43" Sceptre U435CV-U 4K UHD HDR 60Hz LED HDTV Expired

It's 4k.. ish. It can do 4:4:4 chroma signalling at 60hz, but what's important to understand is that the RGBW subpixel pattern means there is only roughly 3k worth of effective resolution for color. There are still actually 4k resolvable pixels for luminance (black to white).

Black text on white and vice versa tends to look fine. Other things tend to gain a bit of a (very fine) screen door effect at best, and colored text on white or black gets this the worst. Colored text against another color is by far the worst. It's roughly equivalent to 4:2:2 chroma but a little different.

Note that this particular TV also has some hard set processing that further degrades the picture at 4k (results in things like gradients looking even worse, among other things, and it's hard to unsee once you see it): this can be changed in the service menu (which requires an access code that I can't even remember anymore, but I'm sure it's floating around on reddit/etc), but it doesn't stick between power downs (ugh). Sceptre refuses to admit there's an issue, and has refused to update the firmware. They've also had their reps lie about the fact that it's RGBW (I'm not joking, there's still Q&A posts in various places and/or responses to reviews online where their reps claim it's explicitly not RGBW, which is silly when it's simply an objective truth that it is in fact RGBW, which plenty of people have exposed with macro shots, if the artifacts alone didn't prove it). The upscaling from 1080p also isn't great.

At $159, absolutely, it's awfully cheap, and mine at least does still work (it got relegated to being used in an arcade cabinet build). I bought one of these a few years ago, and at the time it was very hard to find cheap options for 4k 4:4:4 @60hz, and while it was a kind of crud experience for things like coding and annoying at times while web browsing, it also wasn't the worst at the time, and having 60hz at 4k was nice for being able to load up games on it. It's 2020 and unless I was super hurting for money, or going to be just gaming on it from a bit more of a distance (not as a desktop monitor), I'd look elsewhere for a 43" 4k TV to use as a monitor (for example, TCL's 2019 series 43" TVs are nice).

If you can at all afford to save up another $50-75 for a different TV to use as a monitor, definitely do so rather than getting this.

If you're just buying this because it's a $159 TV and plan to slap a fire stick or something else on it that's already sitting around, sure, it's fine for that. A little washed out due to the RGBW subpixel pattern compared to anything more modern, but fine for a garage or someplace where you wouldn't care anyway.

I WISH more TVs were dumb.... Hate having their UI in my face when I am trying to use my Roku!

RGBW panel, which as I understand means it's not true 4k and can't do 4:4:4?