FEATURED Seiki SE65UY04 65-Inch 4K Ultra HD 120Hz LED TV (Black)
- 65″ Ultra High Definition, 3840 x 2160 Resolution
- 120 Hz refresh rate
- 4000:1 dynamic contrast ratio
- 1 year replacement warranty
View larger Seiki “Simply Brilliant” Seiki believes everyone deserves a well-made TV, and goes to great lengths to make sure its TVs are the highest quality and available at a fair price. Seiki believes the next ‘big thing’ is a great television everyone can afford. One that offers the same clarity of video and audio featured on the higher priced TVs, but without the add-ons that bring the higher price. Seiki is part of one of the largest manufacturers of TVs in the world. This allows Seiki to create considerable efficiencies that it gladly passes along to customers. Seiki believes a no-nonsense TV delivers big on sight and sound. So Seiki starts with only the most advanced panels for the highest picture quality and use high performance amplifiers to power its speakers. Seiki TVs are made in its own facility by its own people. Not only does this cut out a costly middleman, this also allows Seiki to maintain a high level of quality control that meets its own strict standards. 4K
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Wayne “Omegafiler”
August 9, 2014
Far from perfect, but still a great value for a 4K UHD TV,
The Seiki 4K TV’s are relatively new and have recently made some headlines with being one of the first manufacturers to build a 4K TV for a fraction of the price of the competition. There are many questions that I have such as what, if any, sacrifices were made to get such a low price, how does it work as a PC monitor, gaming possibilities, blu-ray, low-def content, etc. So let’s jump in and see how it does!
DESIGN & INPUTS:
First thing to note is how the TV is being used. It’s in a medium sized Media/Game room that measures about 14′ x 13′, give or take a few inches. There are 2 windows with blackout curtains. And I’m normally sitting anywhere from 4 ft (at my desk) to 11 ft (couch) away. This room has a couple of computers, so it’s used as an office / game & media room (aka “man cave”).
The TV is only about 2″ deep and has thin ¾” border around the screen. However, there is a larger “base” at the bottom where the included stand mounts. This protrudes towards the back another 1″. It also only weighs about 50lbs.
The TV is currently sitting on a mobile TV cart with it’s included stand so I can roll it around as I compare it to my Toshiba 50L2200U 50-Inch 60Hz LED-LCD HDTV that is mounted on the wall. I wanted time to review before making a commitment to replace the already pretty darn awesome Toshiba. 🙂 It’s only about a foot lower and is using the same sources. The stand is a bit wobbly if you bump it, but I shouldn’t need it for long.
There is also a 2″ wide LED “bar” on the front of the TV that changes from blue (on) to red (off). Even though it’s larger than necessary and can’t be turned off, it’s dim enough so I never even notice it when I’m watching TV, even at night. The buttons are on the right side towards the outer edge, facing back. If you mount on a wall, you’ll need to feel around for the buttons if you can’t find the remote.
You can check out the specs to see what inputs it has. The main inputs I’m focusing on are the 2 downward facing HDMI inputs and 1 side HDMI input. It lacks Optical Out, but does have Coaxial Out (RCA type of cable for S/PDIF). Just a note as some may want to have a way to route high quality audio to an external source. In particular, if you don’t have a 4K compatible receiver (more on that later). Otherwise it has all of the other inputs and outputs most folks are looking for.
PICTURE QUALITY:
So how does it look? After its calibrated, most content looks excellent. As with most TV’s the default profiles leave much to be desired. My sources are OTA (Over-The-Air) HDTV, Blu-Ray, DVD, a Media Center PC, and a gaming PC. I don’t currently have cable or satellite. There have been some mixed results though.
As with all high resolution displays, lower res content will suffer a bit without up-conversion. This is exaggerated even more when you are up-scaling from “normal HD” (720/1080p) up to Ultra HD (4K2K or 3840×2160). As with virtually all high def TV’s this is already done for you, on some level. Although the quality of that will most certainly vary depending on the TV (or external scaler) involved and source material. There are considerably more pixels that have to be filled in on a 4K TV so the quality can vary.
I’m going to have separate sections for the various sources as there was quite a bit to cover. So I’m focusing on overall picture quality of the TV itself. And well, overall, it looks very nice; once calibrated of course (see section below). This is very important. Out of the box this TV had one of the worse picture quality I’ve seen in quite a while, almost entirely due to Noise Reduction being turned on by default for every input.
The TV does have local dimming where it tries to improve overall contrast ratio by limiting the back-light to only what needs light. You’re really only going to notice this on a specific scenes where there isn’t much content on the screen. Such as a small opening logo on the screen. It does a good job of limited this so it’s not annoying. For example, the first fight scene in Star Wars III is a good test, as it’s entirely filmed in space. Black levels looks great, no obvious signs of local dimming, colors were vibrant, no blurring, etc. It’s also more than bright enough for daytime viewing with minimal glare. I even had to turn down the brightness at night time.
Side viewing angles are pretty darn good. If you want to get picky, the magenta test pattern does indicate a slight red tint when viewing off angle. In my case, that’s standing about 8 ft back, and moving to the sides at least 4-5 ft off center. However, when watching “normal” content at this distance, there was no obvious change in picture quality or tint. When sitting off center at my desk, 4 ft…
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|Clint Baxley “Truth Love Joy”
August 9, 2014
Total breakthrough for linux programmers.,
So I spent all day working with different modelines to try to manually get the resolutin right. The monitor was impressive and would display all kinds of modes between 1920×1080 and 3840×2160. BUT. They were all kind of blurry and would not have worked to program all day on.
Well after about 4 hours of working with random timings and resolutions I thought I would try xrandr with the 3840×2160 modes untill I found one that very closely matched an hsync of 30. I found the closest line that I could get to 30hz was:
root@dv7# cvt 3840 2160 13.8
# 3840×2160 13.79 Hz (CVT) hsync: 30.05 kHz; pclk: 144.25 MHz
Modeline “3840x2160_13.80” 144.25 3840 3944 4320 4800 2160 2163 2168 2180 -hsync +vsync
I guess you could find something closer but that was close enough. So I ran:
xrandr –newmode “3840x2160_13.80” 144.25 3840 3944 4320 4800 2160 2163 2168 2180 -hsync +vsync
xrandr –addmode HDMI1 “3840x2160_13.80”
Those make it so you can select it in the Displays or monitors section depending on your distribution (make sure you have the right HDMI port by running xrandr without any arguments).
If you don’t know where the monitors section is you can run (leave off the quotes):
xrandr –output HDMI1 –mode 3840x2160_13.80
Anyway after I ran that and the monitor came back from being black… BAM! Super high definition and huge display! I was so happy I cried a little. Not a pixel is bad and text is so sharp it is like sitting in front of 4 monitors!
I cannot think of anything I have ever bought that deserved all 5 stars any more than this product.
My monitor prayers have been answered.
You can feel safe with the purchase. (I purchased it from Amazon fulfillment)
This has made my year.
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