Home Theater Advice - 4K, Dolby Vision, HDR, Atmos & more...

Yes, that really does not demonstrate how great it can look but each to their own.

I had a 5.0.2 system with a dedicated receiver before. The Sonos Arc (with 2 One SLs as surrounds) sounds great and is just so much cleaner, less clutter, GF approved… I never thought I would say this but I probably wouldn't go back to a traditional surround setup.

In terms of how it dominates a room. Which is the metric relevant to the GF.

If it were up to me, I'd want the entire wall to be viewable area.

The TV needs to be further forward considering how small it is!

Well that's just silly, if the entire wall was viewable area there'd be a console in the way at the bottom.

Ah yes, Selling Sunset does work better on the big screen.

I used to really like the idea of a home theatre / cinema room but it’s just a bit impractical. I want my living space to accommodate it, which means it’ll never be truly impressive but will be infinitely more usable.

That's looking great already. Are you going to have speakers in the wall behind the screen?

I'm hoping to move soon, and finally (maybe) build my cinema room. Basements in London are hard to come by, but if we move a bit further out, lot's of places have garages which seem a perfect size for converting. Plan would be to soundproof (and insulate) whilst installing speakers at the front and in the ceiling and then likely having wall mounted sides and rears.

I'll still have a large TV in the main living space, but use the "cinema" for big event TV, films, some games and occasional sport. If I watched everything on the same size screen then it just becomes "normal" and some of the impact is lost when wanting that more immersive experience.

So, bit of a delay but the TCL 98” C955 arrived last night. It’s… interesting. I’m not fully committing to it yet but I’ve run various content through it to see how it fares.

I’m generally pretty impressed with the picture. Coming from a 77” OLED I knew it would be different but I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I haven’t spent any time with an LED panel in 3 years and the one I put in the bedroom a couple of days ago is fairly shitty (Samsung Frame). I threw some OLED demo content up to just see how it handled blacks, contrast, and colour, and I’m quite pleased. It obviously doesn’t have the micro contrast that an OLED produces, that makes it look like seeing something through a glass panel rather than a screen, nor the perfect blacks, but it holds up very well and the extra size is, well, extra. I’m not going to get the OLED out and demo them side-by-side as I know it will favour poorly and it’s just not worth the headache and FOMO of seeing it.

It’s bright. As fuck. I’ve had to turn the brightness down to 60 to protect my retinas and I’m still concerned for them. I never felt that my OLED wasn’t bright enough (other than very dark scenes on a very bright day, and no TV will manage that perfectly) but it’s shocking how different this is.

The screen is semi-glossy. Reflection handling is pretty good, but you can see my dining room/kitchen lights reflected in the screen. The size is obviously a factor, but we’ve also only just moved in so once various light shades and things are in place it will all be reduced, and we’ll have lights off for evening viewing anyway. The OLED would have been worse for this but still wouldn’t have been an actual issue.

TV apps all behave well. It’s running Google TV so everything is present and correct. Only issue I’ve found so far is that the Apple TV+ restricts purchase and rental on Android TVs, so I need to solve that via Apple Devices and then play the content on the TV once done. An Apple TV 4K box will solve it directly within the TV, and I may go that route for ease of use.

I had one noticeable example of motion stutter on a specific YT demo (repeatable) but there’s been nothing since. HD content on YT is a bit muddy, I guess mostly because of YT’s compression coupled with the low res and large screen size. I ran an episode of Friends, also HD, via HBO Max and it didn’t look anywhere near as bad. Not great, but certainly watchable. I’m not sure I’ll watch much at 1080 anyway. As soon as YT content goes 1440 it looks fine, and everything 4K from any source has been beautiful.

I skipped through a few different scenes from different movies that I own via Apple to see some comparisons. The brightness really is something else. I’ll continue playing with it across different content but as soon as movies launch into Dolby Vision you can’t actually change it, which is weird. You can select between DV IQ, DV Bright and DV Dark, so there are some options, and putting it in DV Bright (IQ is actually brightest) everything looked pretty good.
Into the Spider-verse is crazy vivid. It’s probably the biggest noticeable difference to any content from the OLED. It’s very bright and vibrant. A little soap-opera effect in some movement in some scenes - not really fast moving stuff, just walking and things. I think this is noticeable because I’m aware of it in the change from OLED to LED, and I’m looking for the differences, but it’s minor and I’d think I’ll get used to it over a little time.
I watched a few scenes from The Batman to see how it handled dark content and it was fine. The movie itself looks a little a soft in places but I don’t think that’s the TV, just the choice for the film. OLEDs crush blacks below a certain percentage and LEDs lift them so it’s just different. I really wouldn’t complain with what I saw though.
I then finished off with the race scene from the start of Ready Player One and it was phenomenal. The summer blockbuster content is really where the TV will come into its own.

The set has 4x HDMI 2.1 ports and the PS5 is auto detected and switches into Game Mode, which turns on ALLM and VRR. I’ve not really spent much time with different games but I put about 90 mins into Apex Legends at lunch and it was buttery smooth and responsive.

And that’s where my current adventures with an obnoxious TV have got me so far. I can’t find any reviews of the set at any size so I’m going off of my own picture settings and stuff so far. The 55” and 65” models were delayed into January next year, and most reviewers don’t opt for the oversized models, so I’ll just have to wait and see what comes up later and tweak from there. So far I’m pretty happy. I was expecting more speed bumps to be honest, and I’ll get used to what’s there in exchange for the screen estate. The gf really likes it and keeps asking me how I feel, so I think she wants it to stay.

Bright LED sets definitely take a little getting used to. We've got a QD-OLED in the living room now but it replaced the last flagship LED set Panasonic made (before transitioning to OLED) and it was eye searingly bright, even compared to the QD-OLED.

For SDR content I think we had the brightness set to 19 out of 100 and HDR content (where it obviously defaulted to 100) was just insane. The finale of Batman Vs Superman on 4K Blu-Ray was genuinely so bright it was borderline painful to watch. You do gradually get used to it mind you.

Pictures make it look smaller, weirdly.
I’ll sort one out soon, but if it stays it’ll be wall-mounted and stuff.

I’m eying up the sales for a new TV. Currently we’ve got a Sony LED that’s about 5 years old. I find the viewing angle pretty shoddy and the software is abysmal. I’m not sure what to look for next really, other than perhaps an OLED. Probably in the range of up to 1k. Anyone got any recommendations?

We’ve just always had problems with android. It’s laggy and some apps crash. Iplayer for example goes out of sync a lot. We never have issues with iplayer on the Roku stick we have upstairs.

Fair enough. I’m using Google TV for the first time now and it seems fine, but I’m not far enough in to have any sort of judgement on it yet.

Regardless, right now, it's difficult to find better overall value in a TV than the Samsung S90C, if you can find one in the size and price bracket you want. Tizen (Samsung’s OS) is the worst of all of them, imo, so brace yourself for that, but the set is seemingly very good.

I’m seriously impressed with the TCL C955 atm, though I have no idea how expensive the regular sized models are. It’s a mini-LED but it’s handling everything I throw at it very well, and if you don’t get on with Google TV it's easy enough to add a stick or TV box of some variety and workaround that.