Spec me a mid range 65incher

skaif

skaif

skaif

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Hi folks, not really too hot on the TV front but I am after a 65in TV and due to my location (Qatar) I am limited by choice and I have a budget to stick to.

To save you the headache of thinking about cost I've converted to pounds and have a budget of around £500. I have thought about getting a smaller TV as there's more of a range and it's cheaper, but to be honest the place where its going needs a 65incher. Having measured it and looked at the display models, anything smaller will leave gaps which looks awkward.

I will list the potentials and ask for your opinions on which is the best one to go for.

Use case is a large room, little sunlight and mainly used for games (PS4 PRO) and movies / shows streamed in 1080 and 4k.

So here we go

In the Hisense corner - the 65inch A6500 (£460)
This seems to be the one I'm leaning towards based on my limited knowledge.
https://hisense.co.za/product/65-4k-premium-uhd-a6500-65a6500uw

TCL (who?) with their 65P8M (£460)
Looks interesting! People in the States speak highly of this apparently!
https://www.tclelectronics.com.au/products/series-p-65-inch-p8m-quhd-tv-ai-in/

Toshiba 65U58 (£410)
No idea on this one but is suspiciously cheaper than the others...
https://tvmea.teva-toshiba.com/products/u5865-series/

Sony KD65X7 & LGUM7450 (£560)
Both these are over budget but want to know if it's worth the money?

Edit
TCL C6US - (£600) Just seen this and looks quite good--But is it an extra £100 good?
https://www.tcl.com/in/en/products/c6/c6-65.html

Anyway help is appreciated! Cheers
 
All the second hand sets (well the vast majority) out here are 1080 rather than 4k. On top of that these guys don't understand the concept of depreciation and will expect almost what they paid for it. I did look at this route but to be honest better to go new.
 
I'm pretty happy with my Hisense 55 7500. The UI is clean, the inbuilt apps are stable and I've not needed to use my FireTV stick.

The only really downside is panel uniformity isn't great, but that happens plenty of high end sets.

The one you're looking at is a previous generation but I would certainly have a look at it.
 
skaif said:
Hi folks, not really too hot on the TV front but I am after a 65in TV and due to my location (Qatar) I am limited by choice and I have a budget to stick to.

To save you the headache of thinking about cost I've converted to pounds and have a budget of around £500. I have thought about getting a smaller TV as there's more of a range and it's cheaper, but to be honest the place where its going needs a 65incher. Having measured it and looked at the display models, anything smaller will leave gaps which looks awkward.

I will list the potentials and ask for your opinions on which is the best one to go for.

Use case is a large room, little sunlight and mainly used for games (PS4 PRO) and movies / shows streamed in 1080 and 4k.

So here we go

In the Hisense corner - the 65inch A6500 (£460)
This seems to be the one I'm leaning towards based on my limited knowledge.
https://hisense.co.za/product/65-4k-premium-uhd-a6500-65a6500uw

TCL (who?) with their 65P8M (£460)
Looks interesting! People in the States speak highly of this apparently!
https://www.tclelectronics.com.au/products/series-p-65-inch-p8m-quhd-tv-ai-in/

Toshiba 65U58 (£410)
No idea on this one but is suspiciously cheaper than the others...
https://tvmea.teva-toshiba.com/products/u5865-series/

Sony KD65X7 & LGUM7450 (£560)
Both these are over budget but want to know if it's worth the money?

Edit
TCL C6US - (£600) Just seen this and looks quite good--But is it an extra £100 good?
https://www.tcl.com/in/en/products/c6/c6-65.html

Anyway help is appreciated! Cheers
Click to expand...

Not trying to be picky here, but as a group these are not mid-range sets, not by a long way. They're all very firmly in the budget TV end of the market.

Roughly speaking, 65" LED TVs in the UK range in price from a shade under £550 to more than £3,500. Looking at the web addresses of co.za and com.au and tvmea, these are for S.Africa, Australia and the Middle East. Some of the models listed are old or just not ranged here. That makes it hard to get objective views from owners.

Of the brands you listed, Sony and LG are long-establish major players. The name on the front of the product relates to the name of the factory that they came out from. This hasn't been the case for Toshiba for a very long time.

AFAIK, who has the licensing rights varies from territory to territory. There has also been some churn in company ownership, and in some cases the brand is part of a portfolio of brands owned by a company making the TVs, but that company is owned in turn by a bigger company. It all gets quite complicated. All you need to do though is remember that Toshiba is aimed at price-conscious retailers and end-users. It's not about performance.

TCL and Hisense are both big Chinese electronics companies. They've been operating and growing in the Chinese home-market to the point where they dwarf the likes of Panasonic and Sony in terms of the business size. Each has spotted opportunities to expand by buying up the factories around the world vacated by the once-large Japanese and US brands.

Of the two, Hisense are making more of an effort to produce TVs to compete with the bottom-to-middle-range Sonys, Panasonics, LGs and Samsungs but either at a lower price or the same price but with more features.

Just like most manufacturers, Hisense and TCL both offer steps in their ranges where performance and/or features improve with price. What you need to remember though is that the Hisense A6500 is 3rd from bottom in its 11-model range for TVs at 55-65". Bear this in mind when reading reviews and try to avoid letting a good review of a higher-spec model influence your judgement. Having said that, between the Hisense, and TCL and the Toshiba, then it's the Hisense that gets my vote. Spend a bit more money though and you might get a brighter picture and less gaming lag. (Brightness 400 nits, that'll be maxed out rather than real-world-viewing. Gaming lag is <50ms, but on what measure?)
 
lucid said:
Not trying to be picky here, but as a group these are not mid-range sets, not by a long way. They're all very firmly in the budget TV end of the market.

Roughly speaking, 65" LED TVs in the UK range in price from a shade under £550 to more than £3,500. Looking at the web addresses of co.za and com.au and tvmea, these are for S.Africa, Australia and the Middle East. Some of the models listed are old or just not ranged here. That makes it hard to get objective views from owners.

Of the brands you listed, Sony and LG are long-establish major players. The name on the front of the product relates to the name of the factory that they came out from. This hasn't been the case for Toshiba for a very long time.

AFAIK, who has the licensing rights varies from territory to territory. There has also been some churn in company ownership, and in some cases the brand is part of a portfolio of brands owned by a company making the TVs, but that company is owned in turn by a bigger company. It all gets quite complicated. All you need to do though is remember that Toshiba is aimed at price-conscious retailers and end-users. It's not about performance.

TCL and Hisense are both big Chinese electronics companies. They've been operating and growing in the Chinese home-market to the point where they dwarf the likes of Panasonic and Sony in terms of the business size. Each has spotted opportunities to expand by buying up the factories around the world vacated by the once-large Japanese and US brands.

Of the two, Hisense are making more of an effort to produce TVs to compete with the bottom-to-middle-range Sonys, Panasonics, LGs and Samsungs but either at a lower price or the same price but with more features.

Just like most manufacturers, Hisense and TCL both offer steps in their ranges where performance and/or features improve with price. What you need to remember though is that the Hisense A6500 is 3rd from bottom in its 11-model range for TVs at 55-65". Bear this in mind when reading reviews and try to avoid letting a good review of a higher-spec model influence your judgement. Having said that, between the Hisense, and TCL and the Toshiba, then it's the Hisense that gets my vote. Spend a bit more money though and you might get a brighter picture and less gaming lag. (Brightness 400 nits, that'll be maxed out rather than real-world-viewing. Gaming lag is <50ms, but on what measure?)
Click to expand...
Awesome, thanks for the in depth info! I appreciate its difficult to compare and get reviews when I'm in the middle of nowhere and there's no equivalents for you guys to compare to!

I'll go and have a proper nosy next weekend as its payday and hopefully will try and up the budget to get something better. I was initially thinking to splash out a bit, but moving places and other unexpected costs have meant I'm not in a position to splurge just yet.

I spotted a deal on the 65sm8100 from LG? It's pretty much half price according to the sticker in the store but still £850 - is that a mid range set? Worth getting that? Or the 65um7450 for £660?
 
The closest equivalent in the UK to the SM8100 is the SM8600. Both TVs have 100/120Hz panels (much better than 50/60Hz panels for motion handling and low gaming lag), and they're Nanocell technology which better colour accuracy than standard LED. Samsung uses a similar tech that they refer to a QLED.

From the specs I've seen, the 8100 and 8600 both have HLG, HDR10 and Dolby Vision. The inclusion of DV bodes well for compatibility with high quality streaming and UHD BD disc.


I can't comment on whether the sticker showed a genuine price reduction. LG might well list a guide price for the TV that the retailer is then using for comparison, I don't know. What I can say is that UK retailers sell the 8600 for around £1100-£1200, so your local price of £850 is still very good.
 
Ok completely new choice, Sony KD65X7000G. Thoughts? It's discounted to around £500
 
Without some objective reviews it's impossible to say. You'd really need to see them side-by-side to judge things such as image brightness, colour accuracy, motion handling etc. Even then you'd be relying to some degree on the set-up of each TV.
 
Thanks for all the help and replies guys especially @lucid!

Decided on the Sony in the end after a side by side comparison in the store. The Hisense was great but the Sony just produced a better picture to my eye.

Getting it all set up now and first impressions are not too bad. Blacks arent great but I was not expecting them to be. Colours are awesome but I need to find a calibration site or method to get this running perfectly. It has a HDR mode and can be set to vivid for moar brights but not sure thats the way to go. Am I right in thinking that I need to connect to HDMI2/3 to get HDR mode on these sets?

Thanks again :D
 
Vivid generally screws up the picture. The whites are overexposed and the blacks are crushed. No picture derail in either. Backlight gets ramped up too high, so does sharpness and colour level.

Re: calibration. Using someone else's picture settings is a bad move. There is fundamental stuff such as brightness which really needs to be set for.the room conditions you have rather than the unknown room of some random stranger.

Brightness affects colour saturation and can also skew what happens with contrast in some sets. You need to get this and the backlight setting done right for your room before making any other changes; they're really that fundamental. The only way to do that accurately is to run a test pattern and then adjust until certain portions of the test image can be seen but other parts not.

Contrast requires a different pattern. This time it's the lightest parts if the image that are being adjusted. Too much and white detail gets obscured like an overexposed photo. Too little and the image looks dull. The correct point is 1 step before a certain part of the test image gets washed out.

You'd carry on with patterns for sharpness, colour tone (warm / normal / cool) for which warm is normally the most true to life, colour level (viewed through a blue filter), hue (if appropriate), and then finish off with some motion patterns to see if the TV's picture processing is helping or hindering with various combinations of signal type and cadence.

I calibrate displays professionally, and have been to home cinema enthusiasts homes where they've tried using other people's settings. I have never yet come across a situation where it got close to accurate. At best the results were different but not much better than the TV's factory settings. Sometimes though the picture was much worse. You need to get hold of a test disc or some media files and a blue filter to do the job right. It won't be as accurate as I can get with my light meter and test software, but you'll have a picture looking massively better than the factory settings.
 
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