CCF Archive Site

They are all made in the same lead and poison laced Chinese factory in Shenzhen, no doubt. I bet there are not that many (maybe 2 or 3) manufacturers at the top of the supply chain, tops.

The thing that's missing is the refresh rate. It really becomes obvious when you are watching anything that involves motion, like sports, or action movies or anything that's moving.

I've had a high end but old  1080 (full HD) unit.. maybe 5 years old. It was a 240Hz refresh rate unit.  It kicked butt showing action movies and sports - and I don't really watch sports.  I upgraded it to a 4K Black Friday unit and it was stunning in terms of details, had that wow factor that the older 1080 lacked.  You could see every microbe on every amoeba on every blade of grass.

However, I noticed that the older one displayed motion better, much better. The new 4K was only 60Hz. You want at least 120 HZ and 240 Hz is even better. There are classic movies that show you how well a TV responds to motion. For example: Matrix, the scene with the rain. The reason it's significant because it also shows you black. An expensive 4K will display blacks as very black, cheaper units will have blacks as slightly gray. That rain scene in Matrix combines both of these difficult functions: Rain at night and tests both of them.

The stuff on Black Friday, the 55" 4K units for $399 you can skip, if you watch action / sports, you won't be happy. Normal news and movies appear just fine however.

Costco/Best buy/Chimart don't play 4K source I don't think, their PQ sucks. They don't play source that really demos the capabilities of the units. They play compressed shyt over the cable, not via a 4K "redray" disk. 
Having said that, I saw some OLED TVs at Best Buy the other day, they were very expensive - well, relatively so but man, the color just jumps at you. Very saturated, life-like. I thought OLED was a BS gimmick.

The thing that's missing is the refresh rate. It really becomes obvious when you are watching anything that involves motion, like sports, or action movies or anything that's moving.

I've had a high end but old  1080 (full HD) unit.. maybe 5 years old. It was a 240Hz refresh rate unit.  It kicked butt showing action movies and sports - and I don't really watch sports.  I upgraded it to a 4K Black Friday unit and it was stunning in terms of details, had that wow factor that the older 1080 lacked.  You could see every microbe on every amoeba on every blade of grass.

However, I noticed that the older one displayed motion better, much better. The new 4K was only 60Hz. You want at least 120 HZ and 240 Hz is even better. There are classic movies that show you how well a TV responds to motion. For example: Matrix, the scene with the rain. The reason it's significant because it also shows you black. An expensive 4K will display blacks as very black, cheaper units will have blacks as slightly gray. That rain scene in Matrix combines both of these difficult functions: Rain at night and tests both of them.

The stuff on Black Friday, the 55" 4K units for $399 you can skip, if you watch action / sports, you won't be happy. Normal news and movies appear just fine however.

Costco/Best buy/Chimart don't play 4K source I don't think, their PQ sucks. They don't play source that really demos the capabilities of the units. They play compressed shyt over the cable, not via a 4K "redray" disk. 
Having said that, I saw some OLED TVs at Best Buy the other day, they were very expensive - well, relatively so but man, the color just jumps at you. Very saturated, life-like. I thought OLED was a BS gimmick.

Thanks for the tips on telling me what to buy. I need to get a new TV but have been casually shopping when I am out. I will wait till after the New Year. I have read a bunch of gibberish on the web but it made my eyes glaze over. You summed it up perfectly for this right brained IT dork.

So here is my question for you - this 4K source that will display so much more - do the cable providers and streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, etc) support this or no?

Because frankly if they are not transmitting in 4K what difference does it matter?

We have a bunch of TV's at work and I've noticed during soccer games that some team colors have very noticeable ghosting of the players. Some kind of persistence issue related to the refresh rate or perhaps the type of screen? 

It might be the video technology. The MPEG. The same data loss that makes some scenes with uniform background colors blocky.

So you're suggesting it might be the video feed?

Hmm, so it still comes down to the TV or just the feed? I'm trying to remember if different TV's with the same program, had the same problem? I don't think so. If that's the case, then not all TV's unpack the data the same way, which sounds like nonsense. But maybe you're paying for post processing of the video before it's displayed? Just to clarify, the TV's are not all the same.