On today’s You Asked: How high is too high to mount your TV? When is the Hisense 116 UX coming and how much will it cost? Will our CES videos ever be shot in HDR? And how does a 120Hz TV display 30 fps TV content without forcing the soap opera effect?
TV mounting: How high is too high
Brian Rock writes: There’s a lot of information about optimum viewing distance from the wall-mounted TV based on screen size, but I haven’t seen anything on optimum mounting height based on TV screen size. Assuming there are no viewing obstructions, what dimensional guidelines do you recommend for 16:9 screens of different sizes?
It’s true: We talk a lot about optimum size for viewing distance and there are easy-to-find calculators to help, but mounting height doesn’t seem to get as much attention. Let’s change that.
There are three guidelines to keep in mind. The goal is to satisfy as many of the three as possible with the understanding that everyone’s situation will be different.
The first guideline is pretty simple: The closer to eye level you can get the center of the TV screen, the better. The principle behind this is also simple. With the center of the screen at eye level, your eyes have less looking up or down to do to take in the picture. Unfortunately, placing a TV at eye level is extremely unrealistic for many of us. Many of us (myself included) have some kind of entertainment stand sitting in front of where we place our screens.
Here’s an example situation. When I’m sitting on the couch in the studio, eye level for me is somewhere between 38 inches if I’m lounging back and 42 inches if I’m sitting bolt upright. The 65-inch LG G4 OLED is 32 inches tall, meaning the midpoint is at 16 inches. If I placed the midpoint of the TV at 38 inches above the floor, the bottom of the TV would be just 22 inches off the floor — less than two feet — and my BDI stand, which is 29 inches off the ground, would cover about 20 percent of my screen. Instead, I have the center of the LG G4 at about 49 inches off the ground — seven inches higher than my highest eye level — and it is very comfortable to watch. Of course, the bigger the screen, the higher the midpoint needs to be. That leads me to the second guideline.
Ideally, a TV should be mounted so the vertical viewing angle to the center of the TV is no more than 15 degrees up or down. It is fairly uncommon for the center of your display to be more than 15 degrees down from your eye height when seated. This guideline is meant to keep the center of the screen from being too high, which is often what happens if you mount the TV above a fireplace.
Perhaps the easiest way to figure out the optimal screen height is to take your viewing distance from eyeballs to the surface of the TV — say, 10 feet or 120 inches — and divide by 2.5. That would give you 48 inches. Start there, and then move the center of the screen up until you can see the whole display.
In my example, 48 inches works great for a 65-inch TV. For an 85-inch TV, my BDI stand would block the bottom of the TV and I’d need to move it up to see the whole screen. The vertical measurement of an 85-inch screen in a 16:9 aspect ratio is 42 inches, making the midpoint 21 inches. To clear my BDI stand, I’d need to have the center of a wall-mounted 85-inch TV at about 71 inches — well above the 48-inch recommendation as viewed from 10 feet, but still totally manageable and well within that 15-degree tolerance.
Many folks might wonder: Should I get a smaller TV if I can’t get the center point really close to the ideal height? My answer is no, it’s fine if it is a little high — just try to avoid exceeding 15 degrees so you don’t end up straining your neck.
Hisense 116 UX: what’s the latest?
Stephen in Atlanta writes: Hisense wowed us at CES with their 116-inch UX TriChroma mini-LED and the first consumer-ready 136-inch micro-LED TVs. With this RGB technology, how accurate will they be out-of-the-box? Will any calibration be required with this new technology?
Also, I just saw a reviewer on YouTube say that the release dates for these two TVs will be in March, and the 116-inch will cost $30,000. He also mentioned that U6, U7, and U8 will have new models announced soon, with a 120-inch coming this summer. Have you heard any of this information? I am extremely anxious to hear more about these models and prices.
I pressed Hisense on the release timeframe for the 116 UX and they were optimistic for summer release. That tracks because the highest-end TVs from TCL and Hisense usually come later in the year. The Hisense 110 UX was released in September and TCL released the 115-inch QM891G in July (that’s when I got it for review). With that in mind, I’d say the timeline from your source is off.
When it comes to the price, $30,000 isn’t out of the realm of possibility, but I’ve seen TV pricing settled just days before release, with adjustments down as much as $5,000 two days before launch. Therefore, claims that the TV will cost a specific amount are likely inaccurate. We’ll know when we know, and I think we’ll know much closer to launch. However, I do think we will be hearing more about the U6, U7, and U8 TVs in March.
As for out-of-box accuracy? I’ll bet they’ll be as accurate as Hisense can get them. However, the more I ponder RGB mini-LED backlighting, the more I think that real-world color performance when playing content might deviate drastically from color slides on a pattern generator — simply by nature of how the backlight jives with the color filter and the fact that color distortion seems inevitable. But, that’s another story.
HDR content from CES?
Patrick writes: I watched so much CES 2025 coverage this year and I wish I could better see the color/dynamics of the incredible displays on show there. I was wondering if you ever consider filming event/review videos in HDR?
We have definitely considered it, but right now it is totally unrealistic to do so. You may have noticed that we produced an unboxing or two and a review in HDR later in 2024 — we were dipping our toes in, seeing how to do it without adding tons of time to the grading and editing process. I think you’ll be seeing more HDR content from us in 2025. But events like CES? We are far away from that, I think — unless we can come up with a lightning-fast, cloud-based upload and download solution and outfit ourselves with screaming fast laptops.
Recording in HDR requires us to apply less compression to video files, which makes them exponentially larger. That makes uploading and downloading the videos — or even simply transferring them to laptops — a time-consuming chore. Wi-Fi at CES sucks. This is why so many big media outlets don’t publish in 4K from CES — most videos are in 1080p.
As soon as we can solve the file size, transfer speed, and workload issues, we’ll do HDR — but for now, we are far away from that. Even if we did record in HDR, we’d still have to stomp down on some of those ultra bright TVs in dark spaces. Plus, you’d need a display as capable as the TV itself to be able to see what the TV was doing. But, honestly, we’d probably have to do 1,000 nit grades, which would stomp on the contrast too.
Right now, it’s either publishing two videos in HDR per day, or 4 to 5 videos in SDR per day. We want to show you as much as we can, so we opt for the latter.
Dodging the Soap Opera Effect
Deborah writes: We have satellite service. We watch equal amounts of regular shows and sports. I know native 120Hz would show a clearer picture, but I’m concerned about the Soap Opera Effect on the regular shows with 120Hz. I would probably keep the motion enhancement option off all the time, but would that help the regular shows still at 120hz? Can I change the 120hz to 60hz?
What TV do you recommend for my situation for under $1,000?
First, to clarify: The Soap Opera Effect (SOE) results from a TV making up frames that aren’t there in the first place. Let’s say I have a 30 frame per second (fps) signal — and yes, nerds, that’s rounding up from 29.97 — and it’s displaying on a 120Hz TV. Without motion smoothing turned on, the TV will simply repeat the frame four times. The clarity advantage comes from the TV being able to pivot to the next frame faster and more smoothly than a 60Hz TV can, which is only repeating the frame twice per second.
You get the SOE when the TV’s motion smoothing feature is turned on and it makes up new frames — it draws pictures in between the real frames to try to connect the two. It’s content fabricated by a computer. It looks fake, because it is fake. It has nothing to do with higher refresh rates being better or worse, it has everything to do with the fact that it’s made-up content.
This is why actual high frame rate content looks vastly different than low frame rate content with motion smoothing employed.
And for the best TV under $1,000? Take your pick from the list in this article discussing the best TVs under $1,000.