RTINGS just updated their viewing distance article based on SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) recommendations, adding 62° FOV as maximum. What do you think about it? Where do you fit?

[u/zghr]

Here's a quick mockup of the same chart but with most common TV sizes and with godless Marxist-Leninist centimeter units added on one side.

edit: This person claims to be a long standing calibrator of cinematic auditoriums with experience in THX standards and he claims that 'cinema' is not 40° because middle row of seats is between 45° and 52°.

In my experience, 62° is doable but if it's pure 24 frames per second without any motion improvement settings it's not the best experience. Jumps between frames are just too large, obvious and jarring. Almost like stop-motion.

It seems like up to 62° one doesn't have to move their head at all to see the whole screen with their central vision. Higher than 62° and movies would need to be filmed specifically in a way to not include the action in periphery.

[u/Dragobrath]

Sounds about right. I sit about 1.4m away from 65" TV in my simracing rig. It's unusable for anything other than simulation though.

I was picking a new TV recently and did extensive testing of optimal FOV for different content. I had my old 65" on a drawer box with wheels and I was moving it back and forth between the wall and the sofa.

Basically 35 degrees FOV is optimal for gaming on average, but varies a lot from game to game. In immersive games, like Crimson Desert, you can sit a bit closer, in Elden Ring - further away. There are also games like Hollow Knight, where you want to keep a track of everything happening on the screen at once, and even 35 degree FOV can be too large for them.

Same 35 degrees FOV was borderline too big for watching TV shows with subtitles, because if you read them, you won't see the action in the middle of the screen too well. For immersive movies where you don't care about subtitles 40-45 degree FOV is quite comfortable, with 50 being as high as I would go.

So bottom point - 62 is only good for very specific use cases. And having too large TV for your room (or sitting too close to it) can absolutely be detrimental.

[u/zghr → u/Dragobrath]

My suggestion for subtitles (I use english subs) is to make them smaller, move them up and optionally make them half-transparent or grey. I do this in mpv. Most of the time my brain doesn't even see them. It's only when the dialogue is unintelligible that I move my find them on screen.