Home Theater Geeks 446 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
On this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I answer a question from a listener who wants to know about TV viewing angles. I have some answers, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hey. There, scott Wilkinson. Here, the Home Theater Geek. In this episode I answer a question from listener Alan Goldstein, who writes I'll be replacing my current TV soon.
00:41
I'm considering the top-rated OLED and mini-LED models and keep hearing and reading about OLED being better when viewed from off-center angles, since only one person can sit directly in front of the TV. Everyone else is off-center, but I never hear anyone say how wide is too wide, making OLED much more important. My wife and I sit at angles to the TV, roughly 25 or 30 degrees. Could you discuss this sometime? Well, alan, I'm happy to discuss it and you're right, only one person can sit directly in front of the TV. This reminds me of the audiophile trope of the single person sitting in the middle between the two speakers and having, in fact, only one chair in the room. This is a common audiophile practice, but in video also in audio, for that matter we often like to share the experience. So no one is going to be sitting directly in front of the TV, usually With OLED, the picture quality does not of LCD TV.
02:14
The farther off axis you are, the farther away from center, the more the picture quality suffers. The picture quality suffers and we can see that right here in an illustration that shows in the middle you're looking straight on and on the right is OLED TV, looked at at an angle, and on the left is LCD and LED backlit LCD, which is virtually all of them these days. Uh, how that looks when viewing from off angle these days. How that looks when viewing from off angle. Now I will say that OLED does, in fact, degrade off axis at least a little bit, and depending on the quality of the product, it may degrade more than a little bit, but generally speaking, it does not degrade nearly as much as LCD TVs. So how does it degrade? What is this degradation that occurs when you're looking at an LCD TV, particularly off-axis? Well, there are several aspects of the picture that suffer. Lower contrast is one of the main ones, because the black level increases while the peak bright level decreases. You also get desaturated colors. You also get shifted colors that go away from the hue that they're supposed to be, and the gamma shifts as well. How the TV comes out of black, so to speak. Now this happens continuously as you venture off axis, and the farther you go, the worse it gets. Now, depending on the specific TV you, this may happen more or less.
04:03
Manufacturers have developed an array of technologies to combat this problem. For example, samsung has something called ultra-wide viewing angle and Sony has its X-wide angle, which are technologies in the screen itself that try to mitigate this problem, but it can't be avoided entirely. Also, you should realize that these technologies sacrifice some contrast for better off-axis performance. Now there's a website that does extensive TV reviews that I really like. It's called ratingscomcom spelled ratings without the A, so it's R-T-I-N-G-S dot com, and they have a great explanation of this issue on their website, which we will include a link to in the show notes, and they include the test results for all the TVs that they've tested, specifically the test results for off-angle performance, off-axis performance, and so I'm going to show you a few examples here.
05:19
One is color washout, so this is washing out the colors, desaturating the colors, in other words. So here we have the Sony 800H, which is an LCD TV. It is an IPS panel, and you can see that the colors do wash out somewhat as you go farther and farther off axis, which is indicated along the horizontal axis of this graph. The next one is the Hisense H9G. Notice how much more its colors desaturate as you go off axis. It's quite significant. And by comparison, we'll take a look at an OLED TV, the LG C3, which is last year's midline OLED from LG and look at how little its colors desaturate Very, very little, all the way out to 70 degrees. So this actually points out one difference that I wanted to make clear to everybody, and that is the type of LCD panel that is used in an LCD TV, be it a mini LED or a QLED.
06:50
There are two basic types of LCD panels that are used in those TVs. One is called IPS in-plane switching and the other is called VA vertical alignment switching, and the other is called VA vertical alignment. Now, it's sometimes difficult to determine whether a given model of TV uses an IPS panel or a VA panel. Ratingscom gives you some indication, I believe. In general, when they test a TV, they'll tell you which kind it is. The manufacturers often don't. Now what's the difference between them? Ips panels actually have better off-axis performance. They degrade less as you go off-axis than VA panels. On the other hand, va panels have deeper blacks and thus better contrast when you're viewing them on axis. So that's a trade-off. I typically would opt for a VA panel for the better contrast and figure that I'm going to have to sit close to the center.
08:01
So if we take a look at those pictures once again, just in this particular case, we can see it does fall off. The saturation does fall off. It's an IPS panel. But if we look at the Hisense, which is a VA panel, we can see that it falls off a lot more. So this is the disadvantage of a VA panel.
08:27
Okay, so the next one I want to look at is color shift, which is how does red, green and blue deviate from where it's supposed to be as you move off axis? And we can see that in the next graphic with the same three TVs here's the Sony X800H and these colors really don't diverge much at all over as off center as 70 degrees. Again, this is an IPS panel. If we look at the Hisense H9G, we can see the colors diverge way more as you go off axis. The green stays pretty good, the blue just falls off a cliff and the red moves away from where it's supposed to be as well in the other direction. So again, the colors shift a lot more on the VA panel on this Hisense H9G. As we move over to take a look at the LG C3 OLED, just for fun, we see that its colors do not diverge very much at all. So again, we're seeing the advantage of the OLED in terms of off-axis performance.
09:47
So the third issue that I want to mention is the drop in brightness or peak luminance, and we'll take a look at the three TVs again as measured by ratingscom and here is the Sony and you can see that the brightness, the peak brightness, does in fact decrease over time. These different lines indicate 80% gray, 60%, 40%, 20% and pure black. If we go over to the Hisense, we will see once again that it diverges quite a bit more and in fact the black level rises, as you can see the very bottom line as the peak brightness, the 80% gray anyway, and the others drop pretty dramatically. If we take a look at the LG OLED, we can see that, yes, the brightness does decrease, especially at the high end, but not nearly as much as the LCD TVs. So I didn't have any graphics, couldn't find any on ratings about black level rise, although you saw it there to some degree, particularly in the Hisense. But ratings reports that the Sony X800H the black level doesn't rise much, even at 70 degrees, whereas the Hisense the black level doubles at 20 degrees. So that's going to look pretty bad. Then there's gamma shift I mentioned that before which is gamma is a description of how the TV responds as the image goes from black to near black, to less near black, and brighter and brighter and brighter. And again ratings reports that the Sony X800H doesn't vary much at all, doesn't change much, even at 70 degrees, while the Hisense 20% gray starts looking like 40% gray, even at at narrow viewing angles. They said they didn't specify an angle. So how far is too far? That was one of your original questions.
12:11
According to ratingscom that big long list of all the TVs they've measured and what the results were most OLEDs are fine out to 70 degrees for all aspects, although older and cheaper models start to degrade sooner than that. Color shift, especially in some of the OLEDs, can degrade even as early as 25 or 30 degrees, but the LEDs are rated much worse. In general, color washout is typically in the 30 to 40 degree range, and by these ranges I'm talking about where it becomes objectionable. Color shift is in the 25 to 70 degree range, so there's a big wide range there. And brightness loss is in the 30 to 40 degree range. So there's a big wide range there, and brightness loss is in the 30 to 40 degree range as well. And, interestingly, the black level rise is in the 70 degree range for the high-end models. Some low-cost sets are much worse and gamma shift can be a problem anywhere from 15 degrees all the way to 60 degrees.
13:24
So what's the moral of this story? It's choose your LCD TV I mean QLED or mini LED or any form of LCD TV carefully. Go to ratingscom and check out their reviews for sure, because they're going to talk about this. If you and your wife sit in the 25 to 30 degree range, 25 to 30 degrees of center, most LCD TVs the higher end ones anyway are going to be fine, and you said you were looking for a top tier model, so it should be fine. The image quality will be slightly degraded, probably not even noticeable and certainly not enough to be objectionable.
14:08
But if you often have people over that are sitting farther away from center, then you really want an OLED TV. There, for example, you can see their diagram. If you're sitting mostly near the center, you're fine, but if you're off center in the side couch there, then it's going to be a problem in most cases with LCD TVs, but OLEDs will be fine. So OLED is clearly superior in this regard and I hope that I have been able to help you with your decision. Now, if you have a question for me, please send it along to htg at twittv. I love answering these questions on the show and I will do so as often as possible. And, as always, we thank you for your support of the Twit Network with your membership in Club Twit, which lets you come into the Discord channel and interact with other Club Twit members and have access to the video of all the shows that Twit produces. So I do hope to see you in there. Until next time, geek out.
