RUNTO Technology published its half-year LCD TV panel tracker on August 6, and the headline number is a flat one: 120.2 million large-size TV panels shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026, down 0.3% against the same period last year. Shipment area went the other way, up 2.8% to 91.3 million square metres. One tier moved sharply — the 98-inch-and-larger class RUNTO files as “near-hundred-inch” shipped 1.2 million panels, a 39.6% jump, and that was still exactly 1.0% of everything that left a fab.
The rest of the table is the same slow migration the display industry has been running for a decade. The 32-inch class fell 13.4% to 25.4 million panels and remains the single largest size on the list at 21.1% of shipments. Forty-three-inch fell 4.8%. Fifty-five-inch rose 10.2% to 20.1 million, 65-inch rose 5.5% to 14.8 million. Seventy-five and 85-inch together account for under a tenth of the market. Averaged across the whole 120.2 million, the panel that shipped in the first half of 2026 measured 50.3 inches — nine-tenths of an inch larger than the one that shipped in the first half of 2025.
The two quarters did not behave alike. Q1 was down 3.2% in units and 0.9% in area; Q2 turned it around at plus 2.8% and plus 6.8%. RUNTO expects the full year to land at 238 million panels, down 3.1%, with total area holding flat at roughly 181 million square metres — which is another way of saying the industry now grows by making the same glass bigger rather than by making more of it.
Above 98 inches, mainland Chinese panel makers hold 94.7% of shipments, against a little over 72% for the market as a whole. That is not a coincidence of pricing; it is a consequence of which fabs exist. Gen 10.5 lines cut 98-inch panels with very little waste, and the companies that built Gen 10.5 lines are in Hefei, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Anyone selling a 100-inch television in North America or Europe this year is selling Chinese glass, whatever the badge on the bezel says.
That supply position is why the price collapsed. An entry 100-inch set now starts around $1,150 in US retail, and the mainstream Hisense and TCL 100-inch models sit between roughly $1,800 and $3,000 depending on backlight tier. Two years ago the same diagonal was a five-figure special order. The 100-inch TV stopped being a curiosity and became a product you can put in a cart.
It just is not what people are buying. A 1.0% share on 39.6% growth means the segment shipped about 1.2 million panels in six months against 25.4 million at 32 inches. For all the marketing air around giant flat panels, the world’s median television purchase this year is a 50-inch set in a room where a 100-inch set would not physically fit, would not go up the stairwell, and would need two people and a stud finder to hang.
The argument that cheap 100-inch televisions have made home projection redundant gets made every few months, and it is being made against one percent of the panel market. The other ninety-nine percent is the actual competitive set, and against a 50-inch screen a projector does not need to win on contrast or brightness or colour volume. It only needs to be bigger, which it is by default.
That is visible in what sells. On Amazon’s projector best-seller list this week, the top position belongs to a YGSKK unit at $75.99 claiming 300 ANSI lumens and a 50-to-200-inch range. Magcubic sits at fifth with a $59.99 model rated 200 ANSI and 9,685 ratings, and again at seventh with the HY300PRO at $49.99. CiBest is at $39.99 with 10,133 ratings; AuKing’s long-running budget model is $69.99 with 15,021. Half the list costs less than a mid-range HDMI cable.
None of these are good projectors in the sense a reviewer would use the word. They are single-chip LCD engines, most of them 720p native with 4K “support” meaning the chip will accept the signal and throw away most of it, and 200 to 300 lumens means a dark room and a light-coloured wall. What they sell is diagonal per dollar. At a realistic 100-inch image the YGSKK works out to about seventy-six cents an inch. The cheapest 100-inch television is about $11.50 an inch. That gap is doing more to keep the entry projector category alive than any specification on the box, and it is the reason the segment survived a 26% collapse in Chinese smart projector sales that we covered at the end of July.
The one recognisable brand in the same list is instructive about what the next rung costs. Epson’s EpiqVision Flex CO-W01 sits at 24th at $329.99, a three-chip 3LCD portable rated at 3,000 lumens of both colour and white brightness, and Epson’s own listing copy makes the size argument directly: a 300-inch picture, “four times larger than a 75-inch flat panel.” Epson has been more careful with its numbers than most this year — its LifeStudio Grand Plus was one of the rare models to measure above its own brightness rating in independent testing.
The honest framing is not projector versus 100-inch TV. It is projector versus the wall that currently has nothing on it — the bedroom, the rental, the dorm room that opens in three weeks, the back garden in August. A television has to be bought, delivered, mounted and lived with. A projector gets carried in and pointed.
The model that makes that case most cleanly right now is the Dangbei N3 Max at $559.99. It is rated 1,000 ISO lumens, and the ISO part matters — that is a measurement under ISO 21118 rather than a marketing figure, which puts it in a different conversation from the 300-ANSI claims further down the list. It runs VIDAA with officially licensed Netflix built in rather than requiring a dongle, throws 60 to 150 inches at a 1.15:1 ratio, sits on an integrated 180-degree gimbal so it can be aimed at a ceiling without a mount, and carries 12W of Dolby Audio. Automatic focus and keystone are handled by Dangbei’s InstanPro system, which means the thing that usually kills a portable projector’s second outing — spending ten minutes squaring the image again — does not happen.
Full specifications are on our Dangbei N3 Max product page, and the wider field at that price sits in our under-$1,000 roundup.
RUNTO’s forecast for the rest of the year — units down, area flat, prices softening in Q3 before steadying in Q4 — describes an industry whose growth strategy is to add nine-tenths of an inch to the average television every twelve months. At that rate the average set reaches 100 inches somewhere around the year 2081. Projection’s whole commercial argument is that you do not have to wait.