I had a 48″ Samsung TV for the last 9 years and for the most part it’s been adequate. The sound sucks on every tv these days so you have to buy a sound bar and that fixed it for the most part.

About a year ago, one of the diffuser domes over the LEDs fell off and I had a stupid hotspot shining on my tv all the time. I put up with that, but a year later it just died and wouldn’t turn on anymore.

I never had much of a preference or opinion about TV tech, except that I do know OLEDs while dimmer and subject to burn in, don’t disrupt sleep and have the best overall picture. OLED tvs are quite a bit more expensive, usually 3-4x the price for a LED model.

The Samsung just worked, the picture was pretty good and no crazy colors. Also it was easy to disable the motion smoothing feature which I find to be nauseating.

I looked online and found that there were abundant tvs for well under $500 including the fancy new QLED models. QLEDS have quantum dots and can be brighter and more vivid. This sounded great and selected a Vizio model since I’d had one before and it worked great and lasted longer than I wanted to keep it.

As soon as I set it up I had major irritation. The screen had very low contrast and they compensated for that by artificially boosting the highlights in software leading to blown out highlights that lacked detail.

The colors were the worst part, they were vivid and completely detached from reality. No matter what I tried, skin tones were either washed out and virtually grey or so pink and yellow that I couldn’t pay attention to the show.

I can’t believe people actually watch TV like this, especially with the smooth motion feature turned on.

Anyway I went to Costco, Target and Best Buy to look at TVs in person and after looking at HiSense, TCL, Vizio, Samsung, LG, and Sony TVs, the best picture quality in sub $1000 tvs was Samsung and LG, so I picked up another Samsung and came home with it.

After plugging it in and setting it up, I disabled the motion smoothing and it’s bright, has good contrast, a sharp image, and handles upscaling lower resolution content to 4K without a lot of issues.