On the one hand, choosing a television set is a simple task: get the most expensive one you can afford of a brand you like. On the other hand, there are so many types of screen technology and associated labels and acronyms that you will be forgiven if you feel completely overwhelmed by it all. Here is your (relatively) simple guide to the TV technology you will encounter in 2021.
As has been the case for a long time, the best way to choose a new model yourself is to read the reviews and even check TV sets in person – better than trying one specification against another anyway. compare. That said, it can definitely help to know about some of the technology and language usage that will put manufacturers on your path.
The basic
The most important specifications of a TV remain the same as always: the size of the screen is, how big the television is when you get it at home, and there is the resolution, how many pixels are packed in the screen and how sharp it goes be. 4K is now the norm, with more 8K televisions this year (although TVs generally remain excessively expensive).
Then you have the two different ways to place an image on a TV screen, which you will also see on smartphone screens. There is the superior but more expensive OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode), where each pixel is illuminated independently, as opposed to the cheaper and still very good LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), which uses a backlight layer.
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LCDs have improved over the past few years by using LEDs (Light-Emitting Diodes) in different configurations, enabling them to get closer to the sharp contrast and deep colors of OLEDs. LCD TVs these days are often called LCD LED TVs, or even just LED TVs, which do not make the purchasing decisions for consumers very easy. These two main categories are now also being cut into different subgroups as manufacturers refine their technology and the differences between technology types become more obscure.
Don’t forget HDR, or High Dynamic Range, the ability of screens to balance colors so that the darkest and lightest spots are still full of detail. There are different types to think about – HDR10, HDR10 +, Dolby Vision and others – but you can make your shopping life easier by finding out which standards are your favorite content providers and set-top boxes bid and select a TV to match.
Mini-LED and MIcro-LED
As mentioned above, TV technology is being divided into more and more subcategories and variations on a theme, with manufacturers regularly following their own routes – making it harder to place brands versus brands (as we said, to put sets in ‘ compare a store). remains one of the best ways to choose one). With that in mind, we have the rise of Mini-LED and Micro-LED, variations on LED (itself an evolution of LCD).
The problem with LCDs that use LED taillights is that they do not provide much pixel-by-pixel lighting control. This means you are more likely to see light rays around bright spots on dark backgrounds. To address this, manufacturers have begun to divide the taillights into smaller zones, controlling them individually so that some parts of the screen can be deeper black (or a brighter white) without affecting the rest of the screen.
Mini-LED en the even smaller Micro-LED is a further upgrade of this idea, which makes the size of the individual LEDs smaller and smaller, thus enabling more control over the image. You’ll see both used on TV sets in 2021, depending on the manufacturer, but Micro-LED remains much less common and more expensive for now (Samsung’s upcoming 110-inch model) costs a little over $ 150,000, if you want to invest).
In theory, Micro-LED offers the benefits of LCD and OLED in a new package, and manufacturers should be able to get the technology cheaper and more practical over time; for a while we are all going to buy sets that are built on cheaper alternatives. This is the TV company and Micro-LED is developed differently by different companies under different names: Sony call it Crystal LED.
Insert a number of quantum points
If you’ve seen a lot of CES 2021, you would have seen manufacturers show their own improvements on Mini-LED – LG QNED and Samsung QLED, for example, with the Q standing for ‘quantum dot’. Ultimately, these are variations on the same LCD LED template we’ve seen before, but there’s an extra layer of these quantum dots that can further refine and process the colors on the screen and the overall contrast of the image.
This is the same pattern we’ve seen over the years in TV technology – a clever adaptation to an existing technology to address some new limitations with its limitations. One of the major advantages of QLED and QNED sets is the improved brightness, which may even surpass OLED in some cases (brightness and longevity are the potential disadvantages of OLED, although manufacturers also improve in that area).
Samsung has been developing QLED for a while now, with the latest incarnation Neo QLED. As with many of these renames, Neo just means new and improved: it refers to (quantum dot) LEDs that are smaller, more precise, less leaky in terms of light and responsive. The technology can also be better managed through the TV’s built-in software. Ultimately, it’s about a better and better picture.
LG QNED, meanwhile, is the relative newcomer to the scene, although it includes an established LG technology called NanoCell. The N actually refers to nano: LG’s QNED sets plug in as many as 30,000 LEDs to serve as a taillight, so you can see how far we have come from the original LCD TVs that use one taillight for the entire set has. If you are comparing TV sets with this kind of enhanced Mini-LED technology, look at the number of LEDs mentioned, as well as the number of local dimming zones, if these details are listed.
More TV technology
If you get confused by any TV specification you come across, you should quickly go to the official manufacturers page to get an idea of what it is, amidst all the hyperbole. As we mentioned at the beginning, studying specifications is not as good as watching a TV yourself read a thorough review, but you can at least get an idea of what manufacturers are trying to do, and why one set costs more than another.
Televisions have processors – if you did not notice. Faster, more advanced, more expensive processors help TVs better manage all those millions of pixels – change colors faster, interpret brightness and contrast more realistically. and to upgrade all your old content to 4K and 8K in a way that doesn’t look awful (with a little AI help).
Sony, for example, do not reveal what it calls ‘cognitive processing’ for its 2021 TVs: it uses special algorithms to find out where your eyes are most likely to look (actor faces are usually a good choice) and then enhance the parts of the picture. These are the kind of small adjustments and improvements that manufacturers want to add annually, though you will not necessarily miss it on sets without doing so.
These are the most important considerations covered, but there’s a lot more to weigh in than extras – gamers will want to know about the refresh rate and latency, while software and audio format support may also be important. It’s a good idea to check the type of content you want to send to your TV while selecting one, and make sure the necessary features (from ATSC 3.0 on HDMI 2.1) will be supported.