Question Budget TV for a non ideal situation

mingus2112

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Looking for some guidance for a new TV for our living room. Our current TV is a 50" Panasonic DLP rear projection (1080i), so most new TVs will be an upgrade in terms of contrast, brightness and black levels. Spending the $3700 we spent on this DLP over a decade ago, i've been reluctant to get rid of it. We've replaced the bulb ONCE and that was only because we let it actually die (not replace it when it was dim). The high price tag of that TV is what has kept us from replacing it...hell, it still works!

Given that, we're looking at a replacement (upgrade) for about $500 (give or take). I expect to replace it in ~5 years, and that's the amount I can live with and be comfortable replacing it. All of our content is streaming from a home media server. No over the air, no cable, no bluray, no netflix. That content is a mixture of 720p and 1080p bluray (mostly 720p since my TV for well over a decade has been 1080i) rips, 480p DVD rips (and some straight up remuxes to mkv files) and even some lower resolution VHS rips of older TV shows, concerts, etc. Given the lower resolution of my existing content, i'm concerned with upscaling and don't want to end up with a picture quality worse than what I have now. I have 30T of media and, while i'll gladly start upgrading some of my content, I can't expect to replace or re-rip all of it. I am currently using a Roku to stream the content from my Plex. If i'm outputting from the Roku via HDMI, is the Roku doing the upscaling or is it the TV? If it's the TV, then that's a concern to factor in.

As for the room, it's a small living room and, due to a very open floor plan, the TV has to be in the corner. In the opposite corner is a sectional. The corner seat of the sectional is at 90degrees to the center of the TV at around 10'. The extreme left and right of the sectional are about 45degrees (staring at the center of the TV) and about 8' away. Tv is mostly watched with lights on, which are all 2700k LED bulbs, but occasionally in the dark.

The first TV I was looking at was the Samsung KU6300 50". Decent reviews and comes in at around $550 for now. I also saw that Best Buy has the Hisense 508HC for $400, which is a huge drop at this price point. I've seen a thread comparing this Hisense with the Samsung KU8000 which was very polarized. I would think that the KU6300 would be more comparable as the KU8000 is a much higher quality TV and much more expensive.

So given the content I need to display, any suggestions or recommendations? Thoughts on those two models? Obviously, buying a new TV i'd like to go something capable of 4k, but that content would be very sparse - especially since Youtube would be the only source for me right now. I need something that will actually be an upgrade to my DLP or I may as well get another bulb for it (~$150) and keep it for another 5 years.

-James
 
Should also add that I don't like "motion smoothing" or whatever it's called. The soap opera effect kills me and, while i'm sure that can be turned off on whatever TV I get, I just wanted to add that the quality of this effect in any given TV would be irrelevant to me. ;)
 
I've been doing a little extra research on my own and i'm inferring from what I read that the Roku automatically upscales to its set output. So if I have the output set for 1080p, it should pass anything at 1080p to the TV without upscaling and then anything below 1080p (90% of my content) it will upscale to 1080p. Then, I assume, a 4k TV would upscale that 1080p signal to 4k, correct?

What would the best practice for this? If I have SD content upscaled on the Roku to 1080p and then again to 4k on the tv, I assume this would be detrimental. Obviously garbage in/garbage out, but i'm satisfied with the picture quality of the SD content on my DLP with the roku outputting at 720p (so I assume it's upscaling there). I'd almost be OK sticking with that TV if it didn't take up the whole room, was a little brighter and had more contrast.

Any thoughts?
 
Thoughts on those two models?

This forum has a large UK population and neither model is available here. The KU6300 is clearly some variant of the KU6000 but I'm not sure about the H8C? It's Rec. 709 rather than wide gamut so an M3300 variant maybe.

Have you looked at the UN49K6250 which seems very similar to the K6300 here? That's a Full HD TV so would put off your upscaling problem for a couple of years until SD to 4K scaling improves.
 
Interesting. . .looks like that's not available in any local stores, but it's available from Amazon for about $50 more than i'd pay for the KU6300. It's curved, though. What's the advantage to a curved tv?
 

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