> It would help if TV manufacturers would clearly document what these features do, and use consistent names that reflect that.
It would also help if there was a common, universal, perfect "reference TV" to aim for (or multiple such references for different use cases), with the job of the TV being to approximate this reference as closely as possible.
Alas, much like documenting the features, this would turn TVs into commodities, which is what consumers want, but TV vendors very much don't.
I wonder if there's a video equivalent to the Yamaha NS-10[1], a studio monitor (audio) that (simplifying) sounds bad enough that audio engineers reckon if they can make the mix sound good on them, they'll sound alright on just about anything.
Probably not, or they don't go by it, since there seems to be a massive problem with people being unable to hear dialogue well enough to not need subtitles.
It was a real eye(ear?)-opener to watch Seinfeld on Netflix and suddenly have no problem understanding what they're saying. They solved the problem before, they just ... unsolved it.
My favorite thing about Kodi is an audio setting that boosts the center channel. Since most speech comes through that, it generally just turns up the voices, and the music and sound effects stay at the same level. It's a godsend. Also another great reason to have a nice backup collection on a hard drive.
It's a similar thing to watching movies from before the mid-2000 (I place the inflection point around Collateral in 2004) where after that you get overly dark scenes where you can't make out anything, while anything earlier you get these night scenes where you can clearly make out the setting, and the focused actors/props are clearly visible.
Watch An American Werewolf in London, Strange Days, True Lies, Blade Runner, or any other movie from the film era all up to the start of digital, and you can see that the sets are incredibly well lit. On film they couldn't afford to reshoot and didn't have immediate view of what everything in the frame resulted on, so they had to be conservative. They didn't have per-pixel brightness manipulation (feathering and burning were film techniques that could technically have been applied per frame, but good luck with doing that at any reasonable expense or amount of time). They didn't have hyper-fast color film-stock they could use (ISO 800 was about the fastest you could get), and it was a clear downgrade from anything slower.
The advent of digital film-making when sensors reached ISO 1600/3200 with reasonable image quality is when the allure of time/cost savings of not lighting heavily for every scene showed its ugly head, and by the 2020's you get the "Netflix look" from studios optimizing for "the cheapest possible thing we can get out the door" (the most expensive thing in any production is filming in location, a producer will want to squeeze every minute of that away, with the smallest crew they could get away with).
Reference monitor pricing has never been any where near something mere mortals could afford. The price you gave of $21k for 55” is more than 50% of the average of $1k+ per inch I’m used to seeing from Sony.
If you account for the wastage/insurance costs using standard freight carriers that seems reasonable to me as a proportion of value. I’m sure this is shipped insured, well packaged and on a pallet.
Walmart might be able to resell a damaged/open box $2k TV at a discount, but I don’t think that’s so easy for speciality calibrated equipment.
My local hummus factory puts the product destined for Costco into a different sized tub than the one destined for Walmart. Companies want to make it hard for the consumer to compare.
Costco’s whole thing is selling larger quantities, most times at a lower per unit price than other retailers such as Walmart. Walmart’s wholesale competitor to Costco is Sam’s Club. Also, Costco’s price labels always show the per unit price of the product (as do Walmart’s, in my experience).
Often a false economy. My MIL shops at Sam's Club, and ends up throwing half her food away because she cannot eat it all before it expires. I've told her that those dates often don't mean the food is instantly "bad" the next day but she refuses to touch anything that is "expired."
My wife is the same way - the "best by" date is just a date they put for best "freshness". "Sell by" date is similar. It's not about safety.
My wife grew up in a hot and humid climate where things went bad quickly, so this tendency doesn't come from nowhere. Her whole family now lives in the US midwest, and there are similar arguments between her siblings and their spouses.
The ones I’m talking about were only subtly different, like 22 oz vs 24 oz. To me it was obvious what they were doing, shoppers couldn’t compare same-size units and they could have more freedom with prices.
There is no federal law requiring unit requiring unit pricing, but the the NIST has guidelines that most grocery stores follow voluntarily. 9 states have adopted the guidelines as law.
I don't think that's correct. Prices for retail goods aren't usually even attached to the product in interstate commerce, and are shown locally on store shelving.
These exist, typically made by Panasonic or Sony, and cost upwards of 20k USD. HDTVtest has compared them to the top OLED consumer tvs in the past. Film studios use the reference models for their editing and mastering work.
Sony specifically targets the reference with their final calibration on their top TVs, assuming you are in Cinema or Dolby Vision mode, or whatever they call it this year.
There is! That is precisely how TVs work! Specs like BT.2020 and BT.2100 define the color primaries, white point, and how colors and brightness levels should be represented. Other specs define other elements of the signal. SMPTE ST 2080 defines what the mastering environment should be, which is where you get the recommendations for bias lighting.
This is all out there -- but consumers DO NOT want it, because in a back-to-back comparison, they believe they want (as you'll see in other messages in this thread) displays that are over-bright, over-blue, over-saturated, and over-contrasty. And so that's what they get.
But if you want a perfect reference TV, that's what Filmmaker Mode is for, if you've got a TV maker that's even trying.
It would also help if there was a common, universal, perfect "reference TV" to aim for (or multiple such references for different use cases), with the job of the TV being to approximate this reference as closely as possible.
Alas, much like documenting the features, this would turn TVs into commodities, which is what consumers want, but TV vendors very much don't.