Whats the difference between cheap and expensive modern TVs?
I feel like it used to be size, color, and clarity meant more expensive. Now I look at a 500$ 4k TV and a 2000$ 4k TV and I don’t know what the difference is. They can both be smart TVs, be the same size, and have a lot of same advertised features, but what are the subtle unspoken mysteries that justify a huge price gap?
In store, it’s hard to tell the difference. They run in a ”Store” / “Retail” mode that amps up the brightness and color saturation to a level that’s often unsustainable (it will damage the TV if you use it in this mode) and that doesn’t translate well to actual content because it’s too vivid.
If you’re interested in understanding more about modern TV technology / which TVs are best, I recommend checking out Rtings and HDTVTest (there’s a site, a channel on Youtube, a subreddit, etc). The former because the reviews are great; the latter because Vincent explains these things well. He talks about specific technologies like types of OLED panels, different LED technologies, different settings on TVs and what they mean, calibration, etc…
To answer your question, though: the more expensive technologies are what cost the most, and bigger versions (starting at 55”) also tend to cost more. Right now the best TVs you can buy are OLEDs - specifically, QD-OLEDs like the Sony A95L. A 55” is like $2500. By comparison, a traditional OLED (or “WOLED”) like the LG C3 is half the price - a 55” is $1300 - and nearly as good. (And a previous gen model, like the C2, will be even cheaper, if you can find one.)
The screen technology is the biggest differentiator. Cheap sets use LCD. Some will have local dimming zones where parts of the backlight dim in order to increase contrast a bit, but there is light bleed which I find distracting
There’s a newer tech called mini LED which is basically an LCD with an array of much smaller led backlights behind it than a cheaper set. This allows for much more precise local dimming of pixels, creating a picture with a better contrast ratio and much less light bleed.
The more expensive stuff is OLED which is a different technology entirely. Its main benefit is that each pixel is lit independently without the need for backlighting which provides VERY deep blacks (the pixels are off), often described as a near infinite contrast ratio, with no light bleed. The main drawbacks are low peak brightness and the possibility of burn in, though both are getting better with time.
The newest and priciest is micro LED, which uses self illuminating LEDs as pixels so it has the same contrast advantages as OLED but it has much higher peak brightness and no burn in. This is extremely expensive and not widely available yet, but is being pitched as replacing OLED eventually.
We fell asleep with the Diablo 3 inventory screen open on our OLED and now it’s permanently burned in. Thankfully it is only noticable against yellow backgrounds. Other than that drawback, OLED screens are amazing. We have a 4k LCD screen in another room and it looks like trash compared to the OLED.
Yes, we went through all of the troubleshooting and possible fix steps, and then went through them again when we tried to file a warranty claim. Of course they claimed screen burn in isn’t covered by the warranty. There were multiple times that we walked away from that game with the inventory open. Never for more than a few hours, but I guess that plus the one night was enough. Thanks for the idea though!
Gradation, color reproduction, and gaming performance are also important factors. There are a lot of “mid tier” TVs (and even some of the “premium” TVs) that can produce really dark blacks, bright whites, and vivid colors, but…
Gradation: Mid tier and above non-OLED TVs have local dimming and other features to improve blacks and contrast. They tend to have dark blacks and very bright whites, but their performance in between is important too. You will find that many of these tvs are hard to impossible to calibrate to get even gradation between black and white. This leads to muddy grays and “crushed” blacks and whites. Crushed blacks means that very dark gray appears black so you lose detail. Crushed whites means the same on the white end. Additionally, local dimming can lead to “halo” effects in which when there is a quick transition from black to lighter colors, the black area has a halo around it.
Color: In my experience, the colors are often off. Youll get really vivid colors in certain tones and more muted colors in others. This can lead to a picture seeming to have a tint to it. Skin tones, which we tend to be more sensitive to, may appear greenish. These TVs will often have a “feature” to improve skin tones because manufacturers know that people notice that. This feature will try to correct green (or other tint) but tends to also influence reproduction of other colors.
Gaming: many TVs have a “game mode” which reduces input lag to make gaming better. Input lag is the amount of time it takes for a video signal coming into the tv to be displayed on the screen. With gaming mode off, many TVs have input lag that is 70-100ms (100ms is 1/10 of a second). This amount of lag is very noticeable in any game that requires fast reactions. Gaming mode input lag tends to be great these days - often 10ms or less… but on a lot of TVs it comes with a big price: many of the TVs picture processing features get turned off. This can include local dimming, which means you end up with gray blacks and a muddy picture in gaming mode.
I purchased and returned three higher end tvs ($900 to $1200 for a 65” tv) from about 2019 to 2021 in an attempt to replace a 55” plasma TV from 2013. Despite the fact that the plasma was 1080p and had no HDR capability, the picture was way better than any LCD-based variety I looked at (note: LED, QLED, and MicroLED are all LCD tech). All of them were bad enough in one or more of the above areas for me to return them. Most notably, I game on tv and that is where the failures of these TVs really really showed. Finally, about two years ago, I dropped the $$ for an OLED (LG C2). This was a true upgrade and I am really happy with the picture and performance. Not to say there aren’t software issues, but it felt like a real upgrade.
Quantum dot LED TVs don’t actually use quantum dot LEDs (yay, marketing). They’re built like any other LCD, but instead of having a white backlight (typically a blue LED with a phosphor to fluoresce the blue to green and red, too, making white) and then a colour filter behind each pixel subelement to only let the right colour through, they have a blue LED backlight, and then a quantum dot film that fluoresces the blue to the right colour.
The advantage of this is that you’re not making light in colours you can’t use just to get absorbed by the filter and turned into heat, so can make the backlight brighter, which, when combined with other techniques to make good LCDs, is enough to make them comparable to OLEDs in quality and price.
Actual quantum dot LEDs let you make light at practically any frequency you want, like OLEDs (traditional LEDs only make light at bandgap frequencies for atoms of elements, and there’s not a huge choice of suitable elements, hence blue LEDs taking decades to materialise after other colours were cheap). In theory, quantum dot LEDs won’t have burn-in problems, but they’re currently not practical to make a TV out of, giving marketing people plenty of time to weasel out of their fuckup with naming existing QLED TVs.
nits - overall brightness - hdr support, high refresh rates.
but. I recently got a samsung tu690T, $300ish w/ taxes! - 58" - 4k, plenty bright, good FOV… so I dunno man, I could have spent more to get a brighter set, but for the price I’m plenty happy.
One thing to keep in mind is if you’re watching old DVD’s, pay for low-tier Netflix, or have low quality pirated content, the difference will be way less noticeable.
I ignore the “top 3” brands because they’re full of ads, and practically a wiretap at this point. Surprisingly, the mid-tier brands don’t invest in selling the consumer as a product.
You may get a decent experience from a top-tier that’s kept offline, and using a media box that you have more control over.
I’ve found that response times are an important spec. TVs now are mostly < 10ms (about half a frame at 60Hz). I have older TVs where it’s > 150ms and audio goes out of sync and video games are unplayable. I suspect the cheaper TVs fare well here too. They don’t do as much postprocessing.
I won’t buy an internet ready TV. My newest screen is a hospitality screen from Samsung. It’s designed to be hardwired to a network and so doesn’t have any bloatware or telemetrics.
Mainly the color accuracy, how dark the darks are, and how bright the HDR is.
I used a $350 55" 4k TCL for five years though and it was great. I upgraded to an oled but I still have my TCL and it still looks good. The OLED looks way, way better, but if you’re not buying blurays, or just want a decent TV for sports and Netflix then the TCL will be great for you.
I sound like a salesman but I really like my cheap TV.
branding. if you want a name brand (Sony, Samsung, LG, etc) you’re going to pay through the nose for it. the knockoff chinese brands that have weird, acronym or nonsense-sounding names are going to be able to offer a perfectly good “TV” experience for a fraction of the cost of a name brand TV
Do we even need to pay attention to stuff like black level or color range anymore? I remember that being a big deal when HDTVs were newer, but now you can’t even find that information about new TVs.
My primary concern buying a TV would be UX. If the menu system is well thought out and they’re not spamming the user with advertising, it’s probably a good indicator that they’re investing in good hardware too.
Not that I wouldn’t totally geek out for weeks watching reviews and learning all the minutiae of light levels and color accuracy before pulling the trigger. The research is half the fun.
I might be speaking as a old ignorant fool, but I feel like much of the features in the past 20 years of tvs were just marketing. Or maybe I’m no longer that interested in how many vibrant colors or frames a TV can do. I may go “wow” for the first ten minutes, but then it just fades into the background.
Amount of inputs, types of inputs as in HDMI, DP, usb, etc. Refresh rate of screen measured in Hz, 30, 60, 120. Peripherals and connectivity like wifi and smart lighting. Sound output, too.
Terrible advice. If budget is a concern, then a TV with organic decay really isn’t what they should be looking at. That and with newer technologies like micro-LED, OLED is no longer the be all, end all it once was, especially when longevity isn’t a problem for these other technologies like with OLED.
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