The big "How do I choose an HDTV?" thread.

Stele wrote:

So if it costs $400 or more for a good 4k BR player, might as well get a PS5 or XBX right?

That's where I'm at. I'd love to know if this is a bad choice.

Stele wrote:

So if it costs $400 or more for a good 4k BR player, might as well get a PS5 or XBX right?

I can't speak to the PS5, but MS has long had a sort of laundry list or issues with their blu ray playback software. The One S and X were not good players. I've not seen anything really covering the Series S/X.

I don't even know if they ever fixed the systems displaying incorrect gamma levels regardless of HDMI Black Level setting but that carried from the One to the One S and One X and was still there when I unplugged the system and stopped using it. Wouldn't be surprised if it moved forward onto Series S/X.

*Just confirmed from multiple sources the same bug is still there. The Blu Ray playback app never displays true black, always a dark shade of gray instead. This can sometimes cause FALD issues and even harm color accuracy among the other more obvious things.

Bad players.

If you aren't picky, won't matter. If you are, avoid them as primary playback devices.

Again, can't speak to PS5. Feel like odds are it will be the better if the two, but who's to say.

The PS3 was kind of the benchmark BluRay player, so I would expect the PS5 to be excellent as well. Starting from a position of strength is harder to mess up.

Thin_J wrote:

MS has long had a sort of laundry list or issues with their blu ray playback software.

Deep within Microsoft, the splintered remnants of the HD-DVD team are secretly spiting Blu-ray at every opportunity...

*Legion* wrote:
Thin_J wrote:

MS has long had a sort of laundry list or issues with their blu ray playback software.

Deep within Microsoft, the splintered remnants of the HD-DVD team are secretly spiting Blu-ray at every opportunity...

Ha!

This YouTube comparison seems like the PS5 is just fine for 4K Bluray playback as long as you are okay with only having basic functionality and no DV or HDR10+ support.

Considering how rarely I would watch them, I think it would be good enough for my uses, assuming I can find a normal priced PS5 sometime in the next 5 years.

Maybe I'm a bit old-school, but a 4K Blu-Ray player for me falls under the category of "I want this to do one thing very well and it doesn't have to do anything else", even if I only watch a Blu-Ray once every few months.

T-Prime wrote:

Maybe I'm a bit old-school, but a 4K Blu-Ray player for me falls under the category of "I want this to do one thing very well and it doesn't have to do anything else", even if I only watch a Blu-Ray once every few months.

I have no regrets spending $300 on that Sony after watching a few episodes of Blue Planet 2. Now that I know from kuddles that the PS5 doesn't have Dolby Vision support, I'm glad I'll have the standalone player around for watching movies that I care about which support that. I'll be grabbing the extended complete versions of LOTR at some point when those come out. I'm kind of excited to be set up for 4K HDR content, and I think that'll be a good standard for the next decade or so. Hopefully my equipment lasts that long.

I have a very basic, budget 4K tv. And the LOTR discs in 4K look fantastic. Even on my not very good tv. I probably hadn’t seen them since my DVD versions years ago.

Really, now I can’t wait to upgrade the tv. I didn’t really know what to look for when I got this one.

For the player, I got the Panasonic UBP 420 I think. The only thing it’s missing is Dolby Vision, which my current tv doesn’t even support anyway. I got it for like $150 over Black Friday. Will probably upgrade to one that supports DV when I get a new tv. Otherwise the one I got has worked very well so far.

I've been planning buying a new TV since late last year. The set I was looking at (65" LG CX) was sold out during the holidays or could only be found with a bigger price tag than I was willing to pay at the time. The revised plan was to wait until the 2021 models were released.

However, looking at the differences between the CX & C1and weighing the price difference (+/-$600) now I'm leaning towards getting the CX.

Is an "improved" remote & slightly better processor worth the wait & money? Is the current remote that bad?

I just picked up a 55” CX this weekend for the bedroom and absolutely love it. Also really like the remote, is there something wrong with it? My previous tv remote was awful.

We'd like something cheap but non-sucky to stick on the wall of the game room, does anyone have suggestions for something not massively huge? Figuring right now (superbowl) is a good time to be shopping. Is the general sentiment that TCL is still the best budget pick?

Check these out

https://www.businessinsider.com/best...

TCL is definitely in the running, for 4K, using a QLED.

RTINGS scores the TCLs highly as well. Their top budget choices are the Hisense H8G and the TCL 5-series. The TCL is better at motion tests so for a gamer it would definitely be my preference of the two.

It's kind of amazing the value you can get for screens in the 50" neighborhood. I put one of the 2019 TCL 50" 4K screens in my office (from the cheaper 4-series) and it's an excellent secondary TV.

Yeah, that's what I figured, they've been at the top of the "bang for the buck" list for a while. Just went ahead and ordered a 43" 4K with Roku for $250 from BJs, free shipping.

Ranger Rick wrote:

Yeah, that's what I figured, they've been at the top of the "bang for the buck" list for a while. Just went ahead and ordered a 43" 4K with Roku for $250 from BJs, free shipping.

You won't be disappointed. We've had a TCL 55" 5 series for a year or two and it's been very nice for the money.

The Roku interface isn't bad. The only thing that is odd is that the apps won't do HDR. I don't know if it's a processing power thing or what. I went back and forth between PS4 Netflix with HDR and built in Netflix, and the built in didn't do HDR. I thought maybe it was a thing where the "HDR" icon wasn't showing because of the built in, but it definitely isn't HDR, and you can tell when comparing dark sequences on newer Netflix shows edited for using HDR.

I almost went with the TCL 6-Series instead of the Sony, but mostly bailed because it's only available through online stores in my region and did not want to deal with a potential panel lottery issue with online shops in the middle of a lockdown. The worst things I hear about them is much more fiddling with the settings to get them to look right as opposed to the big brands that have been more veering towards at least one picture mode being pretty accurate right out of the box, and also some other weird menu quirks from a traditionally Chinese bargain supplier. But for most people that only takes up time when you first get it and then never again.

Got a 65" LG CX coming in about a week and a half. I'm very excited.

Reaper81 wrote:

Got a 65" LG CX coming in about a week and a half. I'm very excited.

Sweet!

Reaper81 wrote:

Got a 65" LG CX coming in about a week and a half. I'm very excited.

Congrats!! I have the same one arriving Tuesday.

So, I got my 48" LG OLED set up with my really nice Schiit Audio DAC, tube headphone amp, and AKG K7XXs. The Sony 4K Blu-ray player outputs HDMI audio to the TV, then I can output optical 2 channel uncompressed audio to the DAC. It's kind of a perfect way to watch movies in the house since my partner doesn't like loud noises. Testing it out with Tenet.

Still living this thing as a computer monitor slash close up TV for movies.

Recently I was watching the show "Blown Away" on Netflix (glass blowing reality competition), and the second season has some great HDR, really great for demonstrating your TV's HDR capabilities.

It's a great demo for a few reasons: there are two seasons of the show, with the same content taking place in the same setting, perfect for comparisons. Season 1 of the show plays back in SDR, while Season 2 plays back in HDR. The furnaces ***glow*** fire-bright hot, and really really pops in HDR, while comparing it to Season 1 in SDR the colors are flat and the furnaces are just "white hot".

At the end of the episode when the glass art pieces are shown in the gallery, the lights sparkle and glint off the glass in HDR.

Just wanted to throw a heads up out there for everyone picking up HDR displays recently

T-Prime wrote:

Recently I was watching the show "Blown Away" on Netflix (glass blowing reality competition), and the second season has some great HDR, really great for demonstrating your TV's HDR capabilities.

It's a great demo for a few reasons: there are two seasons of the show, with the same content taking place in the same setting, perfect for comparisons. Season 1 of the show plays back in SDR, while Season 2 plays back in HDR. The furnaces ***glow*** fire-bright hot, and really really pops in HDR, while comparing it to Season 1 in SDR the colors are flat and the furnaces are just "white hot".

At the end of the episode when the glass art pieces are shown in the gallery, the lights sparkle and glint off the glass in HDR.

Just wanted to throw a heads up out there for everyone picking up HDR displays recently :)

Sweet! Will check that out then.

Just to reinforce some previous posts in here, there have been recent 4k blu ray tests on the Series X and PS5.

Series X/S are apparently incapable of both:
1. Displaying 12 bit color during playback
2. And correctly displaying 24fps (*not* 23.976fps) video

So colors are off in some ways and in actual native 24fps transfer films it will visibly skip at least one frame every minute.

PS5 plays correct framerate, but also fails to display 12 bit color when playing discs.

So if you want actual bit-perfect playback of your discs, a dedicated player is, at least for now, apparently the only path.

Also realized I forgot to answer this:

EvilDead wrote:

What encoding do you rip with? I was thinking about starting to use H.265 since my Synology natively supports it.

So this is why I kinda love the Shield TV. As a playback device it natively supports all the codecs used in blu ray and 4k blu ray discs. So I can do native rips with no re-encode and the server doesn't have to do any on the fly re-encoding work to make them playable. It just has to stream the data over my LAN and nothing else.

So if the disc is a VC-1 encode, that's what I rip. I use mkv as the file container, because makeMKV still just works and has yet to fail me.

Even allows me to use my very weak little QNAP NAS. That thing is way too slow to re-encode even full bitrate 1080p rips, but with the Shield TV it doesn't have to. The file just plays natively so even 4k rips work just fine.

Blade Runner 2049 4K is so good! I think I might like it as a movie better than the original Blade Runner.

4\

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Blade Runner 2049 4K is so good! I think I might like it as a movie better than the original Blade Runner.

4K or not, you speak with the devil's tongue, Sir.

LG's 77" CX (2020) OLED is on sale at newegg for $2800

https://www.newegg.com/lg-oled-cx-77...

You get VRR/Gsync with this screen and 120hz.

TheGameguru wrote:

LG's 77" CX (2020) OLED is on sale at newegg for $2800

https://www.newegg.com/lg-oled-cx-77...

You get VRR/Gsync with this screen and 120hz.

Do you have this TV GG? How the hell does the flush mount work? Im trying to find info on it and it seems difficult to find.

Yes I have it..it’s no different than most tv in that the more flush you get the less convenient it is to manage. The mount goes on the thicker part of the TV so essentially that part will be flush and the thin top half will have some space.

Super dumb question...I have a tv stand similar to this:

IMAGE(https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/173981370157_/FITUEYES-Classic-Clear-Tempered-Glass-TV-Stand-Suit.jpg)

What prevents me from being able to get a larger TV than they list? Like, is it a weight thing? Because TVs are lighter and lighter, I'd imagine it couldn't be that. Or is it an actual hardware issue where the attachment won't fit the back of the tv?

In my situation, it states that the stand holds up to a 65" TV. What prevents me from getting a 75"?