If you’ve kept track of my sporadic old-man-rants-at-sky moments on What Hi-Fi?, you’ll notice that I’ve long bemoaned an ongoing and in my mind slightly sad trend in the world of TVs.
Specifically, there are currently woefully few good cheap TVs doing the rounds, especially at smaller screen sizes.
Let’s run through the evidence over the past few months. First off there’s the recent group test we ran, where we checked out around half a dozen of the top-selling small TVs on Amazon. Sadly, none of the sets managed to earn five stars. The 'winners' were the RCA Roku TV 24-inch (RK24HF1) and Toshiba 24WK3C63DB, which scored four stars.
Even these suffered from some key issues, though, ranging from a lack of streaming apps, which made a Chromecast, Apple TV or Amazon Fire Stick all but essential, to a lack of HDR support. Sure they’re small, but I’d like to see at least a few of the innovations we’ve seen in the last decade start to trickle down to this end of the market.
The same is true if you go slightly up in price and look at the Amazon Fire TV Omni range. In our experience testing them, the Omni TVs are great at larger sizes, with the 50-inch Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED remaining the cheap TV we recommend to most people. But go down below 50 inches and things take a turn for the worse, with the 43-inch Amazon Fire TV Omni, in particular, having too many flaws for us to recommend, despite its price.
So in short, based on our testing, if you want a great TV without any caveats that won’t dominate the whole lounge or bedroom, you’re out of luck.
The good news? While companies don’t seem interested in delivering great value in the smaller end of the TV market, we’ve seen great strides in improving your bang for buck when it comes to big-screen TVs.
Most recently this was showcased by the 85-inch TCL 85C805K. Is it cheap? Retailing for £1579 in our native UK, the answer is unequivocally no, as unless you're Jeff Bezos that’s still a large wad of cash. But, by 85-inch TV standards, it’s by far one of the cheapest we’ve seen at this size, and it represents cracking value when you consider how much hardware TCL has packed inside.
Excellent gaming features for PS5 and Xbox Series X and Series S owners? Check. Full HDR support? Check. Reliable picture quality that can get you truly immersed in a film? Check.
Even a couple of years ago, a TV this size with the TCL’s features and performance would have cost nearly twice as much – as we reported in our in-depth TCL 85C805K review: “Despite costing less than some 55-inch TVs, the TCL 85C805K manages to combine the sheer largesse of its 85-inch pictures with excellent gaming support and genuinely cinematic and immersive picture and sound quality. In other words, it’s pretty much a dream come true for home cinema fans who aren’t lucky enough to have limitlessly deep pockets.”
TCL is also one of many TV makers who think the future is in big sets. Samsung’s leadership team said a significant part of its R&D investment will go into large TVs in its last quarterly investment call, as it doesn’t think there’s enough scale at the smaller end of the market.
And many will love this trend, including one commenter on our Facebook page who told me to “just build a bigger house”, the last time I bemoaned my inability to fit an 85-inch set into my home.
But, as I’ve noted before, many of us simply don't have room for such big TVs, but do still care about picture and sound quality. That's why I’d still love to see more of the innovation we see on the larger, more expensive sets trickle down to smaller, and cheaper, TVs.
Until this happens, the truth is that if you want the best bang for your buck, in most instances it may be worth going big or going home when shopping for a new TV.
MORE:
These are the best 65-inch TVs we’ve tested
We rate the best cheap TVs
Check out our picks of the best OLED TVs
