Two 65-inch TVs hang on my basement walls, and their price tags aren't close. One is a Hisense CanvasTV that ran about $1,000. The other is a TCL 4-Series Roku TV I grabbed for roughly $300 a few years back. I've written before about how the Hisense's matte screen makes it read like a framed painting, so I figured the expensive set would pull away the second both were in view. From my couch, eight feet back, it didn't. For everyday streaming, the two sit much closer than the price gap implies. Only two things told them apart from there: how each screen handles a bright room, and what it turns into when you shut it off.
The picture gap is smaller than the price gap suggests
Everyday content from eight feet away hides most of the difference
Both sets are 4K, and both run their streaming apps without complaint. The TCL 4-Series Roku TV I bought for around $300 (it sells for around $500 now), from couch distance, it keeps up with the Hisense far better than that number suggests.
Part of that comes down to the content. A lot of what I watch lives on free ad-supported apps, and those cap their resolution well below 4K, so the source limits the picture more than either panel does. Skin tones, daylight scenes, a talking-head interview: at eight feet I can't reliably say which screen is which. By enthusiast standards, the 4-Series is a plain panel, with no Quantum Dot color and no local dimming, and its contrast is ordinary. For the stuff most people watch, from where most people sit, that shortfall mostly vanishes.
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