Caporegime
He’s expecting top performance HDR and 4K for £300. It’s nonsense. It’s like me getting annoyed that my £200 1660 super isn’t as good as a £1200 2080Ti. After all, the advertisement says both can run the latest games.
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- Thread starter Zefan
- Start date
What did I start. Sorry! But the guy is disillusion to expect top performance out of something that 15% of the price of an actual decent TV...
There isn't a saying "you get what you pay for" because everyone is wrong...
Soldato
Erm, where does it say in his post he was expecting the same performance as a TV £1000+ more expensive?
Where does it say that he was expecting performance rivalling a LG C9 in a TV costing £329? All it says is he's a bit disappointed with it and its taking a lot longer than he expected to fiddle with the settings to make it acceptable to him.
Both the TV's in my house were around that price when I got them. Were they as good as a TV which cost many times their price .... no, but I wasn't expecting them to be. But I was expecting them to be better than what they replaced (which actually cost quite a bit more than they did quite a few years earlier), which they were, and whilst I would like a nice state of the art TV I don't watch enough to justify it. I expected them to be of the quality that would be normal for their price point and the poster here could be the same ... and feel that what he is dealing with hasn't reached that.
Where does it say that he was expecting performance rivalling a LG C9 in a TV costing £329? All it says is he's a bit disappointed with it and its taking a lot longer than he expected to fiddle with the settings to make it acceptable to him.
Both the TV's in my house were around that price when I got them. Were they as good as a TV which cost many times their price .... no, but I wasn't expecting them to be. But I was expecting them to be better than what they replaced (which actually cost quite a bit more than they did quite a few years earlier), which they were, and whilst I would like a nice state of the art TV I don't watch enough to justify it. I expected them to be of the quality that would be normal for their price point and the poster here could be the same ... and feel that what he is dealing with hasn't reached that.
Soldato
Please take a breath and stop.
Because they are, the TV market is a lot like the GPU market where manufacturers/retailers have been gouging for years and prices have ballooned because people pay it.
People expect that if they pay X for a TV it will be better (or at least equal) to the last one they bought for X. It's comical that the TV I paid £600 for 8 years ago still looks better than the stuff they sell for that price today xD
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I wanted a slimmer power bank that could charge my phone up to 1.5 times as opposed to the 10,000mAh one which seems to drop to 2 bars after just 1 charge on my S10e. So thought I'd spend a little extra and go for one of these ultra slim ones which is slimmer than my phone, whilst being the same height and width. Found a 5000mAh one with integrated USB-C cable and the quality is solid. Metal case so will be tough for daily use 
*edit lightroom setting kept the watermark and I CBA to go back and remove. Dealwithit.jpg
*edit lightroom setting kept the watermark and I CBA to go back and remove. Dealwithit.jpg
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Caporegime
What are you talking about?
I'm kind of with everyone else here. If you've paid £370 for a 50" 4K TV you've got a pretty decent deal and would except it to have many shortcomings compared to the more expensive ones.
Someone like my mother would get that TV and probably be over the moon for the picture
rice ratio. I expect those of us on this site wouldn't be, for the most part. Have to manage your expectations.
Someone like my mother would get that TV and probably be over the moon for the picture
rice ratio. I expect those of us on this site wouldn't be, for the most part. Have to manage your expectations.
Soldato
I've been told profit margins on TV's are really slim these days. I don't know where we can check this sort of thing though...
Wait, TV prices have ballooned?! No, they really haven't. They're way lower than they were 10 years back.
Which just makes it even worse then - the fact that spending £350 on a tv now gives you and even worse picture than the tv you bought for £350 6 years ago.
I bought another tv for £499 last year and its picture isnt as good as the £300 panasonic I bought 3 years earlier IMO.
I would agree that although we are getting cheaper TVs we seem to be getting worse TVs.
Although I would agree that £370 for a 50" tv is definitely in the budget range and there are some real lemons, even from top brand manufacturers in that price range which should just be skipped IMO. You really need to do you research, more so than buying a high end TV.
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Caporegime
Purchased my 50" LG last December for £399, can't moan about it at all really.
50UK6470PLC
Is it the latest and greatest? No. Is it QLED or nano whatever, no. It's sat over 10ft away from me on the wall, so u less I stick my face on it it really won't make a major difference to me, particularly on the larger price point required to make it majorly noticeable day to day.
Could you even get a £350 50" TV 6 years ago? Nevermind a good one
Maybe not but the point still stands. Some TV;s have substantially dropped in quality for the same price range.
Have they? Or do people automatically assume they can get bigger AND better for the same money?
I'm not convinced that like for like sized TVs have got substantially worse at the same price point.
If you're trying to buy a 50" screen to replace an old 43", you have to expect the quality to take a dip if you're trying to buy it for the price you bought the 43".
Soldato
Agreed. And one example case of it being a better TV 6 years ago for the money, isn't really concrete evidence of it being a full on trend in that direction.
Soldato
Basic trends that are acknowledged in the TV industry:
- Margins are a lot tighter than before. The industry runs on an annual release cycle and it's become very competitive because of the general price and margin drops
- You can get more telly for less i.e. a bigger screen at higher resolution for cheaper than ever before.
- There is such a thing as a poor quality (or, variable quality) TV product. CPU speed, level of image processing, chassis build, and obviously panel quality all vary. There is certainly a price point where you might not be winning on any of those fronts except cheapness.
That said, I'm surprised a Samsung would be so disappointing as they're a top tier brand. You do have to manage expectations but there are many budget brands below Samsung.
I bought a 2015 model Samsung, in 2016, 48" for £500. That was a killer discount even considering it was end of line. So to find the same size for £350 now? Samsung have either introduced an even lower spec, or everything has squeezed margins even further.
Obviously higher end TVs will have more spec to justify price and hopefully a higher margin. But to see OLED drop to 1000 when the same size 3 years ago was 2000+? That's a new, improving technology. Definitely not price gouging.
You get what you pay for in any given year. Depends on your price point whether that's better than a few years ago or not.
Source: I test TVs for certification.
- Margins are a lot tighter than before. The industry runs on an annual release cycle and it's become very competitive because of the general price and margin drops
- You can get more telly for less i.e. a bigger screen at higher resolution for cheaper than ever before.
- There is such a thing as a poor quality (or, variable quality) TV product. CPU speed, level of image processing, chassis build, and obviously panel quality all vary. There is certainly a price point where you might not be winning on any of those fronts except cheapness.
That said, I'm surprised a Samsung would be so disappointing as they're a top tier brand. You do have to manage expectations but there are many budget brands below Samsung.
I bought a 2015 model Samsung, in 2016, 48" for £500. That was a killer discount even considering it was end of line. So to find the same size for £350 now? Samsung have either introduced an even lower spec, or everything has squeezed margins even further.
Obviously higher end TVs will have more spec to justify price and hopefully a higher margin. But to see OLED drop to 1000 when the same size 3 years ago was 2000+? That's a new, improving technology. Definitely not price gouging.
You get what you pay for in any given year. Depends on your price point whether that's better than a few years ago or not.
Source: I test TVs for certification.
Well from what I have read, there is massive price gouging in OLED Tv's and they are making the manufacturers massive profit margins but there is very little reason to drop them to the £500-£700 price point they should be as us consumers keep buying them as fast as they can make them. Supply & Demand.
Soldato
I agree, they'll have the biggest margins. I don't know they could be produced as cheaply as other panels but they have desirability on their side. Where "healthy margin" becomes gouging is probably not something I'd know really.
I agree. People step up in size to a big 4k TV and HD and SD looks worse on them. Higher quality TVs with better upscaling fare much better.
Yeah gouging is perhaps too strong a word for it but an lcd panels costs £30 to make and the same size OLED one costs $80 but production is about to quadruple from the LG and Samsung factories and once china gets better with their plants, cost of panels will soon be equal to LCD. At the moment though the margins on OLED are two to three times more than LCD which is why there is much more than a $50 difference in end price of the TVs.
Take LG's performance in 2018 when they had OLED TVs and nobody else had them. Their profits for their TV division went up 76% to a new record. So they are selling them more than they need to sell them for. Capitalism for you
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