Best Budget TV Under $600, Why Is TV Calibration Still Required? | You Asked Ep. 10

On today’s episode of You Asked! Why do sports look so terrible on TVs now? Why don’t manufacturers just calibrate their TVs at the factory? What’s the best 55-inch TV under six hundred dollars, and what’s the best small-screen premium TV?

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VIDEO CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:08 Why Do TV's Still Need Calibration?
05:17 Best Budget TV Under $600?
06:25 Best TV for Sports Viewing?
09:31 Best High-End TV Under 55 Inches?

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[Caleb_Denison]

Hey everyone! No joke, these are some of the best comments I’ve seen in a while. I especially love all the folks weighing in on Ben’s question. I love the community we’ve got going here. 9 out of 10 comments are positive and helpful. Let’s keep it that way! Much love to all of you. I’m so grateful, you have no idea! ❤❤❤

[AleksiJoensuu]

"I'd like to keep the screen size small. Under 55 inches." The times we live in! <3

[johnnyice]

As for a TV under 55” that will last for 15 years that performs well. Go with an OLED. I have an LG B6 from 2014. It has over 36, 600+ hours of use. I’m retired and that TV goes on in the morning with my first cup of coffee and doesn’t go off till I go to bed, unless I go out which isn’t often as I’m physically a mess. It looks just as good as the day I bought it. Now I don’t know how many hours you watch per day but I’m guessing you don’t come anywhere close to my usage case. That 36, 600 + adds up to slightly of 12 years of 8 hours per day of use. Just my two cents worth of info. Good luck in your endeavor.

[TheSplurt]

Thank you for shedding light on the degraded signal received from traditional cable. 2 days prior to this video I had a huge aha moment when I noticed the difference in picture quality from watching an episode of the Golden Bachelor (don't judge) recorded on my xfinity DVR and streaming it from Hulu. It was a dramatic difference, far sharper streamed from Hulu. It made so much sense.

[daanishafzal]

A comparison between the X95L and an OLED would be great! I'm sure like myself, many people are in the same boat in trying to decide between the two

[RobertPeters-gl]

Your compression issue I solved with Hisense 7h with next gen receiver the Sunday football is crisp and clear with surround sound. Please talk more about over the air television . Great job!

[DrkRydrProductions]

Why does Digital Trends Content look and sound so darn GOOD

[jolness]

Nvidia needs to update the shield with “super resolution” been really impressed by how well it works even going from 480p to 4k.

[cleonf]

I got curious about the compression effect on sports' smoothness. Would be possible and would make sense to show us the difference. For example, compare a fast motion sequence with no compression and the same sequence with the compression normally used in broadcast. Thank you for the amazing content you guys in DT provide.

[krishy]

Caleb teasing us with the Sony A95L clips ;)
Hope the review is soon!

[Barbarapape]

Re TV calibration, having worked all my life as a A/V tech i have seen some realy bad samples
of how the factory settings do the TV's no favours.
You get what you pay for most of the time, my advice is that if like me you are a perfectionist
stick with Sony, as Caleb has said, they get the settings as close as you can expect leaving you
the choice of tweaking them or paying for a full calibration.
Be careful who you choose to do a calibration, i have seen some sets that have looked way off
after an inexperienced calibrator has made a mess of the settings.

[bobs]

My Samsung 52” LED (red bezel model) which still looks amazing is 20 years old and going strong. I may replace it in a few years only because I want a larger screen size.

[grantwhittington]

Hi caleb, 2 questions:
1. Why did you put an emoji over one of the sony TV's referenced during the discussion on calibration? Was it an older model?

2. Is there a timefraime that calibration is mist impactful? I.e. should you calibrate a TV straight away or can you still calibrate after a year or two of general use?

Thanks for your feedback. Loving your content here in Australia

[esteban]

For those of you suffering from poor sports image, sometimes something as simple as an old school antenna can help you get the best picture. Broadcast TV is the source with the least compression and no cable or internet middleman manipulating and compressing the signal even more. If it's possible, put that digital tuner to good use and get yourself a good uhf antenna. There are way more channels than there used to be for free. A good antenna could cost you less than a month of cable.

[paulbrown]

Caleb, SUCH an excellent explanation of presets and calibration and the reasons one might want to calibrate their TV!

[dgillies]

Another problem with sports is that you need variable-rate compression. I say this as a person who took out a US patent on the DASH streaming protocol for just improving sports playback bitrates. I was watching cycling event in 2011, and it was switching between the in-studio commentator and the cyclists pedaling their bikes. In-studio the announcer was crystal clear - too clear, actually. On the bike, the spinning chainwheel was a blocky mess. They actually needed to reduce the compression of in-studio video and save the extra bandwidth to do less compression on the bike shots. Most TV systems today probably can't do this in real-time for a live broadcast, but for a pre-recorded event a good video mastering engineer can do it with a few hours of patience to perfect the compressed video.

[steveludwig]

I bought a SONY 55 inch X80CK last month for $399 at Sams Club.

[LilJayV]

In regards to the poor picture quality/compressed data part of the video. I don't know if it's still this way or not, but OTA HD programming is/was damn near bluray quality because they don't limit the bandwith with OTA like they do in other formats.

[cnewt]

Where’s the A95L review 😑 That’s the only thing I’m interested in right now

[willhutton]

So I’m upgrading from a 2021 Model (Roku) TCL 6-series. I’m torn on whether to stick with TCL or switch to Hisense. I’m leaning to the Hisense U7K because my local Best Buy is having a $150 off deal for a new total of $479.99. That’s really hard to beat.