I am getting real close with the Media Room revival. So I am left with the impass at what is best to do.

Options:

1. Wait in buying a new TV. See about getting the old 55" toshiba rptv from the parents basement into my basement and hope it works.
1b. Wait in buying a new TV and live without one

2. Buy a 1080p TV for cheep knowing that in 3-4 years there will be better tech out there for far less than it costs to get good now, but risk that you might be stuck with what you got for a long time.

3. Buy a high end 1080p TV as picture quality rules and who needs 4k.

4. Buy an inexpensive 4K TV as resolution trumps all.


I will admit, I am not a filmaphile and as long as the picture quality is not obsine, I will watch the TV and enjoy it, I put up with the crap that NetFlix sends over the internet (even though I have a 50Mb connection, the supposed HD and UHD comes pixilated. That might be because I have a crappy Samsung smart TV from 2012.

I am sure that I will be far more happy with a 65 or 70" tv over a 50" tv with better video viewing specs.

This brings the question to some of the inexpensive 4K TV's that are out there. There is the Hisense LED TV 65" 65K680UW that gives up the ATSC tv tuner, but I really don't care as I am not going to be watching TV on the screen. I will be watching movies and streamed content.

It's one of those Chinese companies who are trying to break into the North American market and are offering a 4K tv at less than 1/2 the big 4 main brands are.

What are the thoughts??

There is no substitute for "bigger".

I still like this chart, which indicates that I would need either a gigantic screen or a very short viewing distance in order to benefit from 4K. Those viewing distances might even require suboptimal viewing angles.



I haven't read very many good things about PQ on those Hisense TV's.

We're just using the projector all the time, now. Love it. Can't imagine going back.

Good luck. Have fun.

Tom, a missing factor in that chart is the age of the viewer. If a person is over 40, reduce everything by a third.

For me, the math shows that anything over a 19" Zenith is unseen resolution.

Hate to be debbie downer.... But finish your room first and buy later.

If you're anything like me, the project will suffer some last minute hiccup and the budget will be strained just to buy some damned seating..... Stupid spring flood.

I hope yours goes snooth until the very end!

Snooth!

I am not looking to buy right now, but I am one of those people who takes a bit to wrap ones head around something.

Plan now so that when the room does get done, I will have at least some idea what direction I am going in. But it also acts as a motivator to get the project done. It's been going on now for 9 months, so I got to get something to light that fire under my butt to get it moving. The promise of a pair of subs doesn't seem to have worked on me.

I have a 2014 model 4k (Samsung HU8550) and a 2015 model 4k (Samsung JS9000). I'm not unhappy with the 2014 model, but I wouldn't recommend it. The 2015 model, however, is a quantum leap over any TV I've had. It's not the 4k resolution that makes the difference, IMO, but rather (1) the HDR (= High Dynamic Range) which gives you bright highlights, (2) WCG (= Wide Color Gamut), which gives 92% of the color gamut that is standard in cinema, and (3) upconverting 1080 resolution to 4k, which needs some computational capacity to do well.

But you have to buy a 4k set to get the other, probably more significant, benefits, available on premium 2015 models. It's expensive to get a premium model, though. I doubt that an economy 4k set is a good deal, now.

I'll agree with others here that there is no value in 4K unless you have a really big screen. That chart Tom posted says it all.

I have not looked at any new TV's. Don't need one. I suspect that Greg is spot on about what matters in the new TVs though.

I am going to gather that I am better off with then option 1 or 1b and wait for the OLED to fall in price to make it cost effective. As 10k for a 65" tv is a bit more that I would like to pay right now

You could pick up a really nice projector for 10K.

One comment on the Netflix quality - and you probably know this - but check your settings for the quality of service for the stream. I had a friend who also mentioned the poor/limited quality. We checked his playback setting and it was low quality.

I mention this as well because I have a 2012 Samsung and I find the quality great from Netflix.

Now, keep in mind that if you don't have unlimited internet, you could drive your bill very high with cap overages.

Greg, that's good info. Thanks.

As far as netflix goes, I think a big part of it is a real CRAP version of Netflix on the Samsung TV. just for giggles, I moved the Apple TV up from the basement and connected it to the TV and the picture quality is much better. But still very highly compressed on quite a few of the shows.

I am thinking that 1080 is as far as I need to go. I have a Kodi box that I use for playing my .mkv TV shows that I get off the internet (as I don't have cable or a PVR). The HD 1080p shows look fantastic. But even the lower quality shows that are encoded at 720x480 look nearly as good and on par easily with a DVD movie.

Properly adjust a TV to give good colour and contrast/brighness and lower quality sources can look just as good.

If you're thinking of getting a 2015 premium 4k TV, 10k is a little exaggerated. I paid $5k for my one-step-down from premium 65" Samsung JS9000, and it's come down $1.5k since I got mine. $3.5k is still an awful lot for a TV, to my mind, but it's much less than $10k. Think of all I saved! And it's a really nice TV.

Spring of 2016 might be a good time to buy. The UHD blu-ray players will be out by then, and there should be a few HDR 4k blu-rays available. I don't think net streaming is likely to give good quality video.

I just picked up a 50" 4K curved Samsung TV for my brother. He (and I, when I visit) sit maybe 8-10' away from the TV. The 4K content on Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime are INCREDIBLE. It is *FAR* better than 1080P. BTW, he has 50Mbps download cable service. I watched Amazon's Bosch series on 4K and it's almost lifelike in quality. I would highly recommend you try out the 4K content in the stores.

Also, normally, I forsake the TV remote because I'm a fan of URC MX900. But the pointer function on the Samsung remote works remarkably well. It's so much easier to type stuff out when you can point at the letters (you can also attach a Bluetooth keyboard, I believe)

The 50" buy cost around $1600 if I recall.

hsb

I would prioritize size first. 1080 is still excellent.

I have a 60 inch 7150 Samsung that I am sitting on till 4k OLED becomes affordable. If buying new I'd get the least expensive TV that still had natural looking tones and decent refresh rate.

Make yourself comfortable.

This thread suddenly became interesting. My Panny plasma is hinting to me that EOL is in the near future. OLED is my preference , they are coming down in price and I am sure will be within reach in the next 12 to 18 months. A 65 inch can be had for 7g US so its getting close.

There are the two sides to this coin.

I understand that each year the cost of bigger screens seem to come down and the quality that is available will become more cost effective. But I take a look at some of the newer models of TV compared to the 46" TV that I have right now and I would say that the picture quality is not better even though the cost is less unless you go out and get one of the upper models of TV in which case you are paying about the same if not more than I did when I bought this TV 3 years ago.

But there are newer OLED that blows the picture quality away. The cost of these units are just too expensive right now. I don't know if they will drop down to the $1000 mark that I could afford.

Does it make sense just to get some form of TV for the time right now spending as little as possible so that when the cost of the OLED comes down you have not wasted as much money as buying a more expensive TV that will look better right now, but no where nearly as good as the OLED can and does.

Do you spend $500 now for acceptable that is still quite a bit of money considering a good quality TV is $1000

I don't think Oled large screen TVs will ever be price competitive. They will get better and cheaper, I'm sure, but so will LED sets. The pattern so far has been that while Oleds got slightly cheaper, LEDs got better. Resolution got better; colors got better; contrast got better; brightness got better.

Extrapolating, while Oleds get better, LEDs will get better faster, in price/performance.

The next big development in video is going to be HDR. As usual, LED is ahead of Oled. HDR-ready LED sets have been available for months (I have one), but so far as I know, Oled HDR is now just a promise from LG. There are no HDR Oled sets available for sale or in the hands of reviewers, for us to read about. Maybe we'll see HDR Oled this Fall, and maybe we won't. It is not obvious that HDR will be practical for Oled sets because of the burn-in issue -- when used at high brightness levels, Oled pixels age faster.

So you are going on about HDR, but I am quite sure that if you put an LED even with HDR right beside an OLED will it look as good? Are you telling me that HDR will make Plasma look bland?

If you look into the LED technology, the limiting factor is how black is black and how white is white. Then you have a number of steps between those two. So an 8bit TV will give you 256 gradient steps and a newer 10bit TV will give you 1024 steps. So you can get effectively more colour and a better colour reproduction. But if your blacks are never black then the only choice you have to get more dynamic range is to make the whites more brighter. But brighter does not mean whiter. And you can get to a point of over saturation where you loose detail.

I don't have an Oled set. I have had several plasma sets, and my HDR-ready LED does indeed make plasma look bland.


I can't quite follow this. Brighter does in fact mean whiter, since white in ordinary TVs is from adding the RGB primaries (with sometimes a fourth primary), so when each primary gets brighter, so does white.

You lose white detail when color depth is not sufficient (not because of saturated colors).

I do digital photography and you do get loss of detail with over saturation of colour. Think of it as when you have many bright pixles of almost the same colour side by side, the brightness bleeds into one another to the point that you cannot distinguish the subtle differences in the colour. As you make the pixles brighter, then the realism of that colour looses effect. For example if the only way to get a true red is to brighen the pixles, then a red apple would appear to glow rather than just be red. The apple would have less detail and look over saturated to get the correct colour.

I have an iMac. It has a black boarder around the outside.. but if I try and put a black graphic on the screen, the black is not as back as the outside boarder as LED cannot get a true black. Now I can get most whites, but in doing so, it over emphasizes that colour and detracts from the colours around it.

Our eyes are less sensitive to differences between very bright colors. But that's brightness, not saturation. I'm unaware of an effect that makes more saturated colors more difficult to discriminate. I thought it worked the opposite way -- more saturated colors are easier to discriminate.

here is an example



a photo of an apple



the same apple with the colour intensity boosted. it is brighter, and the red is saturated to the point that you have lost detail, but you have got a more intense looking red. The apple doesn't look realistic but very red.

I'm not sure that what you call color intensity here is the same as saturation (see note). But anyhow, the effect you are illustrating is called "banding" in describing video, and is the result of increasing a range without also increasing the number of levels reproduced. But HDR video does increase the number of levels, from the 8 bit color depth of present standard video to at least 10 bits. The number of available color gradations is multiplied by 64 or more for HDR.

For video that is not native HDR but is rather upconverted from standard 8 bit video, today's HDR-ready TVs have to rely on a good upconversion processor to smooth out bands of the sort you illustrated with your apples.

Note on saturation. The greater colorfulness of HDR-WCG displays can't really be illustrated using video monitors of the sort I have and, I suppose, the sort you have. Wide Color Gamut displays show saturations of color that standard monitors cannot reproduce. There is not just more intense color, but there are new colors.

My parents ended up getting a UHD TV. They knew it was early to be adopting, but the local dealer they like just happened to get some of last year's model in at a steal. The only reason they were looking is because their bedroom TV's tuner stopped working.

This is the model they ended up with:

Samsung 4K UHD HU9000 Series Curved Smart TV - 55” Class

You can see the original retail price was $4999.99, which of course never really counts, and Samsung's website has it marked down to $3199.99. The dealer was able to offer it for $1499. While I did see a 70" UHD TV at Costco for $1700, I doubt the picture quality was in the same league.

They went ahead and upgraded their Netflix to the plan with 4K, and they're on my Amazon.com Prime as well, so I'll have to check out some content when I can. I watched just a little of Chef's Table on Netflix, and it did look pretty good. The motion wasn't as smooth as you'd hope (which I attribute to streaming at that resolution), but the clarity was there. I'm sure UHD Blu-ray will be an even better experience.

I just thought I'd add this note to an existing thread rather than starting a new one. I'll have to have them try out the 3D on it, too.