Wow! thanks guys for swift response, I suppose you've got time on your hands with this lockdown! Very useful advise, I think I'm put off by wall mounting so it will be on a stand. I have been told that modern big screens are fine in small homes due to higher resolution so watching from shorter distances shouldn't be a problem?
thanks for your advice.
Honestly, it depends more on what you're watching -
the resolution of it and how compressed it is - rather than a simple "this-size-of-screen-is-recommended-for-this-viewing-distance" formula.
I've spent the best part of the last 25 years installing home cinema projectors and screens. If you're old enough to remember watching 29" and 33" 4:3 TVs and thinking 'this is massive', well, at the same time I was installing 72"~96" screens to be viewed from the same distance. VHS looked awful, off-air TV was okay mostly, LaserDisc ranged from acceptable to pretty good.
Things took a big leap forward when DVD arrived, and moved forward again when picture processing electronics got a lot cheaper. Blu-ray and HD TV gave home cinema a big boost in quality, but served to underline how much compression there was in standard def' TV. DVD still looked okay though. People started file-sharing movies, and God they looked terrible on a big screen because of all the compression from ripping and reducing the file size to manageable proportions.
The change from 1080p HD to UHD 4K hasn't been such a big leap. In fact, I'd go further and say that just comparing resolution, most people can't say whether they're watching good 1080p or UHD. Once you have enough pixels, the resolution becomes unimportant. The bigger factor is compression. I could play you a 1080p Blu-ray of a movie, then show you Sky's UHD version, and you'd tell me the BD looks better.
This brings us to how good TVs are at upscaling lower resolution formats to fit the pixels on a UHD screen. It's no surprise then to find that in general, higher quality TVs do a better job with low and medium resolution source images. There's more money in the budget to install better bits of silicon. I will qualify that though by saying that if you're looking at the entry-level Bush versus Sharp vs HiSense, that's not what I mean by looking at higher-quality TVs.
The sort of screen-size-versus-distance charts you might have seen are generally to do with how close you need to be to notice the resolution difference that UHD brings to the party, and they're only valid for good quality UHD source material. That's a very niche application. In the real world we watch a variety of sources. The TV can't afford to be a one trick pony.
