BUT AT WHAT COST?

WHAT TO KEEP IN MIND WHILE WEIGHING UP THE SIZE OF A SCREEN VS THE HIT TO YOUR WALLET.

It’s easy to find a 50-inch screen for around $1,000 these days, but the compromise in image quality is hard to miss once you’ve looked at other TVs. Surprisingly, features such as Android TV and Smart TV application support doesn’t really suffer when you’re at the budget end of town, as these are mainly software driven, and thus cheap to implement. However, using these smart features will generally be more sluggish, as the chips inside these TVs are nowhere near as powerful as more expensive sets.

You’ll also find that HDR support is very confusing in budget price ranges. While most manufacturers claim their sets support HDR, they often use their own terminology rather than the industry standards, suggesting it’s more of a marketing ploy than an actual specification. And even when they do claim support for one of the five official HDR standards, actual real-world performance shows that they don’t live up to the claims.

One final thing you’ll notice with budget boxes is their appetite for electricity. Because they tend to rely on older panel technology, they’ll guzzle the joules like a marathon runner chugging a Gatorade at the end of a race. It’s easy to see this when you’re in store, as most TVs have an Energy Star sticker on one of the corners. You’ll notice that budget sets over 50 inches in size tend to score around the two to three star range, while newer, more advanced TVs get four or more, even if they’re considerably larger.