Vizio officially launched its P-Series 4K TVs last night, which start at $999 for a 50-inch set and go up to $2,499 for a 70-inch set — the first mainstream 4K TVs to be that aggressively priced. To celebrate, the company held a party in a New York art gallery, where the TVs were showcased playing high-resolution video art and in side-by-side comparisons to Samsung's 8500 series, which lists at $2,199 for a 50-inch set. "It's not only shipping an amazingly-priced 4K TV, but one that blows the competition away on picture quality," Vizio CTO Matt McRae told me.

Vizio completely redesigned the backlight to reduce costs

I also asked McRae how Vizio had managed to hit that price point — he told me his team had completely redesigned the backlight to use 40 percent fewer parts, which reduced his overall component cost. "The picture quality goes up, but the cost goes down," he said. Vizio is also designing its own six-core chips now, which allowed the company to reduce costs even further. Matt says the goal is to rapidly accelerate the mainstream adoption of 4K to just a year or two — and take the sales lead in the process.

All that said, the P-Series looked pretty solid last night, with great colors, sharp details, and good black levels. We'll have to see what it's really like when we get our review unit — stay tuned.