It’s that time of the year, the one that comes every February, when you hope all your love and commitment pays off on that special day meant to celebrate your bond.
Sure, your relationship disappoints you at times. Sometimes, they just can’t perform, and from time to time you trade one person out for another. No big deal. But you take the outgoing person’s clothes and slap them on their replacement, and all is good as new, right?
I’m talking about the Super Bowl. What special day in February did you think I was talking about? Super Bowl Sunday is February 9, and if Black Friday is the big day most of us think about buying a TV, Super Bowl Sunday is the big day most of us think about watching it.
survey says!
CNET and YouGov ran an online survey last December, asking people to imagine that if money were no object, how big of a TV would they want? No surprise, more than half of people said 65 inches or larger. When people fantasize, they fantasize big.
Our idea of what constitutes a big TV has grown and grown. I remember huddling around my family’s 36-inch TV in the ’90s with my friends, gawking at the Angry Beavers. Now, apparently people hardly even consider 55 inches that big.
But a king-size screen might not be all it’s cracked up to be. If you have too big of a screen too close to your eyeballs, you’ll end up with too wide of a viewing angle to see all the action at once. That means sweeping your eyes back and forth on a swivel while watching, as if you’re watching a game of Pong.
Check out this TV size recommendation calculator that TV-reviewing website RTINGS put together. Measure the distance from your couch to where you’d place your TV, and then use the slider to input the measurement. It’ll tell you the optimal size of the TV you should buy.
The viewing distance will be smaller than the width of the room. Presumably, neither the TV screen nor your face will be flush with any walls. Using the calculator, the best viewing distance for a 65-inch screen would be at least 9.1 feet away.
That’s a fairly wide room. The more manageable 7- to 7.7-foot viewing distance matches up with a 50-55-inch TV, for example.
“All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc,” says the survey’s fine print. “Total sample size was 1,186 adults, of which 1,141 would put a TV in their house. Fieldwork was undertaken Dec. 16-17, 2024.
“The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US adults (aged 18-plus).” Surveying over 1,000 people is a fairly good sample size for such a survey.
I mean, we’re not conducting the Census here, but it’s also far from those bullshit, why-did-they-even-bother studies that are released all the time where they publicize some shocking findings and it turns out they interviewed six people.
It’s an interesting survey CNET and YouGov put together. If you read it and despair that you don’t have the cash for the humongous TV of your dreams, take some solace in the idea that if you’re not watching TV in a particularly giant room, then you don’t need to spend crazy money to buy the one that’d be the best fit.
The post Half of You Want a 65-Inch TV or Bigger. You Should Think Twice. appeared first on VICE.
