Home theaters are complicated beasts, with a dizzying array of options and a phone book worth of options to choose from. Our home theater buying guide has already covered you with the audio part of home theater, but the visuals can be just as daunting. Let's not forget that it is the largest expense in most cases. It pays to make an informed choice and consider all options when choosing the right TV for your home theater setup.
SummaryViewing distance and TV sizeProjector or flat screen TV?OLED or LCD TV?QLED, Nano Cell and Quantum DotOther factors to considerThis guide breaks down display choices based on key factors like the size of your room, viewing distance, what content you're viewing, and ambient lighting conditions, among other aspects.
Viewing distance, or how far you plan to sit from the screen, is the most important factor affecting your screen size. Determining the viewing distance should be the very first step before finalizing the size of the TV.
You can save a lot of money by simply placing your sofa closer to the screen. The very purpose of a large screen is to fill your field of vision for the ultimate cinematic experience. You can get the same effect with a 50 inch TV at a closer viewing distance, or you can pay the equivalent of a down payment on a house to get the same effect with an 80 inch TV at a closer viewing distance. more generous.
Modern DLP projectors are not only significantly cheaper than their flat panel counterparts per inch of screen size, but they also deliver surprisingly good image quality. However, all that cheap real estate screen comes at a cost. Projectors absolutely need a dark room. The projected image appears washed out and dull under normal lighting conditions. Don't expect a great home theater experience in a room with large windows and lots of natural light, unless you invest in blackout curtains.
The relatively high cost of lamp replacement is another important factor to consider, especially when the average lamp life is around 3000 hours for most projectors. You might as well forget to use your projector to watch daily news and soap operas. The hassle of retracting and installing a projection screen, the mandatory ceiling mounting, complicated wiring for the projector itself, and the need to draw the curtains as well as dim the lights each time limit the projectors largely to casual viewing activities such as movies and videos. Games.
Flat screen televisions are the only viable choice for those who want to put their home theater system in the living room, without restricting it to just movies. This leaves you with the binary choice between OLED and LCD technologies. You read that right:LCD technology, because seemingly modern LED TVs are based on the same faulty LCD technology.
An LED TV is basically the same old LCD TV, except the LCD panel is backlit with LEDs instead of relatively bulky CCFL tubes. In fact, traditional LCD TVs are no longer manufactured, and all modern LCD TVs use LED backlighting.
To be brutally honest, OLEDs are by far the better choice. Unlike LCDs, which rely on liquid crystals to block and bend light emitted from the backlight to form the image, each pixel in an OLED panel is an emissive light source. While an LCD panel has to deal with complicated, quality-robbing color filters and polarizers to create the image, the very pixels of an OLED display generate the final image.
LCD screens suffer from many issues, such as poor color saturation and accuracy, narrow viewing angles, and backlight bleeding. This is because the technology relies on rather complicated, lossy and indirect ways of reproducing the image by bending and blocking the light passing through multiple filters. Then there's also the unsightly motion blur caused by the inherent inability of critical LCD crystals to react quickly to changes.
However, the biggest downside to LCDs is their inability to turn off individual pixels like an OLED. This leads to poor black levels, which in turn severely affects the all-important contrast levels. Worries about burn-in are greatly exaggerated for OLEDs, as modern OLED panels are immune to the phenomenon unless you do something stupid like keep the same frame displayed for hours on end.
Samsung's QLED and LG's Nano Cell technologies are different trade names given to their implementation of Quantum Dot technology. Regular LCDs (or LED-backlit LCDs, for that matter) use a white backlight to reproduce the image. It is not perfectly white and has traces of color impurities, making accurate color reproduction and a wider color gamut impossible.
All a Quantum Dot panel does is replace the white backlight with a blue one and add (essentially) a sheet of plastic containing uniformly sized nanoparticles that glow red and green when excited by the blue backlight. This achieves purer white light and improves the color gamut, accuracy and saturation of LCD TVs. However, this still does not fix existing issues such as poor response times (motion blur), viewing angles, contrast, black levels, etc. that plague LCD screens.
Additionally, most high-end LCD TVs advertise hundreds of local dimming zones. This is another haphazard attempt to improve poor black levels and contrast ratio. Unsightly halos surrounding bright objects in darker scenes are an absolutely horrible side effect of this workaround used by high-end LCD TVs. Because individual pixels in OLED TVs emit light and color, you can find no less than 8.3 million "local dimming zones" in the cheapest OLED panel.
Long story short, using an OLED TV is better than spending a fortune on expensive LCD TVs relying on grossly inefficient workarounds like quantum dots and local dimming.
Having separated the hype from the reality behind the major TV technologies, you will now have decided exactly what is right for your particular home theater setup. There are many additional factors to consider before taking the plunge. Here are some general tips and guidelines that are best to follow when buying a display for a home theater setup.
That's largely all you need to know to make an informed buying decision. Keep these tips in mind and tell the friendly TV salesman to just focus on giving you a good discount. By now, you probably know more about buying the perfect home theater screen than he does. Good luck and happy hunting.
