaming applications) and even do all you ever want from kodi on my rpi3 - e.g. with the TV remote, i can browse a tv station app of kodi and, using the option button on the remote that works as right mouse key, download documentaries directly to the SD card or connected SSD.
Of course, all sound is piped through the receiver, aside from the Laptop which only has a mini-dvi port that, for whatever reason, does not put out sound. therefore i have a separate audio cable and have connected that to the HDMI port where i connect the PC/laptop to.
but coming back to MHL/ARC, it is almost too easy, and replaced all ‘smart’ functionality this TV could offer (which wouldnbe horribly outdated by now, anyway).
So, almost all of the time when i am not playing a game on the PS3/4, i am using the TV remote for doing everything, and that’s pretty cool - years ago you had to buy a “clever” remote from logitech (iirc) for that.
it’s a UHD50, which I got for the equivalent of $1200 USD, which is the cheapest any real 4K HDR projector has dropped so far. I’d been waiting until it got into the price range of comparable TVs, though it’s still $900 more than I paid for my secondhand 720p projector a decade ago…
it’s ceiling mounted, yeah, but that’s not actually that hard to do; just staple gun the wires to the wall and drill three screws into your ceiling studs like 10 feet out from the wall. very paint-overable when you take it down.
