Alastair Stevenson at What Hi-Fi has written up the thing I have been muttering about for years: people have got better at choosing a TV and are still terrible at putting it somewhere sensible. His specific complaint is the set parked directly beside a window, worst during summer, and I have watched people spend four figures on an OLED and then do exactly that.
The mechanism is not complicated. Ambient light lifts your black floor, so contrast collapses whatever picture mode you are sat in, and if the panel has no decent antireflective layer you spend the afternoon watching your own reflection. Nothing in the settings menu recovers it. His fixes are blackout blinds, or failing that simply moving the set a few feet.
What I would add is that the argument has shifted a little. Matte and anti-reflection treatments on recent flagship sets are genuinely better than they were five years ago, and a bright LCD in a bright room can beat a technically superior OLED in that same room. That is not a licence to park it by the window, it is a reason to buy for the room you have rather than the room in the review photos. If your lounge has glass on two sides, the panel technology that wins on a dark-room test chart is not the one that wins in your house.
The half nobody says out loud is that TV placement is rarely a technical decision at all. It goes where the aerial socket is, or where it does not block the walkway, or where somebody else in the household has already decided it goes.
How many of you actually rearranged a room around the TV rather than the other way round?
The mechanism is not complicated. Ambient light lifts your black floor, so contrast collapses whatever picture mode you are sat in, and if the panel has no decent antireflective layer you spend the afternoon watching your own reflection. Nothing in the settings menu recovers it. His fixes are blackout blinds, or failing that simply moving the set a few feet.
What I would add is that the argument has shifted a little. Matte and anti-reflection treatments on recent flagship sets are genuinely better than they were five years ago, and a bright LCD in a bright room can beat a technically superior OLED in that same room. That is not a licence to park it by the window, it is a reason to buy for the room you have rather than the room in the review photos. If your lounge has glass on two sides, the panel technology that wins on a dark-room test chart is not the one that wins in your house.
The half nobody says out loud is that TV placement is rarely a technical decision at all. It goes where the aerial socket is, or where it does not block the walkway, or where somebody else in the household has already decided it goes.
How many of you actually rearranged a room around the TV rather than the other way round?
