So I heard there was a 4k TV for $260 on Walmart.com, I immediately looked up some reviews on it and everything was positive, infact people were even saying it was good for gaming. Optimistic, I dug deeper, I wanted to get into the fine details of this TV, but sadly there wasn't really much info. A few days later the price dropped down to $230, I caved in and ordered it, and for the past week I've been waiting for it to arrive.
Today, it arrived at my door in one piece, I was quick to get my filthy hands all over it.
So here's my first impression's review.
Condition and packaging
The panel came with no visible defects, there's no scratches on it or warped bezel or anything, so that's good. The screen itself had what you would expect, a plastic cover over it and the panel itself had a plastic film I viciously ripped off of it, because I don't have the patients to orgasm slowly peeling away the protective plastic, I don't know why people find that so satisfying. After doing that I smeared my filthy hands all over its glossy surfaces like the naughty little TV it was, see the above .gif for reference.
The TV comes with a remote, off brand batteries, a magnetic screwdriver, manual, but no cables. The power cable is built in.
Aesthetics
You wouldn't think this is a $230 TV, it has a lovely looking brushed plastic bezel with a small SCEPTRE chrome plastic logo in the center, the TV is about 3-4 inches thick but that's only in the center of the backside, the outer edges are only about a half inch then incrementally gets thicker closer to the center. The panel itself is slightly reflective but has a light matte coating, so it's not like the Achieva Shimian where it seems like you're looking into a mirror, it's actually a very good compromise between the clarity of glossy and the anti reflective properties of matte. The bezel is super thin, making the 43" panel feel huge sitting at monitors distance away, it fills your entire vision and nvidia surround/eyefinity seem like a joke when using this.
The stands on this TV are a nice matte gun metal finish, and to my surprise... the stands are metal! This TV didn't come with a cheap shaky plastic stand where if you so much as breath on it the TV wobbles. No, this came with solid metal feet that look absolutely great. As I said above, you would not believe by looking at this that it was a $230 TV.
Construction
I've seen in an unboxing video where someone got one of these with a slightly warped bezel, that was not the case for me. The bezel has no warping and the screen itself appears to have a hard surface over the panel for protection. The packaging was hard foam on the outer packaging while the screen was protected by soft closed cell foam. The feet as mentioned above are metal and rock solid.
One thing to surprise me though, this TV is super light! The tracking label said a max weight for the entire package was 20lb, so I assume the TV is roughly 15lb, it's super easy to maneuver and I'm confident it will sit fine on any versa TV mount.
One down side though, I'm not willing to confirm this but if anyone wants to order one of these and get a little bit experimental with their TV, is I doubt the power supply on this TV is actually using name brand good quality components. It being a Chinese branded TV I wouldn't expect anything more than Chinese capacitors, so if there were to be a failure point in the TV, that would probably be the first suspect.
Overall, I'm very pleased with the build quality of this TV.
Performance
Latency is a big factor when it comes to 4k TV's, there's some very bad models out there with latency as high as 500ms! Completely unusable for even a game console, the best you're going to get out of one of those is 4k Netflix.
Well, I have some great news, testing this panel it appears to be a good pick for gaming. I've tested 3 different games so far, while I don't have the appropriate equipment to actually accurately test the latency, if I were to guess I'd say it's anywhere between 25-40ms, which is entirely playable. For console gaming, you're good to go, but I'm sure most of us here are PC gamers, well unless you're playing a fast action game like CSGO where you need that super low latency and precision you should probably be looking into a low latency 1ms TN panel. But otherwise I think this TV works absolutely great for PC gaming, I've tested it on L4D2, GTAV, and BF4, while I did feel a very minor delay coming from a 5ms IPS panel, I wouldn't say it's anything significant if you're just going to play RPG's, MOBA's, RTS's, and even more casual shooters like GTAV, BF4, ArmA, Rust, etc. It's I'd say on par with more expensive TV's, so the value is definitely here.
Panel Quality
The screen quality is important, and I cannot accurately test this unfortunately. If you were in the lounge you might of heard, the HDMI cable I bought was not as advertised. I'm stuck on Chroma 4:2:0 (YCbCr420,) I've had a few hiccups with this cable as well, I already have an AmazonBasics high speed cable on the way (Link below) so I should be able to update this Friday with updated impressions.
But none the less, here's my experience so far. The panel has very little backlight bleed, there's minor fading around the edges, one thing I did notice though is there's a minor wave effect in the center of the panel. I took a picture of it with my phone, but my phone exaggerates it pretty badly, it looks nowhere near this bad in person. But it's definitely something worth noting. It's only visible on black and white screens, in any other usecase, it's not visible.
Coming from a color accurate apple cinema based panel, the colors are definitely not accurate, but like an IPS monitor there's no color shift when looking from angles. I have yet to actually tune the panel yet, but out of the box it's not well tuned. The first thing I did was immediately turn down the sharpness and turn off things like DLC backlight control, and turn up the back light. The contrast is actually very good, you still wouldn't believe that this is a $230 panel with the deep blacks it can achieve even with the back light turned up. As for the colors themselves, they lack saturation a bit, yellows aren't that good, but I think this can be tuned in the settings, I'll be toying with this later.
Motion Blur/Ghosting
I'm glad to say, from what I've experienced there's no ghosting on this panel, here's a picture I took of the blurbusters UFO demo. As you can see it is faded slightly, which does mean there's a small bit of latency when shifting colors, there's no dark ghosting or shadow effect in the image it only appears to last 5 frames, which is pretty impressive and I'd say on par with most name brand IPS panels.
Software
I personally have not gotten too invested in playing with the settings yet to be honest, but this TV allows you to get access to the full factory settings for additional fine tuning. Use this with caution, you can brick your TV! But I was able to fine tune things like fixing the TV's overscan for 1080p to fit the panel appropriately. There's also a lot of test settings, debug options, and even firmware updating. However Sceptre has officially said they will not be pushing an update for this TV. The settings I do believe save per HDMI port/input mode, not across the entire TV. Overall there's a lot of gritty stuff to get your hands dirty with to tune the panel, overall I think this is a great feature.
Summary
Would I personally recommend this TV? I would have to say definitely. You cannot go wrong with it for $230, and if you do decide you don't like it, well, you have 90 days to return it to any Walmart retailer if you order it through their website! If you're in the market to get into 4k gaming affordably, this is a no brainer purchase. Just keep in mind it won't be replacing professional grade color accurate displays anytime soon or your competition grade 144hz TN panels, but for the casual gamer, it's a good buy.
Pro's: Great price, good contrast, low latency for a TV, 43" 4k @ 60hz, perfect for 100% windows DPI scaling. Text is readable, great for casual gaming, great for someone who just needs to screen real estate. Great build quality.
Cons: So far I have a bad cable, so 4:2:0 (4:4:4 RGB advertised, I'll test this Friday!) No firmware support in the future (if it needs it?) Not replacing your 1ms 144hz TN panels. Not the best in color accuracy (could be a side effect of 4:2:0)
These are just first impressions on the TV, I'll be sure to update this topic if I run into any trouble or have more to say on it I'll be sure to update this topic. I also did record a bunch of footage with my phone, I may decide to compile a video review for it, but in the meantime these are my opinions on it thus far. If there's any questions I can answer I'd try my best to come up with an answer.
The purchase page can be found here.
Here's the spec page on Sceptre's website. This will give you a summary of what inputs are supported.
http://www.sceptre.com/spec-370.html
Picture of the TV
