40" TV, 4K or 1080p

[Digger]

Rant first. I've just moved flat, so we very carefully took my 50" VT50 plasma off the wall and carefully carried it downstairs. Next day I discovered the inner glass panel had a clean long diagonal crack in it! I'm hoping the John Lewis warranty will look favourably on me!

Anyhoo it's too big for my new flat so maximum size I'm looking at will probably be a 40" jobbie. I'm happy to go for a set like this one but wondering about 4K.

My main question as a casual pc gamer is whether 1080p gaming on a 4K screen would be as sharp as on a native 1080p screen? I'm guessing not, even if decent upscaling processing is involved. Otherwise I may stick with the Panny linked above, or similar.

Any thoughts about 1080p content on a 4K compared with a native 1080p screen?

[Matt_N]

My Panasonic plasma has just given up the ghost too, so I've been doing a lot of shopping online and in store, all I say is get yourself into a store and see the screens for yourself.

I went in with a couple of Panasonic LEDs around the £500 mark in mind but came away with nothing but disappointment, lifeless colours, poor blacks and terrible SD picture quality.

The best panels IMO were LG, Samsung and Sony, but even then when switched over to SD the quality is terrible.

Having talked to salesman in both JL and Currys they said that SD and blacks are the real downfalls of LED sets at the moment and the only thing I would happily pay money for right now was OLED, but they are 55" minimum and ~ £1500!

HD and 4K yes they look fantastic but I've only got a handful of HD channels so most of my viewing is SD which my Panasonic plasma handled very well.

[varsas]

I haven't seen much 4k content (still waiting for my UHD player) but I think a 40 inch TV is too small to see the difference. I suppose it'd be worth you getting a UHD TV for the high dynamic range and colours but even then I wouldn't worry much and I'm not even sure there are any at 40 inch. Sadly I think you're going to be disapointed by 40 inch LED sets, they are generally lower range models and will not reach the quality of your Plasma in a number of areas.

Yes, you are right. A computer generated 1080p image on a 4k screen looks a bit blurry and messy. Most TV's will not do a direct 1080p -> 2160p scale (i.e. just display each pixel 4 times the size) so it doesn't look 100%.

Edited by varsas on Monday 25th April 17:27

[Digger]

Thanks chaps. Think I'll go with the Panny I linked above. Yeah I did view it in JL the other day. It seemed to produce a satisfactory image. A bit low on connectivity but again adequate for my needs as 2 hdmi's will suffice for now.

[Digger]

Purchased, set it up yesterday. Put it straight in to True Cinema and configured using the AV Forums suggested settings.

Very happy with the picture from Sky HD, maybe a tad soft. Yet to try it with the PC connected.

[VEX]

This is an interesting article about the other benefits of UHD screens and UHD players & formats rather than current bluray formats.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RtTIaa-ZgL0

Looking forward to getting my set up going here. Hopefully about a month or so.

V.