As it works towards concluding its acquisition by Walmart, the U.S. TV brand Vizio has just dropped a new, 86-inch LED TV that represents the biggest living room display it has ever released.
While ultra-large TVs are certainly not unusual these days, Vizio’s newest 86-inch 4K LCD TV stands out thanks to its affordable price tag. The TV is set to retail at just $999 when it goes on sale in April, making it one of the most competitively priced displays of its kind available.
The new 86-inch model is said to top off the company’s latest series of 4K models, which comes in screen sizes ranging from 43-inches to 75-inches. Despite the low price tag, it’s not a bad TV at all by the sounds of it, featuring a full-array LED display that supports Dolby Vision and HDR10+ high dynamic range formats, a 60Hz refresh rate, and gaming in 120Hz possible when reducing the resolution to 1080p. There’s also support for Auto Low-Latency Mode, Variable Refresh Rate and Dolby Vision gaming, the company said.
Also supported is DTS:X surround sound, though Dolby Atmos seems to be absent. Users will get a Vizio Voice remote control complete with a built-in microphone, which is said to be compatible with both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Chromecast and Apple AirPlay 2 are also supported, enabling additional content to be streamed from a smartphone or tablet to the TV.
How does it stack up?
It’s not uncommon to see ultra-large TVs with sub $1,000 price tags, but many of these cheaper super-sized models tend to come with fairly basic displays that skimp out in terms of colour, contrast and black uniformity.
More expensive TVs tend to have full-array LED or Mini-LED backlights which do a good job of reproducing a more accurate picture. These technologies enable local dimming zones that can distribute the lighting across the screen more evenly, meaning contrast is superior. But the basic edge-lit displays that generally come with sub-$1,000 ultra-size displays cause deeper blacks to appear as gray tones, while the highlights for HDR movies tend to look quite dull in comparison to more expensive models.
The good news is that Vizio’s latest 86-inch model may not suffer such problems, as it features a full-array LED backlight. That said, the company made no mention of local dimming, so we cannot be sure just yet.
What we do know is that many other TV brands, such as TCL and Hisense, sell 85-inch models for less than $1,000, and they don’t feature local dimming zones. They cannot therefore match the picture performance offered by the best ultra-large Mini-LED TVs, which typically cost twice as much.
