Size for distance / 11 feet
What size TV for 11 feet away?
From 11 feet (132 in, 335 cm), a 81-inch screen fills the SMPTE 30° everyday view and a 110-inch screen fills THX's 40° cinema view. Sizes in that range listed here: 83", 85", 86", 98", 100".
The numbers for 11 feet
| Basis | Screen size | Screen width | Reading it |
|---|---|---|---|
| SMPTE 30° (mixed viewing) | 81" | 70.7 in | The screen fills 30° of your view — the comfortable everyday figure. |
| THX 40° (cinema) | 110" | 96.1 in | The screen fills 40° — immersive for film, a lot for news and sport all day. |
| 4K's own pixels visible from | 169" | 147.4 in | Only screens this big show 4K's pixels to 20/20 eyes from 11 ft — the point where 8K would start to help. |
| 4K looks sharper than 1080p from | 85" | 73.7 in | On smaller screens, 1080p already reaches the limit of 20/20 vision from 11 ft, so 4K adds no visible sharpness. |
At 11 feet the point where 4K looks sharper than 1080p, 85 inches, falls between the SMPTE and THX sizes: at the everyday size the difference is marginal, at the cinema size it is visible. 4K's own pixels only become visible from 11 feet on a 169-inch screen — larger than any TV listed — which is why 8K adds nothing you can see at this distance.
What a 11-foot room usually looks like
Eleven feet often means an open-plan room with the seating in the middle. Sound starts to matter as much as picture at this range, since built-in TV speakers lose presence across the room.
11 feet is a large living room or an open-plan space with the sofa floating mid-room. Most people under-size here: a 65-inch set fills well under 30° from 11 feet. The sizes the standards point to — 81 to 110 inches — are the 75-to-98-inch class, where mount weight and wall strength start to matter as much as the picture.
Compared with 10 feet, every extra foot of distance adds about 7 inches to the SMPTE size and 10 to the THX size. Both sizes are within the range of TVs listed here.
Choosing within the range
The two standards bracket a sensible choice rather than giving one answer. Lean toward 81 inches for a room used for news, sport, gaming at a desk distance, or a bright room where a huge black rectangle dominates when the set is off. Lean toward 110 inches for a room built around films. Your eyes, not the chart, settle it: if you turn your head to follow the action, the screen is past 40° for you; if you lean forward to read captions, it is under 30°.
Measure from where your eyes are when seated to where the screen will be — not from the wall. A TV on a stand sits several inches in front of the wall, and a full-motion mount can bring it forward a foot or more. For comparison, the SMPTE distance for a 55-inch is 7 ft 5 in and the THX distance for a 65-inch is 6 ft 6 in.
TVs to look at for 11 feet
- 83-inch: 5 models, e.g. LG OLED83W6PUA, Samsung QN83S85HAEXZA
- 85-inch: 20 models, e.g. LG 85QNED92AUA, Samsung UN85U8000HFXZA
- 86-inch: 5 models, e.g. LG 86MRGB95BUA, LG 86QNED90TUA
- 98-inch: 8 models, e.g. LG 98NU850BPUB, Samsung QN98QN990FFXZA
- 100-inch: 5 models, e.g. LG 100QNED84BU, Samsung MRN100R85HFXZA
Sizes are geometry from the viewing angles and the 20/20 acuity limit cited by Wikipedia's Optimum HDTV viewing distance article, for a 16:9 screen. Viewing distances are geometry from published viewing angles: a 16:9 screen's width is 0.8716 x its diagonal, and the distance at which it fills a horizontal angle A is width / (2 x tan(A/2)). Resolution distances use the 20/20 acuity limit of one arcminute per pixel. The same formulas reproduce the reference figures quoted in the source (30 degrees = 1.6264 x diagonal; 31.2 degrees for 1080p; 58.37 degrees for 4K).