 I'm actually super excited about this video. I mean it's all fine and good to be checking out the latest like $5,000 BFGG or you know, $5,000 OLED displays, but that's not what most people are actually buying. So James here... Went online and got some of the most popular displays or TVs that you can get that are 4K under $400. Let me try that one more time. All 4K under $400 anywhere from around 50 inches to... I think from 49 to 55. Sweet. So we're gonna let you guys know which ones are the best in terms of the color reproduction, viewing angles, interface, and features, and we're gonna do it all in the next 8 to 9 minutes. That's what you know. What Linus doesn't know is that there's an als- there's a game mechanic built onto this. Oh really? So as you can see, each one of these TVs- do not touch that- has a concealed message in front of it corresponding to one of these prices. Oh, so I have to decide which one is which? Yes, that's right. You're gonna look at each of these TVs and then you're gonna tape one of these prices to each one. Wow, one of them is 220 bucks? I'm looking forward to this. But that's not all. There's stakes. Sorry, what? If you get them all right, you get to enjoy a bowl of your favorite cereal, cranberry almond crunch. Ah, okay, I like cranberry almond crunch. And you have to agree to this. Agree- agree right now. Okay, sure. Anything to make the content better. If you don't get them all right, you have to endure a nice big bite of durian. I knew this was coming. I knew it was gonna be a f***ing durian. I talked to his wife. And this video was brought to you guys by Honey. No matter what you're shopping for, whether it's a value TV or whatever else, use Honey. It's the free browser extension that applies the best promo codes on popular sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Razer, and more. Just go to joinhoney.com slash Linus. We're gonna have that linked below. You're just- there's no milk. You're not expecting me to get them all right. There's almond milk in the fridge if it comes to it. It kind of tastes like spit, but- All right, let's get started. The first thing that stands out to me, not just about the scepter here, but about all of these displays, is how couple of generations ago looking the bezels are. Not just in their thickness, because they're- I mean, they're reasonably thin. How thin of a bezel do you need? But in the way that they're sticking out from the actual panel itself, like having them flush against the glass has become a trend over the last couple of years. The other thing is that they are all using this two-foot style of stand, and it never occurred to me before, because I just didn't think about it, but yeah, it must be cheaper to have the weight, like all the mass of the TV, sitting on top of something, instead of having to build a skeleton on the inside that goes up the middle and is strong enough to be supported by just one point. Like the back is metal instead of plastic, and there's not a ton of I.O. What the hell? It doesn't have a network jack. There's no home button on the remote, because there's no dashboard, because it's not a smart TV. This is super unresponsive, too. What the hell? I think part of it is the receiver, like just getting the signal. Oh yeah, if I get down here, it's fine. So this is clearly one of those ones that's designed to be mounted above your fireplace, because you have no taste. Wow, this is super basic. So like, that's really cheesy. The logo is the bar. Dude, it gets worse. Do the volume. Hahaha, it moves! You're not getting any points for cuteness, guys. Is the default setting for motion compensation off? I didn't mess with that, so yeah. Okay, well that's good, I guess, and apparently it has HDR, but I don't really understand what HDR middle, low, and high means. I happen to know that the peak brightness on this thing is around 250 nits. Okay, so it's not HDR no matter what happens. But we can try, because we have an Xbox here with some HDR games. Okay, cool. Another tell for cheaper TVs in general is poor scaling when you throw in off resolution at it. So even though you're not necessarily going to get pixel perfect scaling, you know, 4 4K pixels to one 1080p output, this is extremely ugly. I'm still pretty sure that they are playing some pretty funky games with the color here. Also, wow, those pixel response times suck. Even just watching the text pop up in this menu is gross. You know, I gotta say, the backlights of cheap TVs have gotten a lot better over the last little bit. Like, I don't notice any hot spots in the corners or anything like that, even when you've got black bars. And Brandon, does it seem like there's a bunch of over-sharpening going on? That's really gross. Like, that's not even, you know, having a low-end processor and not doing enough processing on the image. That's doing bad processing on the image, and that's something that I can't condone. Picture settings. Ah, here we go. Sharpness. Okay, now it's a little soft. That smearing is still nasty, but look at his hair now. So much better. To its credit, HDR does seem to be working, but this is not a great HDR experience. So, you know, where you have these reflections off the armor or anything like that. It doesn't look great. You know, same thing here, but at least it's interpreting the data. Now, the smearing-ness still looks gross, but the foliage is no longer being completely destroyed by that sharpening filter that they were applying out of the box. So, 30, maybe 35 seems to be a better bet. As far as color accuracy goes, I don't see anything that, you know, really draws me out of watching the movie or anything like that. But I would say that the gamut, there's no way it's very good. 93% of sRGB. Yeah, okay, so that's then hot garbage and not accurate at all. So we're way off on magenta, blue. Cyan. Basically everything except the yellows. And I'm actually kind of surprised because usually with the monitors that we've seen on the very low end, SEPTRE kind of punches above the price tag with like the cheapest 4K and the cheapest 144Hz monitors that we've looked at. They've been cheap and you get what you pay for, but they're not bad. There's no way. I mean, I'm not, this is not my final answer, but I'm fairly sure that this is that. Just based on brand name, I'm guessing that TCL is going to come in pretty cheap. It's also really small, so I'm thinking this is like a pretty budget TV, but obviously with better features. I can see TCL is taking advantage of that Roku partnership and they've got an integrated Roku. So not just a smart TV, but a pretty feature rich one. Build quality wise, nothing really stands out here. It's about the same thickness, about the same robustness feeling. Has an ethernet jack, obviously, three HDMI ports, including audio return channel. Yeah, but what I really want to see is the menu. How snappy is it? So much snappier. Picture settings. Let's have a look at what their defaults are. So it defaults to brighter, which is perfect actually for the room we're in right now. Yes, you get HDR notifications. So it formally says, yes, we support HDR, but at what peak brightness? I don't have a spec for the TCL. Bad sign. That's it. TV picture settings. Like where's the sharpness and like tint and stuff? We figured out the menu issue. You've got to select an input in order to actually change these settings. So you use the asterisk button. Then you can get into it. And then if we go into picture settings, okay, movie. Oh, we can actually see what it's changing. So movie, it turns down your sharpness and your color and sets it to warm. I wouldn't necessarily prefer that. However, if you look at our color checker report, look at this. Oh, wow. Movie is like bang on. This is like almost professional grade. Like you could edit photos on this casually. Okay, I guess I will put it in movie mode. That totally smashed all these other TVs. Huh, that's really impressive. So this is pretty annoying. The Xbox is picking up HDR 10 video support now, but only after we went into this settings menu, not the other settings menu, went to TV inputs, went to HDMI 1 and manually changed the mode to HDMI 2.0. It was on auto before and we had power cycled the Xbox. There's no excuse for it not picking that up, but it wasn't. I'm hoping for better this time. I can already tell from this loading circle that the pixel response time is better, let alone from the actual movie. Not bad black level. Yep. It's nice and dark. What panel technology do you think it is? Hard to say. I lied. I have a guess. I'm guessing that it's an IPS like because I'm getting a fair bit of glow off axis. Actually, I think that they're all VA except for one. Oh, all right. Well, the LG would not be VA. So now we know. Now immediately upon loading up our movie, this is noticeably, noticeably better HDR. So the bright points like the flames, the reflections off skin, they stand out far more than they did on the other one. But with that said, this is clearly not thousand knit or even 800 nit peak brightness. Like it's very mediocre HDR. There's no local dimming or anything like that. Some people complain of a really plasticky smell. Oh, wow. It does smell. I feel ridiculous. Look at your life and consider all the decisions you've made that I brought you to this. This one smells a little too, but not nearly like this one. It's got like kind of almost a burning plasticky smell. I mean, I don't think that it's necessarily overheating or anything like that, but it does smell. Now here's one weird thing that doesn't apply to this, but potentially applies to the 43 inch version. We can't test this ourselves, but there is a Amazon review that says that the 43 inch version of this TV, the vase amount uses a nonstandard threading on it. So it would be really hard to find a mount for it then. That's right. It's M6 instead of M4. So you just screw. This is sweet. The Xbox just prompted me to enable the advanced feature auto low latency mode. That's fantastic. Hey, do we have the the latency tester do that? Oh, yeah. This my friends is a time sleuth. Hey, that ain't bad. 24 milliseconds in game mode. Are we even in game mode? Oh, wow. That's with it off. It went from very good to a little bit better than very good. 23 milliseconds. Just shy of 24. Very nice. If I had to assign my price tag based on what I think it's worth, I would probably go higher. But if I have to assign based on what I think it costs, just knowing that TCL is a more budget brand, I'm going to say 279. So given the TVs we've looked at so far and the price points that you've assigned them, this is absolutely worth the extra 50 bucks. Like buy a landslide. Just the fact that there's a Roku included is already a $50 adder. On top of that, it's just a way better TV. That's bigger. I get it. But bigger is not always better. I would suggest scooching your buttocks approximately 18 inches closer and buying that instead. I.O. is pretty similar, you know, three HDMI's again. You've got a couple USB's this time. Composite, component. Looks pretty bog standard to me. But the higher degree of polish with the software, especially compared to someone like Scepter, is definitely immediately apparent. We plugged in an Xbox. It's like, hey, I just detected an Xbox. Once we're connected, we've got support for everything except Dolby Vision. So HDR is there. Video modes. It allows auto low latency mode, which is pretty sweet. And as far as the look of the image goes, it immediately picked up that we've got HDR content incoming. Shoot, they've got their stupid smoothing on by default. Let's go ahead and poke around in the menu a little bit here. Is the settings button really this tiny one down here? Auto motion plus settings. Auto should be off. Digital clean view. No reason not to crank the backlight. While there's no obvious image quality issues like the over-sharpening of the Scepter, I will say that this TV is not doing a fantastic job of retaining detail in the low lights. I mean, that's something that is really noticeable on poor HDR implementations. If I had to guess, I'd say the peak brightness of this one is actually even lower than the TCL that I just looked at. Yeah, it looks a little bit overcooked on the red and maybe the yellow as well. Actually looks like the red is one of the more accurate colors. Really? Yellow is bad. Okay. And as far as brightness goes, it's about 275 to 300 peak brightness. So noticeably, HDR-ent. Yeah. Oh, for crying out loud, I just switched it over to movie mode. Oh yeah, when you change inputs it. Yep. It just discards your stuff. No, I never ever ever want this. Ever. It advertises Bluetooth connectivity, but that's only for audio. You cannot attach your phone or a keyboard or a mouse by a Bluetooth. Right. And so even though the like the copy, promotional copy for it, advertises things like screen mirroring from your phone, you can't. There's actually just no menu for like selecting devices. Time to sleuth. 80 milliseconds. There's no game picture mode. Can you scroll down? Nope. I think this is one of those ones where you have to like trick it. What do you mean? You just have to manually select a particular type of input device in order for it to go into low latency mode. So you can see even game console. I'm looking at 77 milliseconds here. But if I go to home, edit, and I change it to PC. Oh, well, you know, PC people, they're far more discerning. Here's 11 milliseconds of input lag. Why don't console gamers get to have 11 milliseconds of input lag? Sounds I mean, it's very impressive. It's really nice for like budget TV. Great. But do it all the time. So in conclusion, honestly, looks pretty good. Yeah, the color accuracy wasn't fantastic, but I didn't notice any immediately obvious gamut or color accuracy deficiencies, at least to my eye. And my main complaint here is that I'm assuming it's just too expensive compared to the TCL. And that I really wish that TV manufacturers were not labeling stuff like this HDR, because I think it's ruining the brand of HDR for people who look at this and go, oh, well, it's just too dark. I can't see anything. I'm going to put this one here for now. I haven't actually commented on the speakers from the previous ones, but I will say that the Samsung is not great. Neither was the TCL, though the Scepter is just noticeably worse than the other two at this point. You know, I wouldn't have thought it possible, but LG's nasty smoothing might be even nasty. It might be even nastier than Samsung's. It's actually a little chunkier than the Samsung, a little thicker. It actually has nearly identical I.O. to the Samsung. Nothing about it stands out. How do you feel about the fact that you don't have a magic remote? I like the magic remote, but I also don't think it's a huge deal. Because I had originally requested LG to send us a 49UM7300, whereas this is a 6900. And the difference being it's a budget focused holiday model that doesn't have a magic remote. But how much is it saving me? I think 50 bucks. I wouldn't pay $400 for this with a better remote. There's no way. LG's menu does have its own idiosyncrasies, but because I'm familiar with them, I know how to turn on instant game response. You have to turn HD Mile to HD Deep Color on. True motion. Yes, please go away. Maybe it's like normies don't notice and sports people notice and like it. That's basically it. I was at the in-laws over the holiday and they didn't even know their TV had it on. I was like, it was driving me crazy. I turned it off when they weren't looking. As soon as someone goes to the bathroom like, did, did, did, did, did. I do that every time I'm in a new person's house. Yep. Oh, it's smooth things on again. Yep. So we made all those changes based on the ISF expert mode. But now we have to go into the HDR version and we have to go make the changes again. Just like the Samsung. So annoying. True motion. Go f*** yourself. Thank you. Optimized displays for movie. No. Am I wrong to just turn everything I can off? Not necessarily. There's some stuff that I tend to leave on like low, like a little bit of noise reductions. Okay. Okay. I've got this dialed in the way I like it and immediately noticeable reflections off Toothless right here. The clouds we were looking at just now, reflections off the armor. I guarantee you the peak brightness of this is higher than anything else that we've looked at already. Boom. You're right. It's special 400. And you look at the saturation of the greens, you look at how, you know, just kind of vibrant it looks without being overcooked. I can tell you guys right now, the color gamut is going to be very competitive over 99%. Okay. Bing, bing. As for the accuracy, I mean, it's hard to say once you get within delta ease of honestly for me, like watching a movie that I'm not, you know, looking at a reference display right next to it, you know, within like eight or 10, I'm not really going to notice, but I would suspect it's pretty decent. Right again. 94. That's disgusting. Now let's figure out our low latency nonsense. Oh, no. It might rely on the actual input telling it, hey, I need to be low latency. Oh, oh, oh, wait, wait. Nope. LG has a game picture mode. That might do it. This stuff should just be so much simpler. There it is. Boom. 12 milliseconds. Freaking fantastic. I love that TVs don't have crappy input lag, but I hate how it's a different methodology for enabling on everything. I actually want to change my price guess based on what I saw in terms of the performance of this display. And I'm going to say that I think that this one is more expensive. I wouldn't say it's full array local dimming good. Like it's not OLED good anyway, but it is so much better than anything else we saw that I'm a lot more comfortable calling it HDR even in the first place. So if I had to say which one is worth the most, definitely this one. If I had to say which one is the best bang for the buck, I'm going with this one. And Samsung, assuming that it's at this price point, ends up sort of in no man's land where for an extra 30 bucks, I easily take that one and Scepter even at $50 less is just I wouldn't I wouldn't go this route. So I guess it's time for the reveal then. Hey, okay, smart guys. This is your final answer. You're locked in. No phone of friends. This it's so much better that I feel like it's got to be more expensive than this. But this is so much bigger that I almost feel like this could be the two $19.99 one. And those ones like it wouldn't surprise me if the Samsung's more expensive, even though it's a much worse TV. Go with your gut. I've got two $50 50s here. I'm going to price them based on the quality of the experience that I had. So I'm going to hope for the best. It's $220, isn't it? Yes. One for one. He's got one so far. He tastes that cereal. Four out of four. Why do I have to get four? Because I want to see you eat durian because Yvonne said you hated. I was pretty coming. There was no way either. This is going to be 220 bucks. Do I get to rip this one off? So if this one's correct, then you win. Yeah. It's worth it. Hello box of cereal with no milk. Eat it dry. It's still delicious, isn't it? It's like ASMR. I've noticed a little ivy even because I've been talking all day. Oh, that's rough. I need some water. LTT store.com. Well, the video today is brought to you guys by drop.com. The control keyboard is one of their top selling items ever with over 10,000 sold and no wonder with its solid CNC aluminum frame, built in switch plate, RGB lighting, QMK firmware for easy customizability and hot swappable key switches. It is an absolute fan favorite. You can load it up with Cherry MX, Kiwa or Halo switches. It's got dual USB connectors and it weighs a hefty 964 grams. You could probably, you know, hit a baseball with it if you really wanted to. Not that I'm recommending that. I'm recommending going and getting yours today at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoy these kinds of budget display roundups, you might also like the recent high refresh rate budget gaming monitor video that we made where Scepter fared a lot better than they did today. This honestly isn't even worth the $220. I would definitely go there. And this, this disappointed me.