Have you ever tried to grind your way through a 1v7 battle in Smash Ultimate and whined that there wasn’t enough real estate? Or maybe everyone needs just a little more room for four-player Mario Kart. Well, a 100″ TV might fix things.
The 100″ monster was announced by Hisense last year, but ahead of the annual festival that is CES the company announced that their dual colour 4K laser TV would be sold in Australia this year. There’s no announced pricing as of yet – that’s due to be announced in the first half this year – but given that we’re talking about an 100″ TV, I’d expect a figure with at least four zeroes.
What’s unusual about this, besides the fact that it’s enormous beyond belief, is the fact that the TV is more of a projector than a traditional TV. The unit comes in three parts: a screen that is about two inches thick, a projector unit that sits directly underneath that has four in-built Harmon Kardon speakers, and the subwoofer. (Update: Hisense reached out to clarify that the entire TV unit has 14 speakers in total, not including the subwoofer.)
It’s not especially equipped on the ports side – only two HDMI ports, a coaxial input and a VGA port – but a big advantage is that you can use the screen comfortably from four metres away. You’d need to be more than twice as far back to comfortably use an LCD or LED TV of the same size, and that’s if you could install the thing in the first place: traditional TVs that size are heavy as shit. Sony’s 100″ X9D, for instance, weighs almost 145kg with the stand. The screen for Hisense’s 100″ laser offering, on the other hand, is a much more reasonable 25kg.
It’ll be interesting to see how laser TVs fare when it compares to traditional offerings when it comes to input lag and response times. There’s some wording about a microsecond processor response and a smooth motion technology that’s designed for sports and fast action scenes, but it’s not clear what that means in relation to refresh rates or high frame rate. The TV will be on show at CES this year, however, and it’s expected that Hisense will show it offer further in Australia later this year.
I did bring Smash with me on the flight over. I wonder if they’ll let me grind out some more World of Light as a test. As for more info on the 100″ laser TV, Gizmodo’s Hudson got a chance to spend some time with it last year. You can check out his thoughts here.
The author travelled to CES 2019 as a guest of Hisense.
Comments
13 responses to “Behold The 100-Inch Laser TV”
Why do you have to be twice as far back for a LED/LCD TV?
Someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it has something to do with how your brain interprets pixels versus a projection. With pixels, you need to be a certain distance back before your brain doesn’t see the individual pixels – the DPI matters. This is a projector so you don’t have that issue.
You would probably be able to do the same with a CRT that size as well, if such a thing existed. Which I expect it does somewhere.
Fully anecdotal here, but I swear every friend or acquaintance that has got a Hisense TV has had massive input delay from their consoles.
They probably haven’t got the Picture Mode on PC/Gaming? I have 2 Hisense TV’s and don’t notice anything massive. In fact, one of the Hisense’s is rated as Excellent with only 15ms of latency.
Yeah that’s fair enough. This is from a few years ago. Maybe they’ve picked up their game since. How new/old are your TV’s?
Yeah it may be more of a “recent” thing they’ve decided to get around to fixing. I have a late 2016 model and a smaller 2018 model. It’s a pretty good thing that TV manufacturer’s have listened when it comes to input latency though!
Cool. I’m in the market for a new TV, so it’s good to keep my options open. I’ve got no brand allegiance, but tbh the latency issue is probably the biggest thing I worry about as a lot of other features the competing brands are close to par with one another.
If I didn’t have my current TV, I would’ve bought a LG OLED in one of the Boxing Day sales. They were priced to perfection. Input latency for them seems to be around 21ms.
The LG B8 55″ is available at JB Hi-Fi now for $2000, which is the cheapest OLED I’ve seen. All brands are on sale before they release their 2019 models.
2 hisense here as well. One 3-4 years old and other 2 years old. With picture set to gaming no issues at all. The newer one is hooked up to my pc for gaming and is great.
Being a projector, I guess that means average contrast/blacks. Pass on this one, even if I did have a huge lounge room I don’t like sitting in darkness to watch TV.
Depends on the brightness. No you Dont have to sit in the dark, I actually use an Epson projector for Switch/Xbox and it’s perfect. Better latency than my TV’s and great colours.
You only lose “contrast and blacks” If you have daylight shining onto the projector screen. We use ours day and night and even have two lamps in front of the screen.
I can’t begin to describe my surprise at how irritated “an 100” made me.
Take it easy. It was just an simple mistake ok.