Stop Buying This TV

Everything in the world seems to be getting exponentially more expensive. Look at what they've done to our poor RAM sticks. But there's one thing in the world that is somehow getting cheaper and cheaper every year. TVs. Nowadays, buying a big 65-inch TV or even larger doesn't have to cost you more than a few hundred bucks. Back in my day, all they got you was a 15-inch TV and we had to like it. But there's something I've been wondering lately. I kind of feel like all these affordable budget TVs are the same. I don't know anyone buying these TVs that really shop for them. They just wait till any TV in their price range goes on sale and then they scoop it up. But if you ask the TV nerds of the world, aka our Tingz, Ray Tingz, they'd have you believe even with the same budget price point, which TV you choose makes a huge difference. You look at their page and see numbers that are twice as good from one TV to the next. I'm just skeptical of that. I never go to a friend's house and think, whoa, their TV looks twice as good as mine. So today I'm putting the nerds to the test. I'm going to test a popular budget 65-inch TV against a TV of similar price that the nerds claim is twice as good. Will the realities of all these supposed stats and panel technologies really yield better results? Or is my suspicion right? And those stats really boil down to tiny imperceptible differences. Let's spend some money and find out. For the uninformed normie option, I just searched around for any decently popular TV in our price range of about $500, and I ended up landing on this Amazon Fire Omni TV, which has solid reviews and is only draining my bank account $450 today. For the quote-unquote informed option, I scoured our Tingz looking for solid budget options, and everywhere I went, TCL kept popping up as the best option in the budget space. Apparently, not only are their specs impressive, but they have especially good deals if you buy them through Costco. But alas, I do not have a Costco membership. So I searched some more and found this TCL ratings reviewed very well that was for sale at Best Buy for about $550. Fast forward a few days and both of my test subjects had arrived. Setup was both pretty simple. In fact, their setup and parts are so similar that for a second, I got some of the feet confused. It's almost like they're the same? Hmm. It wasn't until now though that it occurred to me that I don't have a table that can fit two 65-inch monstrosities. Now, don't judge me. I did a little improvising to solve the problem. Country girls make do and all that. With both TVs up and running, it was already time for my team and I to get to testing. First up was the smart OS and the general user experience. If there's one thing I know firsthand that makes these budget TVs age, it's their OS. My cheapo TV at home runs so slow now that some of the apps don't even open. I just plug in a PC to make it run. So if either of these seem sluggish or laggy right now, that can't bode well for their future. Setup for the TCL was definitely very smooth. It packs the Google TV OS, which had an option to bypass all the account stuff and just let my TV be a TV. That's a good first impression. By comparison, the Amazon Fire TV had a very bad impression. I knew these TVs are basically subsidized through Amazon advertising, but I didn't realize you literally need to punch in an Amazon account to use core features of the TV. Like I said, not a great first impression, but whatever. That Amazon subsidy helps this TV be $100 cheaper, so I did my best to look past it. Both home screens are filled with ads and neither OS has a way to completely disable them. So that's a wash. Though I will say the Fire TV auto plays video and audio on the home screen, which is extra annoying. What I was most interested in was how snappy they'd be. Smart TVs have tiny computers inside them running all this stuff and different TVs can have more or less powerful computers in them. So for the speed test number one, I unplugged them both from their outlets and tried cold booting them. The TCL cold booted in just over 30 seconds, which feels not great, but then you keep watching and the timer for the Fire TV just keeps going up. In total, the Fire TV booted in almost exactly one minute, twice the time of the TCL. Not great, huh? On all fairness, that is a cold boot. Most of the time when you turn off your TV, you're actually putting it into power saving sleep mode. You only cold boot like this after power outages or stuff like that. So then how about we test app load times? Everyone uses Netflix. Well, except for me and my amazing Plex server. So we tried giving that a go. How did they compete? Turns out Netflix doesn't even come pre-installed on the Amazon. Weird, but whatever. Let's try again. How did they compete for real? Well, once again, the TCL ends up booting the app first, though this time only about five seconds faster. This pattern held true in pretty much everything we tested. Overall, the TCL boots everything faster and in general feels snappier to use. While we're here comparing TVs, you know what else makes for an interesting comparison? Floor mats. Think about your car. When you step into it with muddy wet shoes, what are you stepping on? Is it the thin rubber mats that your car comes with or the naked floor? Well, if they are, it's time for an upgrade. Like these floor mats from our sponsor, LastFit. I recently got these new floor mats for my brother-in-law, but before giving them to him, I wanted to compare them to my five-month-old LastFit floor mats. They say they'll withstand the test of time and no matter how old they are, they'll still look brand new. But is that true? So I took my mats to the car wash, power wash them and put them side by side. Even after some heavy use crumbs, milk and toys from a toddler, as well as some road trips, I've got to say they look pretty fantastic. It's got deep grooves to catch all those nasty spills that comes with having pets, children, or maybe you just want to enjoy a melted ice cream by yourself. Don't worry, I get it. The high edges really catch any spills or even mud that you'll track into your car and the grooves make it easier to clean too. And unlike the default mats your car might come with, it's a stiff thick material called TPE that stays fresh and doesn't smell. Even in the freakishly hot summers around here. These are custom cut to cover every square inch of your car's floor, including that bit underneath the front seats. That's where all the nasties end up hiding. But not with these bad boys. I mean, look at this. The old mats barely look a day old. Plus they're more affordable for how high quality they are. These specific ones cost significantly less and for a limited time, you can get 20% off by using our code SE20. So I suppose my theory has fallen apart a tiny bit. Clearly, ratings approved TV is performing a bit better on the computing front. But that's not what really separates TVs, is it? I wanted to see actual video on this bad boy. A TV show. An HDR movie. Comparison footage. I can deal with a bad OS if it means a great quality display, but the same cannot be said in reverse. So enough preamble. Let's get to the good stuff. Before doing any big boy tests, as always, we were a bit excited to test. So we went straight to YouTube and hit up the cult classic Avatar HDR. Thank you, James Cameron, for providing us with such a rich HDR world. Your movies are not only cultural monoliths, but also serve as the first impression for every TV I try. Right out of the gate, this first test, well, I can't hide it anymore, can I? My theory is shattered immediately. The difference is night and day. Literally, look at this difference. But wait, I haven't calibrated the displays yet. Surely the Fire TV has defaulted to an eco mode while the TCL is already in a brighter power mode. Is what I thought before opening the settings and seeing that neither were in eco mode. To be fair, the TCL was in vivid mode that artificially boosts the saturation. So a bit unfair. Even after tuning them both up to film modes that don't overly process the video, it's still night and day. So what exactly is happening here? Obviously, we can both look at these TVs and see that one is worse. Is there anything the Fire TV does better? Well, let's go point by point here. When it comes to TVs or any kind of display, while there's a million factors and specs and all that, two of the biggest variables are brightness and color volume. They make up a huge chunk of how good or bad a display looks. First, on the brightness front, the TCL obviously does circles around the Fire TV. It looks literally twice as bright, which is in fact true according to Reading's own testing. The TCL has a peak brightness somewhere between the 800 to 900 nits range, whereas the Fire TV tops out at a measly 300 nits. That's not just twice as bright, that's thrice. Most budget TVs shoot for around 400 nits, aka HDR 400. So this comes in even under that, which is a bit embarrassing. And for however obvious the difference is on your screen now, I promise you, it's even more obvious and impactful in person. On the color volume front, a similar, though perhaps even more embarrassing story unfolds. Color volume is basically a measurement of how many colors the display can show. How red can red get? How blue can blue get? Look at this scene in Avatar. See how there's a bit of blue in all these objects on the TCL, and it just sort of looks gray and colorless on the Fire TV? That's what sort of a difference this can make. There's lots of different color ranges you can test, but the baseline range we care about today is this one. The TCL manages to cover a respectable 93% of that color range. Not perfect or anything, but well enough for a budget TV like this. How does the Fire TV compare? Well, it comes in at 75%. Now I know what you're thinking. That's only 18% difference. At least it isn't double or triple, but I think we need to put this into perspective how bad 75% is. For reference, here's a big list of TVs that Ratings has tested. When you sort by color gamut percentile, the thing that we're talking about right now, this Fire TV is 12th from the bottom. There are literally $200 TVs with better color than this one. And we ran test after test trying to find positives for the Fire TV. But the more we looked, the worse it got. Sometimes the color volume was so bad, the Fire TV would lose detail entirely, like the feathers on this bird's chest or motion clarity. I did notice a bit of ghosting happening when trying a game on the TCL, which I suppose is to be expected at this price point. But then we switched over to the Fire TV, and it was once again noticeably worse. There was one thing we eventually tested that is better on the Amazon's TV. Out of ideas and scraping for a single win, we did a TV speaker test. And wouldn't you know it, I actually think the Fire's built-in speakers are better. The TCL is tinny and hollow by comparison, where the Fire TV's speakers have a bit of a rounder, fuller sound. To be fair, if you're using your TV speakers in the first place, we need to talk. But then again, if you are the type of person to go for a $500 TV, maybe slapping on an extra $150 for a decent soundbar is breaking the bank, which is fair enough. So, okay, clearly the idea that all budget TVs are the same is very, very incorrect. Laugh at Betty from the past, it's okay. But having seen and tested these two side by side, I've actually come away with a very different, yet more important takeaway from all this. Not only are budget TVs not the same, doing your research matters at this price point more than anywhere else. Like if you're going to shell out $2,500 for a TV, doing some research to make sure you're getting the best possible bang for buck is a good thing. But at the mid and high range points, at least you pick the suboptimal TV, you might be getting like a 5% worse TV, or a 10% if you choose really poorly. But in the low range, clearly which TV you choose makes a huge difference. These TVs are less than $100 apart, but the TCL is twice as good of a TV as the Amazon. Not in a nerdy, nitpicky, taking a microscope to it sort of a way. You could bring your grandmother with seven layers of cataracts into the office right now, and even she would laugh at how bad the Fire TV fares against the TCL. In pretty much every way we can measure, the TCL is a better TV in the same price bracket. So if you're in the market for a cheaper TV in the future, and feel compelled to just wait for any old sale and jump on what comes first, shop wisely. You can get some pretty solid TVs for cheap nowadays. This TCL really does pack a solid punch for how cheap it is. I'm sorry if I ever doubted you ratings nerds. You're right. So if you're looking to buy a thoughtful gift for a family member that'll last, check out LastFit.