Prices of Very Large Flat TVs are Falling Fast

[Power Pop 23]

The 'Review Pipeline' page for TV's to be measured at Rtings dot com now shows they purchased five very large (98 to 100 inch diagonal) TV's on October 15, 2025. I believe this is the first time Rtings dot com has purchased TV's of this size.

Hisense 98QD5QG
Hisense 100U8QG
Sony Bravia 5 98
TCL 98QM8K
Samsung 100QN80F

Review Pipeline

See what TVs are in our review pipeline.

www.rtings.com

Rtings dot com has posted (paywall-free) reviews of each of the above TV's

Review Pipeline

See what TVs are in our review pipeline.

www.rtings.com

 

[DSJR]

One Cornish-based TV repair engineer on YouTube, feels that Hisense tellies are the absolute pits, as they only seem made for a very few years' life before almost certain irreparable or uneconomic failure. he took a Sony apart and showed where the extra money goes internally. Many modern sets do seem glued together and this makes them very difficult to repair as separating the screen elements is very difficult. Edge lighting runs hot too and cheasper sets without proper heat-sinking there, heat-damages the prism sheet that transmits the light up the screen. A comparison with a Sony edge-lit model shows how much extra work Sony did to minimise any potential heat damage and why Sonys tend to cost a bit more.

Hisense apparently, are the number one worldwide in terma of sales. A shame if many of these will end up in landfill after less than five years as this engineer thinks...

 

[EJ3]

Nothing in the real world ever looks as deep black to me as a pure black area of a TV screen. Something about it just isn't quite right perceptually.

I guess that you have never been 10 miles down in a cave, sat in the dark for 30 minutes to let your eyes get accustomed to ZERO light & then lit up a Bic lighter?
It's pretty amazing the distances & detail that your eyes can see in true total darkness + that little bit of light.

 

[Petrushka]

One Cornish-based TV repair engineer on YouTube, feels that Hisense tellies are the absolute pits, as they only seem made for a very few years' life before almost certain irreparable or uneconomic failure. he took a Sony apart and showed where the extra money goes internally. Many modern sets do seem glued together and this makes them very difficult to repair as separating the screen elements is very difficult. Edge lighting runs hot too and cheasper sets without proper heat-sinking there, heat-damages the prism sheet that transmits the light up the screen. A comparison with a Sony edge-lit model shows how much extra work Sony did to minimise any potential heat damage and why Sonys tend to cost a bit more.

Hisense apparently, are the number one worldwide in terma of sales. A shame if many of these will end up in landfill after less than five years as this engineer thinks...

Isn’t edge lighting on its way out?

 

[Doodski]

One Cornish-based TV repair engineer on YouTube, feels that Hisense tellies are the absolute pits, as they only seem made for a very few years' life before almost certain irreparable or uneconomic failure. he took a Sony apart and showed where the extra money goes internally. Many modern sets do seem glued together and this makes them very difficult to repair as separating the screen elements is very difficult. Edge lighting runs hot too and cheasper sets without proper heat-sinking there, heat-damages the prism sheet that transmits the light up the screen. A comparison with a Sony edge-lit model shows how much extra work Sony did to minimise any potential heat damage and why Sonys tend to cost a bit more.

Hisense apparently, are the number one worldwide in terma of sales. A shame if many of these will end up in landfill after less than five years as this engineer thinks...

I had not owned a TV for ~25 years. I know little to nothing about big screen TVs and so I bought a very newly released model of a 55" HiSense TV on July 27, 2025 and I paid more because it was a recently released model. It does not have an on-screen clock! The picture is fine with no issues there but I suspect the remote control has a issue. Sometimes when I click the remote control back and forth selection arrow/buttons to control the selection on the TV screen the selection does not go to the next selection but it very rapidly clicks over several selections and then stops. If I click back on the remote then the selection very rapidly goes back several selections and so I can't select anything because the box highlighting the on-screen selection just keeps moving around all over back and forth quickly and never stops where I need it. So I power down and power up and sometimes the issue is gone and sometimes it remains. So... I ordered in a HiSense TV remote control from Amazon that will arrive this afternoon that looks near identical to the factory HiSense TV remote control and I will test drive that remote and see if I fixed the issue. Otherwise it is going back to HiSense for warranty repair.

I was curious if I bought a good brand of TV. So I commenced web searches and I read a lot and I watched reputable testers' videos and the end result is the experts stated that all the big screen TVs are not lasting a long time on average and buying a top brand is not a guarantee of a longer lasting TV or even a better TV. They said in simple clear English that the top brands are just as unreliable or reliable as the lower price brands at this time. But Panasonic is apparently a very good big screen TV is a underlying idea that kept being repeated.

 

[Doodski]

I guess that you have never been 10 miles down in a cave, sat in the dark for 30 minutes to let your eyes get accustomed to ZERO light & then lit up a Bic lighter?
It's pretty amazing the distances & detail that your eyes can see in true total darkness + that little bit of light.

I caved on Vancouver Island @ the Horne Lake Caves Park in the winter. It rains constantly there with no snow to speak of and it is just fricking miserable. So to my amazement I found and I bought a large big blister pack of assorted large flashlights from Eveready, all waterproof, all rubber to be tough and I bought quality Energizer batteries for all of them to make sure all was tip top and very powerful etc. I gave the multiple several D cell batteries big long weapon sort of fat Billy Club shaped flashlight to my legally blind albino buddy so he at the least had some form of weapon and we set off into the bush going to the cave and went far underground deep into the cave with zero cave experience. It was not what I expected. Water was dripping, water was running, it was fricking dangerous and amazingly as usual my legally blind albino buddy was not even concerned and not phased by any of it and was enthralled to be out and about doing stuff with me. >Sidenote: When we where younger we went out in Vancouver alll the time for pints. One night we climbed a skyscraper tower construction crane to the top and walked out to the very tip of the crane end way up high and had a celebratory wee off the top and laughed and he was concerned but not even scared and he's legally blind. < So we went from cave section to cave section, narrow passage to narrow passage and in a large tall ceiling area we shone the lights up and the entire ceiling of the cave was gray/brown spiders. Thousands of spiders hanging out. I found out later that they winter in the cave to escape the horrible wet, damp, rainy disgusting winters of Vancouver Island.

 

[EJ3]

One Cornish-based TV repair engineer on YouTube, feels that Hisense tellie' are the absolute pits, as they only seem made for a very few years' life before almost certain irreparable or uneconomic failure. he took a Sony apart and showed where the extra money goes internally. Many modern sets do seem glued together and this makes them very difficult to repair as separating the screen elements is very difficult. Edge lighting runs hot too and cheaper sets without proper heat-sinking there, heat-damages the prism sheet that transmits the light up the screen. A comparison with a Sony edge-lit model shows how much extra work Sony did to minimize any potential heat damage and why Sony's tend to cost a bit more.

Hisense apparently, are the number one worldwide in terms of sales. A shame if many of these will end up in landfill after less than five years as this engineer thinks...

Based on the experiences of friends living on Islands in the Indian Ocean & Western Pacific, (where it is surprising the amount of stuff that can be fixed there, because it takes weeks or months to get something to places that many won't ship to). I needed more checks and it took 88 days for them to get to me from Virginia in the USA (because most places only accept cash or check, with a credit/debit card or phone app as your means of money, you'd likely starve to death).
The Hisense's failed (in the hot all the time, super humid environment) on average 2-3 years and could usually be repaired only the first time (it would be something minor). The second time would typically occur 3-6 months later and would be unrepairable by anyone on the islands (and probably uneconomically too, what with having to obtain the part, and then repair it.)
So into the dump it goes (not much space on those islands).
So then, the electronics that are in the dump gets loaded on to barges and sent somewhere for recycling.
It's a very expensive, time & labor process to get rid of something that is no longer repairable or re-purpose-able when you are living on a tropical island paradise.
Hence my leaning deeply into whether or not something is repairable over the long term of my lifetime.

 

[EJ3]

I found out later that they winter in the cave to escape the horrible wet, damp, rainy disgusting winters of Vancouver Island.

Smart spiders!

 

[Tim Link]

I guess that you have never been 10 miles down in a cave, sat in the dark for 30 minutes to let your eyes get accustomed to ZERO light & then lit up a Bic lighter?
It's pretty amazing the distances & detail that your eyes can see in true total darkness + that little bit of light.

Indeed, I've never done that! I have an iPhone with an OLED display on it that can do 800 nits full screen. I watch in the dark with my magnifier reading glasses and that looks really good. No weird problems.
In real life it seems that things look different. I've been in very dark caves where I couldn't see a thing. When I lighted a penlight it was brilliant but the rest of the cave was also no longer ptich black. So that's perhaps why it looks so weird to me when content creators make scenes where part of the screen is illumnated and somehow another part is completely not illuminated. The closest thing I see to that is streetlights against a very dark sky. That much stark contrast is not visually attractive, so I'm not really interested in making it a goal to reproduce it. Nice highlights that pop against an illuminated background are nice. OLED can get very good color saturation in those darker areas because of no light bleed from the other primary colors. Of course, our ability to see color is reduced as the illumination level goes down, so there's a limit to the importance of that.

 

[Doodski]

Smart spiders!

I was working as usual at my parents farm and we where doubling the size of the house and the expansion was a bare concrete basement with a sand floor. I was in and out over the summer and watched a Orb spider set up home and build a very huge very tough durable strong large funnel web in the corner near the ceiling. This was like ~150 yards from the Columbia River and there is so many moths and other bugs large and small there in the summer that the windshields of the cars and motorcyclists visors get so caked with bugs that you can't see out and car radiators get completely plugged with dead bugs and the engines overheat. Bug central! Many food items for spiders and many all day everyday night hawks galore buzzing about dive bombing bugs to eat all the time. Anyway... The Orb spider became so large that I was scared to even go near it. It was like a ~golf ball or bigger at the body plus the appendages. To see it was to know it was a real life living animal right in front of your eyes and you could see the hairs and stripes on the legs and body etc. I was using my arrows to stab huge like 3" long "snappers" AKA grasshoppers and then offer them to the spider impaled on the arrow and I would set them on the web and then when I backed off the spider came out and spun them in silk and slurped on them. After the absurdly large spider trusted me it anticipated my arrival and rushed out all the way to the edge of the web funnel to meet me when I came with more snappers and it eagerly jumped on them aggressively. It learned who I am, visually recognized me somehow, anticipated my schedule, knew I was not a threat and knew I had food it preferred. I read about spiders and they are some of the most intelligent beasties on Earth in some ways.

 

[EWL5]

I have an LG G5 on the way. I'll let everyone know my impressions soon...

So I'm really liking what I see in my new 65" G5:

1) Football looks great on this TV, especially in a bright room!
2) Filmmaker mode does a good job making you feel like you're at the movies w/accurate colors and inky blacks. I watched The Rise of Skywalker 4k BD on my LG UBK90 player and the scenes on Exegol got really creepy and really did the dark scenes justice!
3) Streaming on Apple TV 4K was a pleasure and I was pleasantly surprised at how all the anime from Crunchyroll turned out. The processing on this TV must be a bit better than the B7 that was replaced.
4) The PS5 looks like a knockout on this TV. Good to finally have a modern TV that can take advantage of the modern console perks!

I needed a TV that would be great with all the lights on as well as complete darkness. Mission accomplished!

 

[pablolie]

I have never quite understood why a TV would need different modes (sports, cinema, whatever). A good visual setting should stay a good setting no matter what. My TV has those, I have never ever bothered to switch. I set it up once with calibration and that's that.

 

[Martin]

From the Master "Deals" thread - $498 for an 85" is insanely cheap:

Master "deals" (massdrop, ebay, Amazon, etc.) Thread on Audio Product Sales

Apple is offering access to their Apple TV streaming service for $5.99 a month for 6 months. https://tv.apple.com/

www.audiosciencereview.com

Martin

 

[Descartes]

Will we ever see a 97” OLED under $5,000?

 

[Tim Link]

Will we ever see a 97” OLED under $5,000?

I doubt it. But we may eventually see QDEL (quantum dot electro luminescent) displays that rival OLED on every front, and they can potentially be manufactured at close to the price of LCD panels. They might someday hit the 97" under $5000 mark!
Apparently the problem they are having with those is stabilizing the blue quantum dots. They can do it right now with cadmium, but that's not going to get approval because of the long term waste hazard so they're looking for some other chemistry to make good little blue quantum dots that can handle long term direct electric stimulation without breaking down. Blue always seems to be a problem.

 

[Tim Link]

I have never quite understood why a TV would need different modes (sports, cinema, whatever). A good visual setting should stay a good setting no matter what. My TV has those, I have never ever bothered to switch. I set it up once with calibration and that's that.

I have tried to make use of those various modes but always end up with the same mode on everything. I used filmmaker mode for a few years, but lately I've switched to movie mode because for some reason my TV shows some weird color banding issues in filmmaker mode. I just go in to movie mode and change the custom settings so it looks like filmmaker mode but without that color banding issue.
The gaming modes might make some sense for some gamers who are worried about input lag time, or want to support special framerate features or whatever else they're doing with gaming computers and consoles.

 

[Tim Link]

So I'm really liking what I see in my new 65" G5:

1) Football looks great on this TV, especially in a bright room!
2) Filmmaker mode does a good job making you feel like you're at the movies w/accurate colors and inky blacks. I watched The Rise of Skywalker 4k BD on my LG UBK90 player and the scenes on Exegol got really creepy and really did the dark scenes justice!
3) Streaming on Apple TV 4K was a pleasure and I was pleasantly surprised at how all the anime from Crunchyroll turned out. The processing on this TV must be a bit better than the B7 that was replaced.
4) The PS5 looks like a knockout on this TV. Good to finally have a modern TV that can take advantage of the modern console perks!

I needed a TV that would be great with all the lights on as well as complete darkness. Mission accomplished!

I spent some time watching the new Samsung which I think uses a similar panel, if not the same one. Both of those are full 400 nit displays - full screen 400 nit. That's nice and bright and really looks very different to me than older, dimmer OLEDs that couldn't even reach 300 nits full screen, although they could go much brighter for smaller details. I find that kind of dynamic limiting to be very distracting so they've been a no-go for me for years, even though I really wanted those deep blacks. I think I could be totally satisfied with these latest OLEDs. My target was 600 nits, and I think I'd be even happier with that. But 400 looks really good.

 

[Tim Link]

With the contrast turned down so much this clearly doesn't offer a true HDR experience, but it also doesn't look weird. When I do watch HDR content, it still looks better than standard content, so there's a benefit to it that's visible on high quality content. It just lacks the extreme pop I can get if I allow it be weird looking.

I'm responding to my own post. After writing that I decided I need to test all my ideas again. Now I'm confused. Turning up the contrast and brigtness does not necessarily have any adverse effect on the blooming. It seems the blooming becomes less of a problem after the TV has been on for a while, which is not something I would have ever expected, and caused me to chase adjustments that weren't necessary. I've tried to look up this issue and there are some comments about these TVs needing to warm up. Google's AI overview says "

Mini LED TVs require a warm-up period of at least 30 minutes to ensure consistent performance and reach optimal contrast levels.
While LEDs themselves light up almost instantly, the LCD panel and associated local dimming systems require time for the internal components to reach a stable operating temperature

 

[Martin]

Will we ever see a 97” OLED under $5,000?

With 85 inch TVs under $500, I think it’s only a matter of time. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them under $2500.

Martin

 

[Power Pop 23]

Another option for an 85-inch TV for $500 - an Insignia 'F50' from Best Buy USA

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/insignia-85-class-f50-series-led-4k-uhd-smart-fire-tv/J2FPJKSVC7

Rtings dot com measured a 65-inch Insignia F50 in March 2022

Insignia F50 QLED Review (NS-50F501NA22, NS-55F501NA22, NS-65F501NA22, NS-70F501NA22)

The Insignia F50 is an entry-level 4k TV with a quantum dot panel designed to deliver a wider range of colors than traditional LED-backlit TVs. It's a very basic...

www.rtings.com