I'm actually super excited about this video. I mean, it's all fine and good to
be checking out the latest like $5,000 BFGD or, you know, $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 that are 4K under $400. Let me try that. Let's try that
one more time. All 4K under $400.
Anywhere from around 50 in to I think
from 49 to 55. Sweet. So, we're going to
let you guys know which ones are the best in terms of the color reproduction,
viewing angles, interface, and features, and we're going to do it all in the next
8 to 9 minutes. That's what you know. What Lionus doesn't know is that there's
an al there's 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 going to tape one of these prices to each one. Wow, one of them is 220
bucks. I'm looking forward to this. But that's not all. There's stakes. 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. Agree. 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 durian. I knew
this was coming. I knew it was going to be aing durian. I talked to his wife.
You're just not 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, it kind of tastes like
spit. But all right, 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, cuz they're I mean, they're reasonably thin. How
thin of a 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 twoft 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 IO. 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,
too. 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 uh the bar. Dude, it gets worse. Do 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 uh peak brightness on this thing is
around 250 nits. Okay. So, it's not HDR no matter what
happens. But we can try cuz 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 going to get uh, you know, pixel perfect scaling, you
know, four 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 uh with
the color here. Also, wow, those pixel
response times suck. Even just watching the text pop up in this menu is gross.
You know, I got to say the backlights of cheap TVs have gotten a lot better over
the last little bit. Like, I don't notice any hot spots in 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 oversharpening 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. Ah, 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. Um, you know, same thing here,
but at least it's interpreting the data.
Now, the smeariness 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, basically basically
everything except the yellows. And I'm actually kind of surprised because
usually with the monitors that we've seen on the very low end, Septer kind of
punches above the price tag, but with like the cheapest 4K and the cheapest
144 hertz monitors that we've looked at, they've been cheap and you get what you
pay for, 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 that just based on brand name,
I'm guessing that TCL is going to come in pretty cheap. It's also really small,
so I'm thinking this is like a 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 featurerich 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.
Yeah. But what I really want to see is the menu. How snappy is it? So much
snappier. Picture settings. Let's have a look at what their defaults are. So, it
defaults to brighter, which is perfect actually for the room we're in right
now. Yes, you get HDR notification. So, it formally says, "Yes, we support HDR,
but at what peak brightness?" I don't have a spec for the TCL. Bad
sign. 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
casually. Okay, I guess I will put it in movie mode. That totally smashed all
these other TVs, huh? That's really impressive. So, this is pretty annoying.
The Xbox is picking up HDR10 video support now, but only after we went into
this settings menu, not the other settings menu. Went to TV inputs, went
to HDMI 1, and manually changed 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. I'm hoping 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. Not bad black level. Yep, it's nice and dark. What panel
technology do you think it is? Hard to say. I lied. I have a guess. I'm
guessing that it's an IPS like because I'm getting a fair bit of glow offaxis.
Uh, actually, I think that they're all VA except for one. Oh, all right. Well,
the LG 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, uh, the reflections off skin, they stand out far more than they
did on the other one. But with that said, this is clearly not,000nit or even
800 nit peak brightness. Like, it's very mediocre HDR. There's no local
dimming or anything like that. Some people complained of a really plasticky
smell. Oh, wow. Oh, 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 43in
version. We can't test this ourselves, but there is a Amazon review that says
that the 43inch version of this TV, the vase amount uses a non-standard
threading on it. Oh, so it'd be really hard to find a mount for it then. That's
right. It's M6 instead of M4. So, you're just screwed. 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 um 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 that TCL is
a more budget brand, I'm going to say $279. So, given the TVs we've looked 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 in closer and buying
that instead. Uh, IO is pretty similar.
You know, three HDMIs 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 Scepter 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 there. 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. Is the settings button really this tiny one down here? Autootion plus
settings. Auto should be off. Digital clean view. No reason not to crank the
backlight. While there's no obvious image quality issues like the
oversharpening of the scepter, I will
say that this TV is not doing a
fantastic job of retaining detail in the low lightss. 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 and 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 peak brightness. So
noticeably HDR. Yeah. Yep. Oh, for
crying out loud. I just switched it over to movie mode. Oh, yeah. When you change
inputs, it Yep. It just discards your
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 controller or a mouse via Bluetooth,
right? And so even though the like the copy promotional copy for it 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 mode. Scroll 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.
Like, 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 going to 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. Um, neither was the TCL,
though. 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. Now, 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 49UM 7300,
whereas this is a 6T900. 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 HDMI HD
deep color on. True 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 weren't looking. As soon as someone goes to the bathroom, I'm like, I do that every time I'm in a
new person's house. Yep. Oh, smoothing's on again. 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. True motion. Go yourself.
Thank you. Optimize displays for movie. No. 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 reduction is okay. Okay, I've got this dialed in the
way I like it and immediately noticeable reflections off Toothless right here. Uh
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.
It's close to 400. You look at the saturation of the greens. You look at
how, you know, just kind of vibrant it looks without being
overcooked. I can tell you guys right now the color gamut is going to be very
competitive over 99%. Okay. Bing bing.
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 8 or 10, I'm not
really going to notice, but I would suspect it's pretty decent. Right. Again, 94. That's uh 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. Freaking fantastic. I love that TVs don't have crappy input lag,
but I hate how it's different methodology for enabling it on
everything. I actually want to change my
price guess um based on what I saw in terms of the
performance of this display. And I'm going to say that I
think that this one is more expensive. I
wouldn't say it's full array local dimming good. Like it's not OLED 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's the best bang for the buck, I'm going with
this one. Um, 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 Scepter,
even at $50 less, is just I I wouldn't I
wouldn't go this route. So, I guess it's time for the reveal then. Hey. Okay,
smart guys. This your final answer. You're locked in. No phone of friends.
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 that I almost feel like this could be the
$219.99 one. And those ones, like it
wouldn't surprise me if the Samsung's more expensive, even though it's a much worse TV. Go with your gut. I've got two
50/50s here. I'm going to price them
based on the quality of the experience that I had.
So, I'm going to hope for the best. It's 220, isn't it?
Yes. One for one. He's got one so far.
Taste that cereal. Four out of four. Why
do I have to get four out of four? Because I want to see you eat durian.
Cuz Ivonne said you hate it.
Okay. I was pretty I mean, there was no way either of these was going to be 220
bucks. Do I get to rip this one off? So, if this one's
correct, then you win.
Yeah. It's worth it. Hol box of
cereal with no milk. Eat it
dry. It's still delicious, isn't
it? It's like ASMR. I have no saliva even cuz I've
been talking all day. Oh, that's
rough. I need some water. ltstore.com. So, the video today is
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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 uh 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