TV thread returns! I’m still rocking with my TCL 6 series, which has been a great value for the price. Its speakers are not great, so I ended up adding a soundbar. I know they’re nothing special but it was the simplest route for my apartment.
A friend of mine just bought a big expensive 65 inch Vizio OLED on sale a few months ago. I’ve never owned an OLED but his TV is seriously impressive. It can do 120hz, and that looked pretty great with some of the PS5 games he was showing me. I don’t know which model his TV is though.
My understanding of what gets recommended these days is:
~$500: TCL 6 series. LCD panel with good local dimming and HDR for this price but inconsistent quality control. Return it and try again if you’re not happy.
~$1000: Sony X900H or F - LCD panel with better image processing than the TCL. Seem to be hard to come by and more expensive than I’d like right now (up to $1300 for 55-inch, which is at least $200 more than I’d pay).
~$1300: LG C1/CX - I’ve never liked any LCD tvs and I’m happy to evangelize OLED. CX is last year’s model and there may still be a few hanging around for much cheaper. The B1/BX are the tier below and nearly the same but with an older CPU; people normally recommend the C model.
TVs are most expensive when just released in the spring, get significantly (30% or more) cheaper by Thanksgiving sales, and by the next spring can be found at 60% of their starting price.
hey real quick if you don’t like motion smoothing how worth it is using image processing? i turned game mode on a Hisense 4k TV to watch a film the other day but then there was heavy ghosting in scenes with low motion and now i’m thinking maybe some image processing is good actually
It’s just a fact of life on flatscreen panels. The knobs you can turn are only a portion of how the image gets scaled and treated, so game mode means minimal treatment, and the cinema modes usually mean maximal treatment. “Sony has better image processing” means that how they display images, regardless of your settings, will look better, especially on low-quality sources.
I look up those settings when I’m not sure. I know that these days TV nerds turn on a conservative amount of motion smoothing on the OLED tvs because it’s helps steady the motion without the perceptible smoothness artifacts.
I’d set video mode to the closest to a ‘Cinema’ mode you have and then disable motion smoothing or leave it on its lowest, disable adaptive contrast and any fake HDR settings or leave them on their lowest, and see if the picture looks ok. Adding latency from extra processing should be fine for TV and movies.
what’s the deal rn if I want an OLED with HDR no larger than 50"? 4K is optional but also seems like p much everything in this class is gonna be 4K by default. I’d prefer the TV to be not smart but that also seems to be nearly a foregone conclusion.
the internet seems to suggest samsung C2/C1 is the way go, though it seems like they are getting harder to find.
I got the LG CX* on the recommendations of this thread, must concur that it’s a great pick. think there was a 48"? also good luck finding one, [*]I actually got a GX because CXs were impossible to find
that’s where I got mine from, it’s clearly a grey market import from Germany with the serial number sticker rendered unreadable. A++ would purchase again
I have an LG CX and it’s great. They make a 48" and in newer models a 42". The remote has a Wii-style pointer which is actually nice for menus but I don’t use the smarts at all, don’t have it connected to the internet.
Image quality and especially motion resolution is great. You can set it to 120hz with a black frame every other image for 60hz stuff. CRT shaders look great on it. Can’t go wrong
Different market, but I got a Toshiba over here I got like 6 years ago with HDR. Will probably just buy another Toshiba if this one gets a child’s toy through it.
the only thing that’s different about that set is that it isn’t an OLED. however my current TV is a 2014 LED screen with a near perfect black level.
I was playing on my sister’s fancy new LG C2 and the colors looked great on it – if anything I had to increase the black level setting bc by default the colors were crushed overall. like, deep contrast and highly saturated image but a ton of detail was being lost. by the time I adjusted it to where I could actually see subtle details the baseline black level didn’t look that much better than my current TV.
the black level on the TV I linked is supposedly really good, too… is OLED really that much of a difference?
