The hunt for an UHD (4K) television (LG 49UH600T)

We've been staying at our condo in Mandaluyong City for a year now. And all that time, we just had one 32" Hisense HD Ready (720p) television in our room.

Thirdy was attending Kindergarten near our QC house last year so we didn't need a second tv for the living room at that time.

But starting this month (June 2017), he'll be staying with us in Mandaluyong during weekdays, so we need a second TV for him and Tita Fe in the living room already.

I've been planning to get a TV that's around 55 inches. Our unit is small so it'll look huge. I was torn between getting an Ultra HD (4K) or just a Full HD (1080p). My hard factor is the price. I don't want to spend more than 30,000 pesos.

Per usual, i did my due diligence. First is to check with OLX.ph, to get a rough estimate on the available TVs and their prices.

I didn't want to spend too much, and the last TV that we bought was the HiSense brand we have for our room. We bought it last October 2016 for around 11,000 pesos and I haven't experienced any issue with it.

It's a Smart TV and uses Opera App Store for it's application. It supports Netflix and has even a dedicated button. The pre-installed Youtube app also functions well. There aren't that many apps you can get from the Opera Store but I barely use the Smart tv functions as my main PC is connected to it (as well as my Xbox One).

The Hisense 55" UHD model is around 30k at Cash N' Carry in Makati. That's for cash  payment or straight credit card transaction (no installment/layaway option).

The 55" Full HD model (55K220, which is a larger size version of the 32K220 that we own) is around 24k. So a difference of about 5 - 6k.

I did some quick compare for LG and it's about 3k more expensive than the Hisense counterparts. Not bad.

Next step was for an actual look of the models. Since we live beside a mall with my go-to Applicance store (Robinson's Appliances), I went there and checked on the Hisense displayed units.

The 55" Full HD models cost around 27k with cash/straight CC payments (3k more than Cash N' Carry). I could go and buy at Cash N' Carry instead of Robinson's Appliances once I decided to buy.

I can buy cash, but I prefer an installment plan. I just don't want to part with 30k in cash when I can do it gradually across several months especially if it's 0% interest.

I looked at the other models from the other known brands (Samsung, LG, and Sharp) but didn't bother with the other ones (TCL, Devant, etc) as I've read some bad feedback from them back when I was looking for a bedroom TV. Nothing stood out at that time.

Next was to decide on whether to get a Ultra HD or settle with Full HD.

One thing to consider is that 4K content isn't that widely available yet. 4K bluray discs are available, but you need a player for that. And those are expensive right now.

You can stream with Youtube and Netflix, but you'd need a fast internet connection. Definitely, not viable right now. Downloading them is possible, but each movie is about 50 gigabytes compared to a small 1080p video of around 4gb, or a raw ripped Bluray copy around 25gb. With hard drive prices still expensive, you won't be saving a lot of 4k videos on your PC or portable drives.

However, I did read that UHD (4K) tvs, can upscale lower resolution videos (the standard 480p, HDReady 720p or FullHD 1080p) that they will look better than on lower resolution TVs. So getting a UHD TV now even with little 4k content available will still be a better choice. As you have a future proof TV. You just need to wait for cheaper Hard drive prices or faster and cheaper broadband connection.

After thinking about it, I've decided on getting a UHD TV.

I did some research on Hisense UHD TVs. Most of them are pretty good considering the price. Still, I'm a bit apprehensive about getting a Hisense TV for 30k.

For a 32" at 11k, it's ok. But for 30k, I would like a more well known brand, even if Hisense is already the 4th largest TV maker in the world.

So I again checked OLX.ph for a UHD TV from japanese and korean makers. I found out that the 55" variants are out of my ceiling of 30k.

But I did find a few models within my price range, but a tad smaller. There's a 2016 49" model (49UH6100) from LG that's being sold for around 29-30k. The 2017 version (49UH6500) is around 33k.

Samsung's 49" UHD model is around 35k. But there's a 49" Curved model being sold at Lazada.com.ph for only 30k with free speakers.

It looks enticing, but I'm not sold on curved displays. I think it's a bit gimmicky at that size especially since you'll be watching it from a distance. And I have a feeling that replacement display panels will be prohibitively expensive. So i'll stick with flat displays for now.

I did find a Sharp 50" model at around 30k as well. It's a smart TV using Android TV (Lollipop).

Samsung uses their own OS, Tizen. Unfortunately, it's not that mature so I assume there isn't that many applications you can use. LG uses WebOS.

Now Android TV opens up a lot of possibility given the large library of Android apps. However, you can always buy an android TV box or an android stick with any TV now. But it does save you at least 2000 pesos.

However, I did read that Hisense owns and manufactures Sharp TVs now. So you're just basically buying a rebranded Hisense TV. You'll probably be just as good as getting a Hisense TV and just get an android stick/box if you've outgrown the apps from the Opera store. You'll probably end up doing that in a few years once Android TV lollipop gets old for the newer apps. Android fragmentation. Read on it.

By this time, I think I've settled on the LG 49UH6100. It's a year old, but that's ok. Nothing significant with the 2017 version over the 2016 one. It's smaller too, at only 49". But hey, maybe 65" will be cheaper after a few years.

Now it's time to look where to buy one.

Robinson's Appliances offers it for 32,500 for cash/straight CC payment. Cash N' Carry has it for 30k cash/straight cc payment. Automatic Center at SM Light doesn't have it any longer.

I checked Saver's appliance store in at Visayas Avenue, and it's tagged as 39k despite an ad in OLX.ph saying it's only 31k for the same terms. I was advised by the olx seller to go back and look for him. But i thought I might just get one from Robinson's Appliances as it was closer and I could have it carried over to our condo unit on the same day without paying for delivery charges.

The TV model's cheaper at Cash N' Carry by around 2,500, but it's a bit far.

We also checked Western Appliances at P.Tuazon Avenue as I saw their FB ad for a 'bagsak presyo' sale all weekends of June. But when we got there, I was disappointed.

Basically, their SRP for the TV's was the price they had when they first came out. And then they say that they drastically reduced the prices. However, even at this 'reduced' prices, other stores still sold them a lot lower.

Today, 2017/06/18, at around 4pm, we decided to drop by an Abenson's store in Greenhills on the way to Mandaluyong from QC. Chea remembered the time I asked her to visit that branch when I saw their ad about open box/display items.

Good thing that we did. They were having a flash sale today.

We saw that the 49UH6100 was being sold at around 36k for cash/straight payments. Disappointing at first.

We spoke to one of the agents, and I mentioned that Robinsons' was selling it for 32.5k on the same terms. The agent said that he could try and make it available for 36k, but for 3 months installment.

Chea and I then checked if we took the 32.5k straight CC with Robinson's and then transferred it to a 12-month installment plan with another card with the typical interest charges. It came out around 34.8k.

Chea showed the computation to the agent and said that it will be cheaper for us if we went with Robinson's. Not to be outdone, they made some calls and asked their bosses (we were talking to a sales manager already) if they can offer it lower. Chea said we could get it for 35k at Robinson's on a 12-month installment plan based on her computations.

35k is 5k more than my original price limit. But the only way I could get it at that amount was to buy it on cash terms from Cash N' Carry.

While the sales personnel was talking to his boss on the phone, I went around, and saw some display units being sold on the other side of the store. There were some pretty nice options there.

I saw an LG 49UH600T model being sold for only 26k. I was surprised at the price. It was probably an earlier 2016 model used as a store display.

The 10k difference is definitely tempting. Yes, it was WebOS 2.0 as compared to the 49UH6100's WebOS 3.0 platform but I thought, i'd probably just use Youtube from the available apps. I'll primarily use cable TV with it since it'll be for the living room.

It doesn't have HDR (High Dynamic Range) unlike the 6100 model, but it's something I could live with at the moment. It's not a deal breaker for a 10,000 peso difference. I'll probably upgrade the TV 5 years down the line, and it'll be one of the features that I'll be looking for aside from an OLED screen.

Another upside of the newer models is Trumotion or the greater than 120Hz refresh rate. A faster refresh rate makes movement shown on the tv a lot smoother. It makes movies looks smoother. The faster refresh rate is something you'd appreciate especially with playing action games or watching action movies on the TV.

That's something I would like. But again, will I pay 10k pesos more for those feature? Probably not. Unless it came with an OLED panel.

The sales agent checked how long it was on demo mode, and it showed to be just around 50 hours. He was surprised. He said we were buying a display unit that was just turned on for a total of about 2-3 days, so it was practically brand new.

The agent asked if we wanted it on installment plan, and he was able to get it for the same price of 26k stretched for 6 months.

There were a lot of other deals for store display TVs and some of them are pretty good. But Im glad that we decided to drop by Abenson's around Greenhills. And it's always a good choice to bring Chea when shopping. She always gets the best deals.

If we didn't decide to get the 49UH600T, we would have gotten the 49UH6100 for 35k on a 12 month installment.

A little bit of patience goes a long way.


Update: It's almost 6 months to the day that we bought the TV. So far it's working pretty well.

There are two features that I love about the TV. Smartshare and WiDi.

Smartshare is their app that allows the TV to connect to DLNA devices. These are network devices that can share their media content. Using smartshare, i can connect to the shared files I have on my PC. It allows me to watch the movies on the TV from my pc. My PC has about 5 hard drives on it, ranging from 1.5TB to 3TB, and it's mostly Movies and TV shows. So I can watch them on the living room while my PC is in the bedroom.

It works well for 1080p files, but I can't make it work for the 4K movies I have.

Another is WiDi or Wireless Display and Miracast. WiDi allows your device that has this feature to cast or stream it's display wirelessly to the TV. Using it, I'm able to project my phone (Xiaomi Note 4X) onto the TV wirelessly. I can do the same thing with my laptop that has WiDi.

So I can now project my laptop display onto the TV without using HDMI cables. I can watch movies on the TV now with another option aside from SmartShare.

There are other few apps on the LG Store, but I barely bother with it anymore except probably Netflix. But the app is bad as it gets stuck buffering. So I just use Netflix on my Xbox (I transferred it from our bedroom) to watch on the big TV, although i mostly watch in the bedroom TV.

I have a few 4K content now, and it's on a USB hard drive attached to the TV as it's hard to stream it wirelessly over the network.

The visual details are there, but I do feel like I'm missing out not having the HDR and the Trumotion features. But at least, I'll have something to look forward to when I upgrade the TV in a few years.