No, this post is about televisions, because I felt compelled to purchase a new one to replace the ten year old 40 inch Samsung H-series which had been the staple in our rented house since just after Clara was born. Long time readers may remember that I already bought a new TV in the 2023 Good Friday sales, a Philips 65OLED937 which some consider the best TV of its generation. That, due to its overly large size for this rented house, has sat in its box since as the house build took far longer to start than expected.
What motivated this purchase is that a few weeks ago I ended up watching The Hunger Games with the family and I realised that we had to turn off most of the lights to make out much of a picture at all. The Samsung H-series was infamous for developing purple blotches in its screen just after the five year warranty expired, and their refusal to do anything about it I think cost them a lot of their high end customers forever who were furious that a four grand TV now had a mottled screen. My much smaller model cost €500 or so including delivery from Germany, so whilst the blotches were annoying they weren’t a showstopper. However, last few years the screen brightness began to fade. I twiddled some settings to produce a harsh unpleasant but still viewable screen, but even that ran out of rope a few weeks ago. I mean, if you have to turn off most of the lights to make out a picture at all, it genuinely now is time for a new TV.
Having been spoiled by the awesome picture and sound on the Philips, but also unwilling to spend much on this given that the Philips TV already has consumed any TV spending largesse I once had, I wondered how much TV could I get for the same original money as the Samsung? That 40 inch Samsung H-series originally cost me around €500 including delivery from Germany in 2015, which at the time was an absolute bargain given it retailed for no less than €850 in Ireland. €500 in 2015 is about €652 in today’s money. What can €652 buy you in Ireland today?
It turns out rather a lot. I ended up dropping €617 including delivery for:
- Panasonic TV43W90AEB (€429).
- Polk Signa S2 Soundbar and Subwoofer (€188).
The soundbar is because all reviews of the Panasonic W90 series specifically called out the lousy built in speakers. Having since heard them personally, they’re nothing like as bad as the reviewers made out. They’re not a patch on the Polk soundstage true, but if you leave the Polk turned off the built in speakers are perfectly acceptable for a TV. That said, yeah the Polk is worth the money without doubt.
The Panasonic W90 series are – by far – the cheapest TV which the Reddit Home Theatre enthusiasts feel is the absolute rock bottom that their eyes could be allowed to gaze upon. Normal price is about €800, but they are currently on deep discount to clear stock as their replacement model is inbound. The TV is Fire TV based which is deeply unfortunate as you will see later, but the CPU is very capable and it has all the tuners for satellite, cable etc. It is a true DisplayHDR 600 capable TV, and it has a 4k resolution. Here are the comparative specs:
| Samsung UE40H6470 | Philips 65OLED937 | Panasonic TV43W90AEB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year released | 2014 | 2022 | 2024 |
| Screen size | 40" | 65" | 43" |
| Panel technology | VA with edge backlight dimming | WOLED-EX | VA with full array backlight dimming (FALD, 40 zones?) |
| Panel bit depth | 8 bit | 10 bit | 8 bit + 2 bit FRC |
| Panel resolution | 1920 x 1080 | 3840 x 2160 | 3840 x 2160 |
| Panel max refresh rate | 120 Hz (but only under 3D, 60 Hz otherwise) | 120 Hz | 144 Hz |
| HDR | None | HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision | HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, Dolby Vision IQ |
| DCI-P3 | 75%? | 99% | 96% |
| Rec.2020 | likely not much! | 75% | 73% |
| Max brightness | 330 nits | 1300 nits | 600 nits |
| Contrast | 4800:1 | Infinite | 5400:1 |
| Viewing angle without distortion | 22 degrees | 70 degrees | 25? degrees |
| 3D viewing | Yes via 3D glasses | No | No |
| Max power consumption | 115 watts | 220 watts | 160 watts |
| CPU | 4 core ? | 4 core Mediatek MT9970B | 4 core Mediatek MT9653 |
| Speaker power | 20 watts | 100 watts | 20 watts |
As you can see, I did do my research when I chose that Samsung model back in 2015. For its time and for the money, it was very good and it had excellent reviews. I remember at the time that the temptation was to buy a 4k panel TV, but at that time they just didn’t have as good a picture as a 2k panel so I went with the 2k panel and at the time, I couldn’t complain. It was an above average TV – the picture was very good for SDR and the motion processing and upscaling etc were also good for its time. The 3D glasses support meant you could watch 3D movies like in the cinema, and apart from needing to sit rather too close to the small screen to get the proper effect, we did enjoy a few 3D movies before it became too much hassle to setup and fetch the content. The 3D effect was as good as the movies, if you were a few feet from the screen.
On specs alone, the Panasonic W90 holds a candle to the Philips 937 except in max brightness and contrast. I can speak from experience that the Philips 937 can produce seriously bright portions of the picture, like eye searingly so in a dark room, and on that the W90 just cannot compete. If you don’t have any eye searingly unusually bright portions of the picture, the W90 is competitive. Colours aren’t quite as rich, there is a touch of backlight blooming from the FALD array, and the lack of contrast is something you really notice when you’re not looking at an OLED panel. But yeah, the picture is very good, here is the Panasonic W90 showing the same scene as the Philips from back when I posted here about that TV:
The Panasonic TV43W90AEB with Polk S2 Soundbar and Subwoofer to the left, and the Philips 65OLED937 with integrated soundbar to the right. Note the size of each relative to the table – the Philips has a very considerably larger screen
The Polk soundbar as I mentioned above is a good improvement on the built in speakers. It makes a fair attempt at a sound stage, and the subwoofer adds a bit of whack to the audio. It is pretty good, and well above what TV audio normally is. It isn’t, however, as nice sounding as my ancient Audio Technica 2.1 speaker set which I used to have attached to TVs before the Samsung (which I last mentioned here), and the Polk certainly isn’t as nice as the integrated soundbar on the Philips 937. On music, the Polk makes a fairly good rendition of Massive Attack’s Teardrop, but it won’t get you emotional like the Audio Technica’s do with that song, or especially that monster JBL Partybox which rendered that song like nothing I’ve heard before.
All that said, the Polk does ‘just work’ in auto powering on and off with the TV, and they sip the electricity which the Audio Technica speakers most certainly do not (they basically burn full power always even with nothing playing, which is why I had to stop using them for the TV).
I will make one other mild criticism – I do think a 4k resolution is wasted on a 43 inch screen. Unless you sit within a metre of the TV, my tired old eyes don’t pick out much difference in picture detail from the 2k panel. Our sofa is a good three metres away, and I genuinely cannot tell between 1080p and 2160p content at that distance. Indeed, even sitting at the kitchen table maybe 1.5 metres away I can only see the difference in detail for slow moving pans of say wildlife in nature programmes. If it’s say an action movie e.g. The Matrix, the added detail isn’t noticeable. This is in contrast to that 65 inch Philips – there 4k content is very noticeable over 2k content, even three metres away.
All in all, given this TV is less than the original money for the Samsung TV after inflation, this is a whole lotta display and audio solution for the money. Absolutely there have been sacrifices to get to this budget, but it’s a demonstrably superior home theatre solution to the Samsung. Technology marches forwards!
Where technology has been marching backwards however …
Stupid awful Fire TV
Amazon’s Fire TV is a fork of Android, and you can still (just about) side load arbitrary Android applications onto it. Though, in fact you won’t need to, their app store now actually has apps you want in it such as the Jellyfin and Kodi apps.
And that part of Fire TV works well. Current Fire TV is derived from Android TV 11, so the app experience is exactly the same. The Kodi and Jellyfin apps automatically invoke HDR and surround sound content without any help nor configuration. It all ‘just works’ in the Android app space, and very well at that.
What doesn’t work well is that you can no longer disable the vast amount of advertising from Amazon directed at you unless you disconnect the TV entirely from the internet. Which hides all your installed apps, including the side loaded ones not installed by their app store. For no good technical reason, and only because I assume Amazon supports Fire OS for the TV manufacturer for free if Amazon then gets to shove advertising at the TV’s owner for the life of the device.
Up until end of 2024, you could replace the home launcher in Fire TV with your own one, and thus get a non-forced-down-your-throat TV experience. In 2025, that option is currently gone. You get exactly two choices:
- Configure the TV to have no internet connection as a ‘dumb TV’. No apps, just the TV tuner EPGs and you can select HDMI inputs.
- Configure the TV to have an internet connection and get force fed Amazon promotional shit all day every day. And there is a LOT of it, I count five pages of Amazon stuff complete with auto playing videos being rammed at you. And obviously, everything you say and do is also being recorded and sent back to their cloud to ‘improve the consumer experience’ and not at all to track your political ideological purity. Yay.
Kudos to Panasonic for still allowing the dumb TV configuration, and in fairness, the dumb TV UI is clean, uncluttered and intuitive. It’s just wasteful because now I have to use a separate Android TV box for absolutely no good reason.
I have a Xiaomi second gen TV box. It runs vanilla Android TV 11. It has a few Xiaomi apps and branding etc, but they are very easily ignored and they haven’t locked the Android launcher or anything. After all, I paid them money for an Android box, and that’s what they delivered. It costs slightly more than a Fire TV stick, and it is very considerably better because Xiaomi don’t ram stuff at you for the temerity to use the thing you paid them money for.
After a fair bit of faffing around, I figured out the settings for both the Xiaomi box and the TV to get them to correctly coordinate on HDR content and surround sound. To be honest, content in Jellyfin on the TV still seems to me to look and sound better than content in Jellyfin on the Xiaomi box. But maybe I’m being paranoid.
I really wish that Panasonic would insist to Amazon that side loaded apps CANNOT disappear when the device is deregistered from Amazon’s cloud. That’s all I (and I suspect anybody technical like me) wants. But I suppose we’re a small subsegment of the consumer base, and in the end by purchasing an additional box we do get what we want and the fancy high end Android platform built into the TV goes entirely to waste.
Kinda reminds me of how IBM used to install the high end mainframe hardware to every customer, but then artificially limit it in software until the customer paid the increased monthly rental fee. ‘Upgrades’ were therefore a few minutes to flip a switch, but it kinda leaves a bad taste in the buyer’s mouth.
Where next for TVs?
You might wonder what €500 in 2015 euros should buy you in 2035? It’s an interesting question, because unlike in 2015 where 4k HDR screens were known to be on the way, I am currently unaware of anything major in terms of technological improvements coming soon. Basically, OLED and mini-LED panels are expected to keep getting both cheaper and brighter for many years to come. That’s it – nobody is seriously discussing 8k resolution TVs any time soon.
I had to buy a new computer monitor four years ago – it is a 32 inch 4k monitor costing about €700 or so at the time. It can do 95% of DCI-P3 and is DisplayHDR 400 capable i.e. it tops out at about 400 nits brightness (you wouldn’t want any brighter in something that close to your face to be honest). In inflation adjusted euro, it is nearly twice the price of the 43 inch Panasonic TV just purchased, and for slight worse specs.
I therefore think it safe to say that medium to low end screens will soon routinely hit 100% of DCI-P3 colour gamut, whether for your phone, TV, laptop or computer monitor. And with that, the era of sRGB screens will have passed after thirty years. The next obvious milestone will be Rec.2020 colour gamut, for which at the time of writing the best available monitor of any kind can reach 82% of coverage. You currently need a high end laser projector if you want to reach 100% of Rec.2020. But it seems reasonable that a medium end TV in 2035 costing same money as my new one might have 85% of Rec.2020 and peak brightness of 1400 nits (as the current DisplayHDR highest standard is 1400, and 99.99% of all HDR content currently available does not exceed 1400 nits).
In terms of audio, I can see that for similar money to my new Polk 2.1 soundbar and woofer, somebody might do a 5.1.2 soundbar and subwoofer like the Philips TV has. This has two sideways firing speakers, two upwards firing speakers, and the three front speakers left, centre and right. That would currently be a very high end soundbar costing a lot of money, but the DSP chips which handle what signal to go to what speaker to render Dolby Atmos will get ever cheaper. Couple those with lower quality speakers into a budget package … I think it’s plausible for ten years from now.
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