TVs are often not the right size, resolution or sometimes even made from the right material for the various areas of your home.
When making the financial decision around a TV purchase, here’s what you need to think about in advance.
Indoor or outdoor
When it comes to creating the perfect outdoor entertaining space, there are lots of things to consider. What’s the climate like where you live? Do you need furniture that will withstand strong winds or major downpours? Do you have a saltwater pool that could affect how well your furniture lasts? Will upholstery fade in the bright Texas sunshine?
Choosing your outdoor TV screen needs to include the same thought process.
Indoor TVs are made for climate controlled interiors, not for your back yard, however well protected it may be.
Luckily, manufacturers like SunBriteTV have already done the thinking for homeowners and created products specifically designed to handle rain, snow, dust, insects, salt air, humidity and extreme temperatures.
Size matters
We’ve talked about this before. Make sure you buy the right size of screen for your wall!
The Guidelines from the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers recommends sitting at a distance where the screen fills up about 30° of your field of vision as a minimum for a good experience.
This quirky tool from Rtings.com gives an idea of the optimum screen size you should be aiming for in a primary viewing area. It also shows the fine difference between cinema usage and mixed usage viewing.
TV screen size calculator
Our team is equipped with template tools to help you determine where you want to sit to view your favorite channels and what size of screen will deliver the best viewing experience in that space. This is ideal for other parts of the home, such as bedrooms.
Location, location, location
How are your rooms designed? Do you have feature fireplaces that mean a TV will naturally need to sit higher up the wall? Do you have an older home with build in cabinetry that needs to incorporate your TV?
The optimum height for viewing the family TV from your sofa is actually when the center of the screen is 42″ from the floor. If you don’t have the right space then consider a moveable mount which will allow you to move your TV out and down for viewing, if it naturally wants to sit higher on the wall when it’s not in use.
Improve your TV sound quality
Clients often ask us why their brand new TV doesn’t sound as good as they expect it to. The answer is simple. Built in TV speakers aren’t great!
As screens have become thinner and thinner, it’s only natural that speakers sound quality has deteriorated due to the lack of space in which to house them. While all sorts of magic is possible to squeeze millions of pixels into something barely thicker than a pencil, the same aesthetically pleasing look also contributes to its inferior sound.
The solution until now has been sound bars, with great market leading products available from manufacturers such as Sonos. We recommend investment in a sound bar for TVs in key areas of the home, where entertainment quality is particularly important – the family room and media room, for example.
However, there is a new product on the market that is blowing sound bars out of the water and that’s Sony’s A8F OLED TV. This screen doesn’t use built in speakers. It uses two actuators which play through acoustic glass, supported by dual sub woofers.
We believe this is the best built in audio to date and is a crowd pleaser in our audio visual Experience Center in The Woodlands. Arrange an appointment by contacting us on +1 (281) 465-9101 to see and hear it for yourself!
