On Saturday, I finally decided to go full 4K and get the Vizio M43-C1 television. The $579 price tag seemed wonderful and the screen looked halfway decent. I ended up returning the television set on Sunday. Although there are many good things about the Vizio M43-C1, there are also some bad things that are hard to deal with.
The Vizio M43-C1 offers a great picture -- as long as you don't look at it from too much of an angle.
The Good
- The $579 price tag.
- The television barely has any bezel, making the screen look even larger than the 43 inches.
- Very easy to set up.
- Menus are easy to navigate.
- Will play most HD (but not Ultra-HD) videos on a thumb drive.
- Plays 4K videos from Netfix easily, even with an Internet connection that’s fast, but not lightning speed.
- When looking at the screen straight on, the color representation is very accurate.
- Several different picture modes.
- Upscaled content looks pretty good.
- Blacks look very good — unless you turn all the lights off at night; you will notice the light bleeding from all four corners of the screen.
- Fantastic double-sided remote control with keyboard.
'Orange Is the New Black' looks great on the Vizio 43-inch Ultra HD TV
The Bad
- YouTube won’t play 4K videos since the M43-C1 doesn’t have the M9 processor that is required.
- Very bad light bleeding.
- The speakers are on the rear, causing sound to become somewhat distorted at times.
- You have to mess with the gaming settings in order to turn off the soap opera effect, which is completely annoying.
- Most external hard drives won’t work with the M43-C1. To make things worse, your 4K videos won’t play unless they are encoded with the H.265 codec. You can easily convert your videos on Windows with CyberLink Power Director 13.
- The viewing angles are mediocre; the more you move to the left or right, the more the screen loses color saturation.
- The remote control is sometimes unresponsive.
- One may need to do a lot of tweaking before getting the most desired picture.
- The Ultra-HD set lags a lot in gaming mode.
- Slightly too much motion blur.
- Still not a lot of 4K content (this isn’t Vizio’s fault).
- In 4K mode, there is only a 60hz refresh rate
If you don’t want to spend much more than $500 and are just dying for a 4K television, this may be a good purchase. However, if you have a little more money, you may want to check out the 40-inch Samsung Ultra-HD TV that can be purchased at Best Buy for $699.99. There will be more of that on the iRetron blog later this week.
