HD PICTURE QUALITY HD picture quality was Very Good, overall. Reproduction of fine HD image detail was Excellent. Image detail was very exaggerated and made images appear less natural, despite our attempts to minimize this with the sharpness control. Color accuracy was Excellent, so colors, especially flesh tones, look very natural and lifelike. Very Good contrast—the difference between the darkest blacks and brightest whites—gave images convincing depth and dimension. Black levels were Very Good, and delivered fairly deep blacks that helped the contrast in darker scenes. Vizio's full-array local-dimming feature helped. But the quality appeared worse as we viewed from the sides—see our Viewing Angle results, below. Black levels were fairly deep, just shy of the very best models, which gave dark scenes better depth. Image brightness was moderately low, dimmer than most even with the backlight control turned up—OK for a dark room but not the best choice for a bright room. There was slight display non-uniformity in our test sample—it appeared as brighter cloudy areas which were most noticeable on very dark scenes (or in the black bars of a letterboxed movie)—the severity can vary from model to model. Its reproduction of smooth edges on image content for "up-converted" HD-to-UHD images was Very Good with minimal "jaggies" (jagged edges) deinterlacing of 1080i video, and film mode detection from 1080i content, were both Excellent.
4K UHD PICTURE QUALITY Overall 4K UHD picture quality was Very Good, overall. In our UHD testing, we played native-4K movies and test videos (non HDR) thru the TV's HDMI input, and found their image detail was all there. For color, contrast and black level, the TV performed similarly to its HD picture quality.
HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE (HDR) PERFORMANCE HDR performance was ineffective In our tests, the display did not have the peak brightness capability necessary (by HDR standards) to reproduce the extended contrast on our HDR content., but we noted some loss of detail within the highlights of the brightest areas.
VIEWING ANGLE This Vizio model has a narrow viewing angle overall, below-average performance among TVs. Only those seated directly in front of the screen will see the best picture quality. We examined the image quality at various viewing angles—its image quality notably decreased as we moved away from the center position. In our tests, the picture did show some slight dimming from the sides, but not to a distracting degree. When we viewed the TV from the sides image quality degraded significantly. The picture showed a strong loss of color, so flesh tones looked very washed out. Black levels brightened significantly, and made dark scenes look hazy. Halo effects around objects in darker scenes (a side effect of the local dimming feature) also become more prominent at off angles. Lastly, we viewed the image from above and below center screen, and noticed Good vertical viewing angle performance, with only slight changes in color, contrast, and black level.
