On today’s episode of You Asked: What are the differences between HDMI 2.1, 2.1a, and 2.1b? Are older OLED TVs compatible with the PlayStation 5 Pro? Why 4K Blu-ray-quality digital downloads don’t exist? What screens sizes are best for achieving a cinematic experience at home? Plus, TCL’s Bruce Walker joins Caleb in the studio to discuss TCL’s giant TVs, holiday deals, and what might be coming at CES 2025.
HDMI 2.1 vs. 2.1a vs. 2.1b
Kbarso who writes: What is the difference between HDMI 2.1, HDMI 2.1a and HDMI 2b?. Is a 2019 OLED TV (with standard HDMI 2.1) good for the PS5 Pro that has HDMI 2.1b?
So, short answer: Yes, your LG C9 is a great match for a PS5 Pro. Here’s why.
HDMI 2.1 — without the A or B — includes just about every modern HDMI feature you could want. That includes up to 48 gigabits per second bandwidth, Auto Low Latency Mode, 4K 144Hz, 8K 60Hz — almost all the stuff that you want out of the latest HDMI version. HDMI 2.1a added support for source-based tone mapping.
Source-based tone mapping allows a device like a game console or PC to dynamically adjust the HDR tone mapping based on the TV’s capabilities, which takes the tone mapping out of the TV’s control without — and this is the key — without the user having to do any calibration.
But, the PS5 Pro — and prior versions of the PS5 — allow you to use HGiG tone mapping, where you do a quick calibration on the PS5, and that controls the tone mapping rather than the TV. The only difference is that it requires a bit of input from you.
HDMI 2.1b basically added some stability fixes for the source-based tone-mapping feature that came with HDMI 2.1a.
So, again, the LG C9 will work great with the PS5, and you’ll get the best HDR picture possible by doing that manual HDR calibration.
4K Blu-ray-quality digital downloads
Michael Grundle writes: Hi, are there any digital stores that sell Blu-ray-quality digital downloads? I couldn’t find any. It seems like this is the solution to physical media’s slow demise. I understand that Blu-rays are massive storage-wise, but we live in a world where you buy to own games that you download, why can’t we have this for movies? It would be cool to own digital versions of Blu-rays including menus and special features.
Thanks for your question, Michael. I’ll start by saying that I wish this were a thing as well — I’d love to be able to just buy a 4K Blu-ray-quality version of a movie as a digital download, or maybe pay extra on top of the disc price to get that. Unfortunately, this does not exist — not as you and I are envisioning it, anyway.
The closest thing to owning the digital download version of a 4K Blu-ray is through Kaleidescape — they make high-end home theater movie servers. But those downloads are proprietary, and so is the equipment you must use to play back those digital files. It’s not like you can play it back using your PC or through a media server like Plex.
Outside of that, the closest thing is streaming your digital movies through iTunes, Fandango at Home (that’s what VUDU has become), or Movies Anywhere.
You can also rip your 4K Blu-rays and make your own copies, which is legal so long as you own the movie on disc and don’t distribute or otherwise screen that movie for commercial purposes.
But, yeah, with storage getting less and less expensive, I think it would be cool if we could move toward purchasing digital versions of our movies that are at that quality level. It would still be expensive, but it seems like a low lift for production houses, so why not? They would for sure make more profit margin by not involving disc manufacturing and distribution.
Cinema experience at home
Will writes: You recently covered some really big TV screens. In your experience, considering typical domestic room sizes and average viewing distances, what screen size really starts to feel like a cinema experience?
Well, Will, I’ll do my best here. The thing is, I’m just not sure what the typical domestic room size is anymore. I mean, in the United States alone, the room size in which someone is watching their TV and, by some extension anyway, the viewing distance, seems super varied. In my own life, I’ve been anywhere from 8 to 12 feet away from my screen, but I’ve seen some homes with so-called great rooms where folks are 15 feet or more away.
I think we can simplify this by relying on a tried and trusted calculator to get us started. THX suggests that you take your viewing distance in inches and multiply that by 0.835 to get the screen size, in inches, that will come off as cinematic. So, if we take a viewing distance of 10 feet — that’s 120 inches — and we multiply that by 0.835, we get about 100 inches.
I think that is a good starting point. I think a 98-inch TV, viewed at about 10 feet away, is awesome. From there, you could go a little bigger and be OK, and you can go a little smaller and still have a great experience.
Now, that calculator isn’t concerned with resolution or whether you can see pixelation or any of that stuff — it’s about occupying your field of view in a manner that is similar to what you might experience in a commercial movie theater. But keep in mind that even in a commercial theater, there is a sweet spot, sure, but you may be farther away than “ideal” if you sit in the back, or closer than ideal if you’re sitting in the front.
I think that calculator is a really solid starting point for someone whose main goal is to try to get the most cinematic experience possible. Now, if we take the largest TV screen size available now — 120 inches, which is also a very popular projector screen size — and we work backward, that means the “ideal” viewing distance would be 12 feet.
This section is sponsored by TCL
Interview with Bruce Walker of TCL North America
Speaking of huge TVs, I’m excited to bring in Bruce Walker, Product Evangelist at TCL – the company responsible for bringing us massive TVs like the 120-inch QM891G as well as the 98-inch Q6 and 98-inch QM7. Time to learn a little more about how TCL is doing what it’s been doing, and I’m gonna see if I can squeeze a little bit about what we might see at CES 2025 out of him, too.
Caleb: Bruce Walker, thank you for literally flying across the country this morning to join us in our studio. This is the first time that we’ve hosted a guest here in the studio. I’m honored. And, yeah, I mean, you literally flew across the country. Thank you for doing that.
Bruce: Thank you for hosting me. I’m very excited to be here.
Excited to talk to you and your audience and talk about exciting TCL stuff.
Caleb: Look, I feel like we need to talk about the TCL story because, from my seat, I mean, we’ll go back to the first TCL TV I reviewed. It was a 6-series TV. What was the model number? The P607. That really started it all right, because that TV landed in my testing lab, and anybody who goes back and watches the review will see that we were shocked. Like, it kind of came out of nowhere for us. What was that like for somebody in your seat? Because previously, let’s be honest, TCL was more of a budget-oriented brand that you might find at Walmart or wherever and now you’ve got this TV that’s competing with the best out there. What was that like for you guys?
Bruce: It was really fun. It was a watershed moment for us. You know, when we were talking to members of the media and people at CES, saying, This is going to be one of the brightest Dolby Vision TVs on the market this year, the general response was, “Yeah, right. We’ll see.”
And it really paved the way and allowed customers to believe in TCL as a premium offering.
Caleb: From my seat, it seemed like that set off a bit of a shift in the product planning. So, what was that like at TCL?
Bruce: Yeah, it was a fun domino effect. We started getting better placement at retail partners, so people could see premium TCL TV sets. Then we were able to leverage all the things we do great in terms of innovation. You know, we introduced the world’s first big-screen quantum-dot TV back in 2015. I’m very excited that many of the reviews we see now — back when the P605 came out around that time, it was all about value, value, price, value, value, price. Oh, by the way, it performs pretty well too.
Now, we’re shifting that narrative. So many of the reviews we see don’t even mention price until maybe as a footnote: This TV compares with this, this, and this from the big three. Oh, by the way, it’s also really good value.
Caleb: Something a lot of people might consider inside baseball, but it actually has everything to do with how TCL makes its TVs and how you make engineering decisions. TCL is a vertically integrated company, right? What does that mean, and what does that allow TCL to do that other manufacturers maybe can’t?
Bruce: So, the overarching picture is that we make every component that goes into a TV set. Your audience, the tech-savvy people out there, might say when they see a TV, “Who makes the panel for that TV?”
All the stuff we’re talking about, we do. We make the panel, the backlight, the processors, the feet. We make every component that goes into a TV set.
And there are a whole host of benefits that go with that. If we control the entire manufacturing process, we can control the quality. We can make sure that component A works perfectly with component B when it’s all put together.
And they’re going to last a long time and be a good-quality product. Then that dovetails into the value story: Why can I get a 75-inch TCL for the same price as a 65-inch and have all the same features? If you look at the reviews, they’re comparable.
It’s part of that vertical integration story.
Caleb: So, does that mean because you’re buying less parts from other manufacturers, you’re not paying the markup on those parts
Bruce: The middleman markup? Exactly. Because we’re making it ourselves. Our panel manufacturing facility, CSOT, makes our panels for all the TVs we talk about. Because we make it ourselves, we can pivot and say, “Oh, 98-inch TVs are hot now.” We can make 98-inch panels and now we make more 98-inch panels than any other panel manufacturing facility in the world. And because we make it ourselves, we’re not paying a middleman markup, and we can bring incredible value to the market.
Caleb: See, it’s all starting to make a lot more sense for me now. I don’t think I was aware of that.
Is that also why you’re going to see more consistency in the panels across the different sizes? Because, I mean, we look at some other brands, and you might get a VA panel in one size and then an ADS Pro in another size. But you’re consistent across the board.
Bruce: We make our own high-performance VA panels, and on our QD-LED lines, it’s actually a new HVA panel, which improves the contrast within the mini-LED ecosystem.
Caleb: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe TCL was the first brand to release a mini-LED television, right?
Bruce: Yes! Mini-LED has really reinvented LED TV technology. We introduced the world’s first mini-LED TV in 2019, the 8-series.
Caleb: It’s been that long?
Bruce: Yeah. And now, it’s everyone’s flagship TV. It’s mini-LED. All of our flagship TVs this year are QD mini-LED. We just want to make sure people understand that that’s an important distinction in the marketplace because, unfortunately, when you talk about mini-LED, there isn’t really a definition for it. A mini-LED is a small OLED? If you took it to the absurd, you could make a TV with one mini-LED in the back of the backlight, and we’d call it a mini-LED TV. You know, not all mini-LED is created equally, and when you see QD-LED, you can be assured that it’s going to give you top-tier performance.
Caleb: So what we’re seeing here, on the right-hand side, first of all, you made this, right? Tell me the story about how you made this thing.
Bruce: Most of the cuts have healed, but these are actual, backlights. The TCL QD mini-LED backlight is from a QM8 TV. The other mini-LED backlight is an off-the-shelf backlight, cut up into pieces, sent up to an amazing company in California and made these for us so that we, really put, you know, kind of a face to the name of what is QD mini-LED. And you can see in there, the things that make our secret sauce, as it were.
And with QD being LED, you get things like our own HEXA mini-LED chips for incredible brightness. But also, Pirelli famously once said, “Power without control is nothing.” So we make all this incredible brightness, but we’ve also got our own in-house designed and manufactured UWA ultra-wide-angle lenses that take all that light and steer it to the front of the cabinet.
So it comes out through all the layers of the TV. But it’s our own HVA panel, which does a very good job of, when there’s no light, it closes up to give you deep, rich blacks. And when it opens up, you get a super-bright picture on that panel type.
Caleb: I feel like that’s kind of important because I’ve noted in my reviews in the past that, let’s say, the number of mini-LEDs, the number of zones that were involved — everything else — let’s say those were more or less equal.
The TCL ends up coming out on top in terms of the black levels. And now I’m hearing part of it is because of the VA panel that you’re making. That makes sense because you can actually see it.
Bruce: And then the last part of the equation that I find really exciting is, you know, processing.
Candidly, in our industry, people talk about processing and motion handling. It’s Sony, and then everybody else. To their credit, this year, we have not only one processor but a family of AiPQ processors starting in our S-Class TV. And when we get to our QD mini-LED, we have our AiPQ Pro processor. With that powerful backlight — again, with control — you get up to about 65,000 levels of gradation.
So you not only get incredible bright whites, but you’ve measured specs that outperform what we claim they do: deep, rich blacks. You get an incredible grayscale, so you get great shadow detail.
Caleb: But I do want to get back to this prop because, on the right-hand side, what you’re seeing, if I’m not mistaken, are three mini-LED lights that are kind of hiding behind this sort of dome lens.
And what you notice is that they’re spaced fairly far apart, so there’s a decent amount of gap in between those. And then on the left, we’re looking at the TCL QD mini-LED, where you’re using individual mini-LED diodes, and they’re spaced much more closely together.
Bruce: Yep. Very densely packed. You get better uniformity. You get better brightness.
Because there’s so many and so densely packed, you can have better zone control — all the benefits that come from doing that. And great picture performance.
Caleb: From the backlight level, I think what we’re seeing here is that, rather than use a tight cluster of mini-LEDs and then use some kind of lens to broaden it out, you’re using individual mini-LEDs.
And if I heard you correctly, you can individually address every single one of those mini-LEDs, right? So it’s not like you put a cluster on one board and can just turn that board on and off. You can actually turn each individual light on and off.
Bruce: That’s very exciting.
Caleb: Now we’re starting to understand how it’s actually done.
Bruce: We’re in the golden era of TV sets. And the fact that we’re now producing products that compete with the best of the best — we are proud of the fact that we think that, compared to an OLED (perfect blacks, infinite contrast ratio), we think in the dark man-cave environment, sets like our QM7 and QM8 compete very well.
But then, in the arena of a normal lighting environment where most people watch their TVs, is really where we kind of stand apart. When you’ve got 5,000 nits of peak brightness on our flagship TV sets, we think it’s the best choice for most people.
Caleb: And also, like, no burn-in, right?
Bruce: With the TCL TV, the official TV partner of Call of Duty, if you’re a gamer out there, you can game all day and all night and not have to worry about it.
Caleb: And I’ve seen this question from viewers more times than I can count. How is TCL actually doing that? I’m starting to get the sense that it’s about that vertical integration, right?
Bruce: Yep. But it also boils down to that manufacturing. You know, the fact that — you look at that 98 inch Q6 — it’s our backlight, it’s our panel, it’s our processor.
Caleb: We’re back to the whole, “There is no middleman charging markup on all these different parts.” You can actually make it in a way that others simply can’t.
Bruce: And it’s just been a resounding success. You know, through the end of last year, we were No. 2 in sales for five years in a row.
Caleb: All right, so I know that you don’t have a crystal ball, but, like, how big do you think we’re going to go here?
I mean, 98 inches is — I still think — is a larger size than most people are currently prepared to accept in their home. But obviously, we’re seeing those sell. So that’s changing. It used to be 65 inches was a huge TV, and now it’s kind of like if you don’t have it, it’s not a huge TV. That’s like the No. 1 size in the U.S. right now. Is going big a big priority for TCL?
Bruce: It’s big for us. And I have to say — sorry — it’s a huge growth part of the market. The fact that I mentioned earlier — we make more 98-inch panels than anybody out there. So a lot of the marketing we’ve been doing is, you know, giving people the permission to get a TV that big in their house.
And once you do, I say your childlike wonderment — talking about these, you know, 115-inch screens and watching — it’s just so much fun. It’s a whole different ball of wax watching.
Caleb: I know that you can’t talk about CES — nobody can. It’s a super-secret thing. But how excited should I be about what TCL is bringing?
Bruce: It’s going to be another fun year. I mean, our 2024 product is the best that we’ve ever made. I know we’re going to be showing some great stuff next year as well, and we’re going to be talking about it before we know it.
Caleb: Yeah, I know. It’s coming up super soon. And that’s when I’m going to see you next — is down in Las Vegas. Well, listen, man, thank you so much for coming all this way to give us some insight into it. It’s all starting to make a bit more sense now because it all seemed kind of, “How do they pull it off?” Now I think I understand a little bit better. And hopefully, the audience does as well.
Obviously, TCL is a remarkable choice. And look, the holiday shopping season is not over, you know?
Yeah. And so, I imagine that a lot of folks are going to be looking to do that big upgrade.
Bruce: Measure that wall. Measure that stand. Find room for it. You’ll be happy you did.
