New tv for around £300.. far too many.. making my head hurt
- Thread starter Thaifood
- Start date
What I would suggest is that unless your TV is broken then wait until you have more money in the kitty. Also, read the reviews at the rtings dot com web site. Pay attention to what they say after measuring the screen brigtness in SDR and HDR modes. Look at the number of people posting vids on Youtube where the TV picture has gone purple, and also look at the number of "replacing the backlight" vids working on TVs at two or three years old.
The purple picture is because the backlights have cooked themselves to death. The first casualty is a severe change in colour tone that can't be dialled out. The LEDs no longer produce white light. It has a purple cast because the green emissions dropped off. The reason why they fail so early is exactly the cost cutting that means you can buy a 43" 4K UHD TV with HDR and smart apps for £300. There's only so much that can be saved via economies of scale and efficiency improvements. Sooner or later, all the costs bottom out. That's when the bean counters look at the product itself. "Can we make the casing a cheaper way?" "Can we take away some of the free accessories like AV cables and make them chargeable items?" "Can we stop printing user manuals and build them into the TV instead?" "Can we put all the electronics on a single board?" "Can we cut the number of LED elements behind the screen if we drive the remaining ones harder?"
This is where we're at with cheap and mid-range TVs. We reached this point about 5 years ago. It's why Samsung pulled the plug on its LED panel production facilities, and it's why Panasonic now subcontracts LED TV manufacture to 3rd party suppliers. Those of us in the trade started to notice TVs going faulty with backlight issues. Some of it was this purple issue. More extreme cases had individual LEDs catch fire as they died. Fortunately, the plastics used are self-extinguishing, but not before the mini volcano has burned a hole through several layers of the screen, thus rendering it uneconomical to repair.
The accelerated death is caused by TVs being left switched to Dynamic mode, or having HDR upscaling applied to everything.
If your TV is broken then of course you need to replace it. Where money is tight, have a look at the TVs that people are selling used. eBay, AVForums, the member's market here perhaps. Read up. Older sets will have a tonne of reviews and also any issues will be well documented. Buy something that was a quality TV 5-6-7 years ago. Save you pennies for a better TV than the new ones you're looking at now.
Where it's just the apps that are out of date, buy a Fire TV stick. You don't need an Amazon subscription. YT, iPlayer, ITVX, and all the rest of the free-to-view apps that a smart TV runs are still free-to-view on a Fire TV stick. Buy a 4K Fire TV stick in the next Amazon sale. Set it to 1080p. Run it at 1080p until you get a decent 4K TV. Compare the speed. I'll bet that 9-times-out-of-10 the Firestick is quicker. I'll also bet that the apps will be supported for longer on the Fire TV stick than on the average TV.
Read the rtings review on the Samsung Q60c. It still sucks.
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