Whats the difference between cheap and expensive modern TVs?

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.

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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.

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- Have you tried doing a pixel refresh? One night of a static screen shouldn’t cause burn in on any OLED panel.
  
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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.)

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Vincent is a gem

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aside from a lot of confoobly features and fancy internal speakers, the ability to set advanced color grading, and high-end built-in streaming features, etc., it mostly comes down to the manufacturing quality of the display and its heat resistance/dissipation. the better this is, the longer the LEDs will last and the longer your display element will last. cheap tv displays dissipate heat poorly, so the longer they're left on at a time, the shorter their lifespan. cheap TVs may only last 2-5 years with heavy use.

aside from that, the color depth and brightness of the display can contribute to its cost, as well as the quality of the other parts.

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If you want the best bang for your buck, in my opinion, you have two options.

One is to go cheap. For personal use I buy Visio displays, and have had nothing but success. I never connect them to the internet, and use my PS4 as my media player.

The other is to buy a commercial grade display. This usually means no media apps at all, but they are designed for 24/7 operation. Look for something advertised as a digital signage display.

As the other poster mentioned, OLED is supposed to have better contrast and black, but I've never noticed much of a difference.

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Have you seen them side by side? The difference between backlit LCD and OLED is massive. It's a much greater jump in quality than going from 4k to 8k (which IMHO is barely noticable)

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- In a controlled environment, side by side, yes there is a noticable difference.
  
  I work in AV, and have seen the top end stuff for sure. Maybe I'm old and my sight isn't what it was, but for home use I just don't care.
  
  With HDR in a dark room w a "properly calibrated" LED I get as good an image as I could want.
  
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- One thing about 4K and 8K is there's not a lot of media available for that format.
  
  Most streaming media is going to come in at 720p or maybe 1080p unless you are comfortable with paying top dollar for your streaming.
  
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- My tv is just a 720p panel 😂
  
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For personal use I buy Visio displays, and have had nothing but success.

I have some smaller, older Vizio TV's that were great, no issues. I recently bought 3 large, expensive Vizio TV's and had problems with all 3. All issues dealing with updates. Had 70" get stuck in an update cycle, no fix, even customer service couldn't help. Other 2 repeatedly will not turn on after an update. Problem persists occasionally, but usually resolves in 5-10 minutes.

Done with Vizio. Sony if I want to spend a lot, Samsung if I want to spend a little less.

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- That's literally why they said they don't connect them to the Internet. Just get a separate streaming service and forget about updates or internal software.
  
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- If you're out of options, it ain't hard to hunt up a replacement motherboard for $100 or less. I got a 55" TV for $80 like that.
  
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How small the lights are in the back

Edge-lit is just one big light, no dimming zones.
Direct-lit are big squares of dimmable zones in the back
Mini-led are small squares of dimmable zones, like Direct-lit but smaller
Quantum-dot Led are even smaller squares of dimmable zones that are build-into the screen

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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.

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And OLED is dimming at the pixel layer?

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I just went from a 4K 50in Hisense to a LG OLED and the difference is big imo

OLED just looks amazing

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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.

Blurays look 🔥

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- How about with gaming?
  
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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.

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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.

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- Curious, what model?
  
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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.

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Dark scenes look a lot better and more detailed. The rest not that much.

You can't fully experience season 8 of Game Of Thrones on an LCD TV. But then again it's not really worth experiencing.

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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.
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Durability. Look into the difference between consumer grade LCDs and hospitality grade displays.

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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.

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Some TV’s are OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode). These tend to be more expensive, as manufacturers argue the technology has better black levels and contrast ratios (the range of brightness between the blackest black and whitest white the TV can produce). Personally, I don’t see that big of a difference between OLED and non-OLED. At least, not enough to justify spending $2000 on a TV. Hope this helps.

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OLED is a massive upgrade. Each pixel is its own backlight instead of having an array of leds. So you get actual black, because there is no light there. The contrast and color is amazing.

But OLED is the new plasma. They don’t have burn in anymore, but if you don’t have it in a very dark room, the glare will make you go insane.

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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.

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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.

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I sure do, although OLEDs pretty much have an infinite black level, and the color range is unparalleled to LCDs.

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- How do you pay attention to it when TVs no longer list it?
  
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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.

Like getting excited over a toaster.

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- You aren't alone, buddy.
  
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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.

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Most American TVs nowadays have a 60 refresh rate

60 Hz. You should mention the units.

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Something not mentioned is that some of the cheap tvs don't support the new dolby surround audio, that only really matters if you have a home theater.

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If your budget allows, buy an OLED.
If not, don't look at one in person or you will feel sad.

Edit: clarification

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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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- I'm guessing op meant to say "if you have the budget..."
  
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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

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