You should always map out where you’re going to put a TV before you buy one, and this is doubly (perhaps triply) true when it comes to huge TVs.
In most cases, these TVs use glossy screen finishes to give their already-bright backlights even more oomph. The finishes make colors pop vividly, but on TVs of this size they also risk mirroring every reflective light source in the room, especially for viewers who aren’t sitting dead center. So if you’re placing a huge TV in a room with a lot of windows, you might want to hang some light-blocking curtains. You might also have to move any standing lamps around or plan to turn them off while you’re watching.
You also need to think about where you’ll place yourself in the room for viewing, and whether your living room is big enough. For example, to achieve a field of view of 30 degrees, which is what the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommends, you’d need to sit more than 12 feet away from a 98-inch TV.
Although 4K resolution does mean that you can sit closer to your TV without seeing pixels, relative to a 1080p TV, one reason these deeply discounted XXL TVs are so affordable is that they’re not equipped with the best video processing, so they don’t do a great job of upconverting or cleaning up lower-resolution HDTV and DVD sources. You may notice banding (a term for when gradations don’t happen smoothly, usually in light sources) or be distracted by picture elements like film grain.
Unfortunately, because most of these big TVs are LCD TVs rather than OLED TVs, they also don’t offer the best horizontal viewing angles, and the more affordable ones lack any type of advanced panel technology to mitigate the issue. Since the screen is so big, those viewing-angle effects are intensified; even if you’re sitting only slightly to the left of a 98-inch screen, the far right side of the image could have reduced contrast and exhibit some color shifting.
What’s more, with these big TVs, it’s much easier to be off-angle in the vertical plane, in which the top of the image is too high and looks washed out from your seated position. It’s easier to avoid viewing from extreme angles by placing your seating farther away. (We have more such tips in our article about wall-mounting a TV.)
