What is the best bang for the buck 4k TV for the best picture in Nov Dec 2017 in the US?

Short summary:

Vizio E series 75" for those want biggest picture TV 4K $1500
Vizio M Series 70" for those who want a bigger TV than 65 but better contrast than E series 4K $1300
Vizio P series 65" for those who want higher contrast 4K $1400
LG OLED 55" for those who want best picture 4K $1650

Detailed opinion.

I am only talking picture quality here. If you care about audio, consider a sound bar for bedroom and a AV receiver with sub woofer, center, left and right
for better audio and add 2 more rear speakers to receive the 5.1 audio available on many TV and DVDs, Bluray as well. 7.1 audio is for audiophiles and there is very little 7.1 content available. And yes, there is 9.1 too.

If you are looking for a budget TV under 500, see my other blog.

If you want to spend under $2000 and like to watch your own or YouTube 4k video and photos in highest resolution and best picture quality, you surely want good color spectrum and high contrast.

First of all what is the difference between LCD, LED and OLED TV?

LCD and LED are both back light Liquid crystal displays which require back lighting to brighten the picture where there is brightness and no back lighting where there is darkness. LCD was backlit with compact fluoroscent (CF)  light. LED was backlit with LEDs. Now there is hardly any CFL backlit just CFL bulbs are gone and LED bulbs replaced them.

The very first generation LCD TV had a single backlight and later they started adding multiple zones to better control the contrast.

The E series mentioned here has 14 Active LED Zones.

The M series mentioned here has  32 Zones.

The P series mentioned here has 128 zones and true 120Hz refresh rate for less motion blur.

The OLED has no backlight requirement. Each pixel is either lit or not light.
Effectively 8.3 Million "zones".

So, the contrast is the best. Note that the picture may not be as bright though but this will change as technology improves just as the LED bulbs got brighter with improvement in technology.

There is another aspect to picture quality which scales 480p, 720p, 1080p to to 4K. If money is no object Sony is known to have the best video scaling and video image processing engines. Go do some home work!

What is the best bang for the buck budget TV in Nov Dec 2017 in the US?

Short summary:

43" 4K LED TV for $300 to 350 at Walmart or Bestbuy.

Detailed opinion:

43" TV can be seen from as close at 6 feet without seeing any graininess.
So it is good for just about any use other than as a computer monitor.

At Costco, 48 of the 56 models are 4k or 2160p. 7 are 1080p. 1 720p.

The cheapest and acceptable 43" 1080p TV is TCL for about 20 bucks less
at Costco.

4K (2160p)  has 4 times the
resolution of 3840 pixels × 2160 lines (8.3 megapixels, aspect ratio 16:9)

1080p  1920 x 1080 2 megapixels.

 Most photos we shoot with even a cheap smart phone are 8Mega pixel. So, they
look much better on 4K screen.

If you are planning a vacation, look at youtube videos in 4K.

So, splurge the extra 20 bucks!

Open letter to US Wired and Sat TV providers. Innovate or perish.

You lost the Millennials already.  Gen X and the younger baby boomers like myself are next in line.

Dish network had no internet service. DirecTV was bought by ATT. Verizion FIOS is too small and too costly to expand. Dish network fired the fist salvo with Sling TV and ATT and now Youtube got it to complement Hulu and Netflix. Do not fight them. Join them. Perhaps you need to partner with cellular data service providers.

I have cable and internet and I pay $110 on the average for a 2yr contract. If my contract were to expire today, I would just get internet service even if it means I pay $65 instead of $45 and pay $50 to get Sling TV so called Orange plus Blue plus 4 extras and even a cloud DVR which is coming.

Embrace the new wave and dump your set top boxes completely. Use your ISP backbone using open standards to prioritize video. You know that all it takes is 2Mbps with the high efficiency codec to deliver 1080p and so 8MBps x 3 will support 3 4k TVs per house which is just 25% of my downstream bandwidth. Lot of room to expand into IOT, home security video etc. Your costs will come down because many users who are savvy enough to install their router can do it by themselves and you can contract out with the likes of GeekSquad at Bestbuy for the others. You will not need as many truck rolls. All the hardware other than wire to home is at your end. You can go after any customer in the world connected to Internet including mobile who wants your programming.

Collect social security at 62 and invest vs wait till 67?

I did a simple calculation. Collect at age 62 and invest all of it. What is collected in year 1 is invested for 5yrs, year 2 collection is invested for 4yrs and so on and accumulates till age 67.

Compare it collecting 34% higher amount at age 67.

What I found is all you need is 2.75% return on money you collect at age 62 to match 34% more collected at age 67 and investing at the same return of 2.75%.

You may not get guaranteed return for 1yr investment unless it is 10yr treasury but if you have down payment money to buy real estate, current interest rate on mortgage is 4.75%. Even after tax deduction of 33% 3.2% is better than 2.75%.

What do you think?

2017 Nvidia Shield TV initial impressions.

You can read the specs. here.

I connected it using ethernet wire to my router. Setup and software update was simple.

Tested playback of few media video files with external USB hard drive using the media player which came with the startup. Could not see the file names. I installed Kodi media player and liked it much better. So, it is a decent media player.

Tested youtube and Amazon video playback and it was good.

What did not work was Google Photos App, Did not connect to my google account and show allthe albums like it does on Android phones and Tablets. Chromecast worked when controlled from Android devices. Chromecast backdrop also does not see Google Photos. There is no options to connect as well. This was the big surprise. I did not test 4K video because I did not have a TV to connect to.

I plan to download the google photo albums I want to see on a USB thumb drive to get around the non-working Google Photo App. Not sure if the problem is with Google's Android TV or Nvidia's implementation.

I got the basic model with 2 USB 3.0 ports. Other good thing is a USB device called SmartExtend which is supposed to connect to Smartthings hub. I will get it and see how it works.

I suggest we rename Internet of Things IoT to MoT.

I have always said that it is not about internet when it comes to things we use every single day.

Can you think of one thing every person in the world sees and probably uses every single day?

I think it is the light bulb.

I did a dumb search and found that 2.5Billion light bulbs are sold each year worldwide at average cost of 92 cents. In the US we have switched mostly to CFL bulbs and now switching to LED bulbs but 82% of the bulbs in the world are incandescent.

The retail price of a 60W equivalent LED bulb is when bought in a pack of dozen is less than $3. The retail price of the cheapest connected bulb is $10. The cost of making a bulb connected vs dumb is probably less than a dollar. That means in high volumes it is possible to bring down the retail price of connected bulb to less than $5. That is 5x that of incandescent. Now wonder that 82% of the bulbs sold are still incandescent.

There in lies the challenge and opportunity. With enough volumes LED bulbs could come to the price of incandescent. and for a bit more it could be smart connected bulb.

However, the title of this article suggests MoT instead of IoT. I believe it is all about Mesh of Things MoT. No need to flood the internet with more things connected which do not really need to connect most of the time. However the cell phone is seen all over the world where there is electricity available to charge it and hence a light bulb. A cell phone knows the time and it knows when it is sunset. It has alarm. Most smart phones have bluetooth and wifi. Bluetooth is lower energy and lower range than wifi and more secure because the range is less.

Bluetooth mesh networking is coming. So, connect the dots. Bluetooth mesh enabled led bulbs controlled by phones can lower the global emissions and energy costs. This is the challenge to inventors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and governments all over the world....

Build it and they will come.