What’s the BEST TV Under $400?

I'm actually super excited about this video I mean it's all fine and good to be checking out the latest $5,000 dfgd or you know if $5,000 oled displays but that's not what most people are actually buying so James here went online and got some of the most popular displays or TVs that you can get there are 4k under $400 let's try that over time all 4k under $400 anywhere from around 50 inches to I think from 49 to 55 sweet so we're gonna let you guys know which ones are the best in terms of the color reproduction viewing angles interface and features and we're gonna do it all in the next eight to nine minutes that's what you know what Linus doesn't know is that there's an office a game mechanic built onto this oh really so as you can see each one of these TVs do not touch that has a concealed message in front of it corresponding to one of these prices oh so I have to decide which one is which yes that's right you're gonna look at each of these TVs and then you're gonna tape one of these prices to each one how one of them is 220 bucks I'm looking forward to this but that's not all they're steaks sorry what if you get them all right you get to enjoy a bowl of your favorite cereal cranberry almond crunch okay I like cranberry almond crunch and you have to agree to this Gregory agree right now okay sure anything to make the content better if you don't get them all right you have to endure a nice big bite of Jerry I knew this was coming I knew it was gonna be a durian I talked to his wife and this video was brought to you guys by honey no matter what you're shopping for whether it's a value TV or whatever else use honey it's the free browser extension that applies the best promo codes on popular sites like Best Buy Amazon Razer and more just go to join honey calm / Linus we're gonna have that linked below [Music] you're just there's no milk you're not expecting me to get them all right there's almond milk in the fridge if it comes to it kind of tastes like spit but alright let's get started the first thing that stands out to me not just about the scepter here but about all of these displays is how couple of generations ago looking the bezels are not just in their thickness because they're I mean they're reasonably thin how they never bezel do you need but in the way that they're sticking out from the actual panel itself like having them flush against the glass has become a trend over the last couple of years the other thing is that they are all using this two-foot style of stand and it never occurred to me before cuz I just didn't think about it but yeah it must be cheaper to have the weight like all the mass of the TV sitting on top of something instead of having to build a skeleton on the inside that goes up the middle and is strong enough to be supported by just one point like the back is metal instead of plastic and there's not a ton of I Oh what the hell it doesn't have a network jack there's no home button on the remote because there's no dashboard because it's not a smart TV this is super unresponsive to what the hell I think part of it is the receiver like just getting the signal oh yeah if I get down here it's fine so this is clearly one of those ones that's designed to be mounted above your fireplace because you have no taste wow this is super basic so like that's really cheesy the logo is the the bar dude it gets worse and give the volume it moves you're not getting any points for cuteness guys is the default setting for motion compensation off I didn't mess with that so yeah okay well that's that's good I guess and apparently it has HDR but I don't really understand what HDR middle low and high means I happen to know that the peak brightness on this thing is around 250 nits okay so it's not HDR no matter what we can try because we have an Xbox here with some HDR games okay cool another tell for cheaper TVs in general is poor scaling when you throw an off resolution at it so even though you're not necessarily gonna get you know pixel perfect scaling you know for 4k pixels to one 1080p output this is extremely ugly I'm still pretty sure that they are playing some pretty funky games with the with the color here also wow those pixel of response times suck even just watching the text pop up in this menu is gross you know I gotta say the back lights of cheap TVs have gotten a lot better over the last little bit like I don't notice any hotspots and the corners or anything like that even when you've got black bars and brandon does it seem like there's a bunch of like over sharpening going on that's that's really gross like that's not even you know having a low-end processor and not doing enough processing on the image that's doing bad processing on the image and that's something that I can't condone picture settings here we go sharpness okay now it's a little soft that smearing is still nasty but look at his hair now so much better to its credit HDR does seem to be working but this is not a great HDR experience so you know where you have these reflections off the armor or anything like that it doesn't it doesn't look great you know same thing here but at least it's interpreting the data now the smear enos still looks gross but the foliage is no longer being completely destroyed by that sharpening filter that they were applying out of the box so 30 maybe 35 seems to be a better bet as far as color accuracy goes I don't see anything that you know really draws me out of watching the movie or anything like that but I would say that the gamut there's no way it's very good 93% of srgb yeah okay so that's then hot garbage and not accurate at all so we're way off on magenta blue cyan basic basically everything except the yellows and I'm actually kind of surprised because usually with them that we've seen on the very low-end separate kind of punches above the price tag with like the cheapest 4k and the cheap 144 Hertz monitors that we've looked at they've been cheap and you get what you pay for it but they're not bad I there's no way I mean I'm not this is not my final answer but I'm fairly sure that this is better just based on brand name I'm guessing that TCL is gonna come in pretty cheap it's also really small so I'm thinking this is like a pretty budget TV but obviously with better features I can see TCL is taking advantage of that Roku partnership and they've got an integrated Roku so not just a smart TV but a pretty feature-rich one build quality wise nothing really stands out here it's about the same thickness about the same you know robustness feeling has an Ethernet jack obviously three HDMI ports including audio return channel but what I really want to see is the menu how snappy is it so much snap here picture settings let's have a look at what their defaults are so it defaults to brighter this is perfect actually for the room we're in right now yes you get the HDR notification so it formally says yes we support HDR but at what peak brightness I don't have us back for the TCL bat that's it TV picture settings like where's the sharpness and like tint and stuff we figured out the menu issue you've got to select an input in order to actually change these settings so you use the asterisk button then you can get into it and then if we go into picture settings okay movie oh we can actually see what it's changing so movie it turns down your sharpness and your color and sets it to warm I wouldn't necessarily prefer that however if you look at our color checker report yeah look at this oh wow movie is like bang on this is like almost professional grade like you could edit photos on this couch really okay I guess I will put it in movie mode that totally smashed all these other TVs ha that's really impressive so this is pretty annoying the Xbox is picking up HDR 10 video support now but only after we went into this settings menu not the other settings menu went to TV inputs went to HDMI one and manually change the mode to HDMI 2.0 it was on auto before and we had power cycled the Xbox there's no excuse for it not picking that up but it wasn't moving for better this time I can already tell from this loading circle that the pixel response time is better let alone from the actual movie yep it's nice and dark what panel technology you think it is hard to say I lied I have a guess I'm guessing that it's an IPS Lake because I'm getting a fair bit of glow off axis I actually I think that they're all VA except for one oh alright well the LG a would not be VA so now we know now immediately upon loading up our movie this is noticeably noticeably better HDR so the bright points like the flames the reflections off skin they stand out far more than they did on the other one but with that said this is clearly not thousand nits or even eight hundred nits peak brightness like it's very mediocre HDR there's no local dimming or anything like that some people complain of a really plasticky smell oh wow it does smell I feel ridiculous look at your life and consider all the decisions you've made that I brought you to this this one smells a little too but not nearly like this one it's got like kind of almost a burning plasticky smell I mean I don't think that it's necessarily overheating or anything like that but it does smell now here's one weird thing that doesn't apply to this but potentially applies to the 43 inch version we can't test this ourselves but there is a amazon review that says that the 43 inch version of this TV the vase amount uses a non-standard ready on it so it would be really hard to find a mount for it then that's right it's m6 instead of m4 so you just screw this is sweet the Xbox just prompted me to enable the advanced feature Auto low latency mode that's fantastic hey do we have the the latency tester doodad oh yeah this my friends is a time sleuth hey that ain't bad 24 milliseconds in game mode are we even in game mode oh wow that's with it off it went from very good to a little bit better than very good 23 milliseconds just just shy of 24 very nice if I had to assign my price tag based on what I think it's worth I would probably go higher but if I have to assign based on what I think it costs just knowing the TCL ism or a budget brand I'm gonna say 279 so given the TVs we look at so far and the price points that you've assigned them this is absolutely worth the extra 50 bucks like by a landslide the just the fact that there's a Roku included is already a $50 adder on top of that it's just a way better TV that's bigger I get it but bigger is not always better I would suggest scooching your buttocks approximately 18 inches closer and buying that instead I Oh is pretty similar you know three HDMI is again you've got a couple USBs this time composite component looks pretty bog-standard to me but the higher degree of polish with the software especially compared to someone like sceptre is definitely immediately apparent we plugged in an Xbox it's like hey I just detected an Xbox once we're connected we've got support for everything except Dolby vision so HDR is their video modes it allows auto low latency mode which is pretty sweet and as far as the look of the image goes it immediately picked up that we've got HDR content incoming shoot they've got their stupid smoothing on by default let's go ahead and poke around in the menu a little bit here it's the settings button really this tiny one down here auto Motion Plus settings Auto should be off digital clean view mmm no reason not to crank the backplate well there's no obvious image quality issues like the over sharpening of the sceptre I will say that this TV is not doing a fantastic job of retaining detail in the low lights I mean that's something that is really noticeable on poor HDR implementations if I had to guess I'd say the peak brightness of this one is actually even lower than the TCL that I just looked at yeah it looks it looks a little bit overcooked on the red maybe the yellow as well actually looks like the red is one of the more accurate colors really yellow is bad okay and as far as brightness goes it's about 275 to 300 brightness so noticeably HD aren't ya yeah for crying out loud I just switched it over to movie mode oh yeah when you change inputs it yep it just just discards their stuff no I I never ever ever want this ever it advertises Bluetooth connectivity but that's only for audio you cannot attach your phone or game controller or a mouse by a bluetooth right and so even though the like the copy promotional copy for it yeah advertises things like screen mirroring from your phone you can't there's actually just no menu for like selecting devices time to sleuth 80 milliseconds there's no game picture modal down nope I think this is one of those ones where you have to like trick it what do you mean you just have to manually select a particular type of input device in order for it to go into low latency mode so you can see even game console I'm looking at 77 milliseconds here but if I go to home edit and I change it to PC oh well you know PC people they're far more discerning here's 11 milliseconds of input lag why don't console gamers get to have 11 milliseconds of input lag sounds I mean it's very impressive it's really nice for like a budget TV great but do it all the time so in conclusion honestly looks pretty good yeah the color accuracy wasn't fantastic but I didn't notice any immediately obvious gamut or color accuracy deficiencies at least to my eye and my main complaint here is that I'm assuming it's just too expensive compared to the TCL and that I really wish that TV manufacturers were not labeling stuff like this HDR because I think it's ruining the the brand of HDR for people who look at this and go oh well it's just too dark I can't see anything I'm gonna put this one here for now I haven't actually commented on the speakers from the previous ones but I will say that the Samsung is not great neither was the TC although the scepter is just noticeably worse than the other two at this point you know I wouldn't have thought it possible but LG's nasty smoothing might be even nastier than Samsung's it's actually a little chunkier than the Samsung a little thicker actually has nearly identical IO to the Samsung nothing about it stands out how do you feel about the fact that you don't have a Magic Remote I like the Magic Remote but I also don't think it's a huge deal because I had originally requested LG to send us a four to nine um 7300 whereas this is a sixty nine hundred and the difference being it's a budget focused holiday model that doesn't have a magic remote but how much is it saving me I think 50 bucks I wouldn't pay $400 for this with a better remote there's no way LG's menu does have its own idiosyncrasies but because I'm familiar with them I know how to turn on instant game response you have to turn an HDMI or HD deep color on to motion yes please go away maybe it's like normies don't notice and sports people notice and like it that's basically it I was at the in-laws over the holiday and they didn't even know their TV had it on I was like it was driving me crazy I turned it off when they were as soon as the bathroom like did I do that every time I'm a new person yeah yep yep so we made all those changes based on the ISF expert mode but now we have to go into the HDR version and we have to go make the changes again just like the Samsung so annoying trumotion go for yourself thank you optimized displace for move even Oh am I wrong to just turn everything I can off not necessarily there's some stuff that I tend to leave on like low like a little bit of noise reductions okay okay I've got this dialed in the way I like it and immediately noticeable reflections off toothless right here the clouds we were looking at just now reflections off the armor I guarantee you the peak brightness of this is higher than anything else that we've looked at already boom you're right and 400 you look at the saturation of the greens you look at how you know just kind of vibrant it looks without being were cooked I can tell you guys right now the color gamut is going to be very competitive over 99% okay as for the accuracy I mean it's hard to say once you get within Delta ease of honestly for me like watching a movie that I'm not you know looking at a reference display right next to it you know within like a 2:10 I'm not really gonna notice but I would suspect it's pretty decent right again 94 that's disgusting now let's figure out our low-latency nonsense oh no it might rely on the actual input telling it hey I need to be low latency oh oh oh wait wait nope LG has a game picture mode that might do it this stuff should just be so much simpler there it is boom 12 milliseconds freakin fantastic I love that TVs don't have crappy input leg but I hate how it's a different methodology for enabling on everything I actually want to change my price guess based on what I saw in terms of the performance of this display and I'm gonna say that I think that this one is more expensive I wouldn't say it's full of a local dimming good like it's not only good anyway but it is so much better than anything else we saw that I'm a lot more comfortable calling it HDR even in the first place so if I had to say which one is worth the most definitely this one if I had to say which one is the best bang for the buck I'm going with this one and Samsung assuming that it's at this price point ends up sort of in no-man's land where for an extra 30 bucks I easily take that one and sceptre even at $50 less is just I wouldn't I wouldn't go this route so I guess it's time for the reveal then hey okay smart guy is this your final answer you're locked in no phone a friend's this it's so much better that I feel like it's got to be more expensive than this but this is so much bigger thought I almost feel like this could be the to 1990 anyone and those ones like it wouldn't surprise me if the Samsungs more expensive even though it's a much worse TV go with your gut I've got 250 50s here I'm gonna price them based on the quality of the experience that I had so I'm gonna hope for the best it's 2:20 isn't it yes one for one he's got one so far he's a serial four out of four why I'd have to kept for him because I want to see you eat durian cuz he Vaughn said you hated okay I was pretty common there's no way either this isn't gonna be 200 in 20 bucks do I get to rip the so if this one's correct then you win yeah it's a box of cereal with no milk eat it dry it's delicious isn't it I've no saliva even coz I've been talking all day oh that's rough I need some water Ltd strong so the video today is brought to you guys by drop dot-com need control keyboard is one of their top selling items ever with over 10,000 sold and no wonder with its solid CNC aluminum frame built-in switch plate RGB lighting Kim K firmware for easy customizability and hot swappable key switches it is an absolute fan favorite you can load it up with cherry MX chi-wah or halo switches it's got dual USB connectors and it weighs a hefty 964 grams you could probably you know hit a baseball with it if you really wanted to not that I'm recommending that I'm recommending going and getting yours today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you enjoy these kinds of budget display roundups you might also like the recent high refresh rate budget gaming monitor video that we made where scepter fared a lot better than they did today this honestly isn't even worth the $220 I would definitely go there and this this disappointed me

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,644,311

Rating: 4.9213109 out of 5

Keywords: TV, CHEAP, BUDGET, amazon, sale, $400, 4k, hdr

Id: OgMH7EPXTDI

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/M4tik_]

He really likes HTTYD xD He tested TVs for the third time with this.