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Insider Picks publishes guides to the best budget TVs on the market. Part of those guides is a "BI Rating," a ten-point scale aimed at providing a rough estimate of our own opinions mixed with those of other TV reviewers across the web.
Here's how we came to those BI Ratings, and the TVs we chose in general.
The TVs included on the listare not the four highest-scoring series overall. We chose those four based on a mixture of feedback from professional and user reviews across the web, and our own hands-on experience.
Once we narrowed our original shortlist — which consisted of about 10 series — down to four, we then assigned them a BI Rating, which takes various sources' opinions into account.
Those sources include The Wirecutter, CNET, PCMag, Rtings, Tom's Guide, and Reviewed.
We looked at many other TV reviewing outlets — as well as user feedback across the web — but we felt these six were knowledgeable and updated enough to give us a good idea of what's worth considering.
To get the numerical value for a specific TV, we did the following:
1. Multiplied its star rating on CNET and/or PCMag by two, wherever applicable.
2. Rounded Rtings and Reviewed's 100-point scale to the nearest whole, then added, if applicable.
3. Added Tom's Guide's rating out of 10, if applicable.
4. Added our own BI Rating out of 10.
5. Took the resulting sum and divided it by the number of sources that reviewed the given TV in the first place. The Vizio E series was rated by five of the above sources (including us), for instance, so its total review score at this point in the process was divided by five.
6. Added 0.5 points to the resulting number if The Wirecutter gave the TV positive feedback, if applicable.
7. Rounded the new resulting number to the nearest whole number.
So, going back to the Vizio E, it received scores of 8 (4 x 2 from CNET), 7 (out of 10 from Tom's Guide), 8 (7.6 to 8 from Rtings), 8 (7.7 to 8 from Reviewed), and 8 (out of 10 from us). The resulting 39 was divided by 5 to get 7.8. The Wirecutter did not explicitly recommend it, so the score stayed there. Rounding that up then got us the BI Rating of 8 out of 10.
Like any system that tries to distill personal opinion into a number, this has its flaws. Our personal score often differed from the BI Rating by a number or two, and some TVs on the list weren't formally reviewed by many sources. And it's not like we're not going to highlight any low-scoring devices in a buying guide.
However, ratings make things simple, so if we were going to have one, we wanted one that reflected the ideas of many tastes, not just our own.
These buying guides are by no means static, and we plan on updating them in the future. It's likely we'll be updating our BI Rating metric as well, but for now, we hope that clears up any potential confusion. Thanks for reading.