On the one hand, choosing a television set is an easy job: buy the most expensive you can afford from a brand you like. On the other hand, there are so many types of screen technology and associated labels and acronyms that you’d be forgiven for feeling totally overwhelmed by it. Here’s your (relatively) simple guide to the TV tech you’ll see in 2021.
As has long been the case, the best way to choose a new model for yourself is reading reviews and even viewing TV sets in person – better than at least trying to compare one specification to another in a product listing . That said, it can certainly help to learn about some of the technology and jargon that manufacturers will be pushing.
The base
The main specifications of a TV remain the same as ever: there is the size of the screen, which is how big the television will be when you get it home, and there is the resolution, which is how many pixels are packed into the screen and how sharp it will be. 4K is now the norm, with more 8K televisions this year (although the TVs generally remain prohibitive).
Then you have the two fundamentally different ways of placing an image on a TV screen, which you will also see on smartphone screens. There’s the superior but more expensive OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode), where each pixel of light is independently illuminated, as opposed to the cheaper and still very good LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), which uses a backlight layer.
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LCD has been improved in recent years through the use of LEDs (Light-Emitting Diodes) in various configurations, bringing them closer to the sharp contrast and deep colors of OLED. LCD TVs are now often referred to as LCD LED TVs or even just LED TVs, making purchasing decisions not that easy for the consumer. These two main categories are now also divided into different subgroups as manufacturers refine their technology and the differences between technology types become more blurred.
Don’t forget HDR or High Dynamic Range, it power of screens to balance colors so that the darkest and lightest areas are still full of detail. There are several types to consider: 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 offer and choose a TV that suits you.
Mini-LED and Micro-LED
As mentioned above, TV technology is being broken down into more and more subcategories and variations on a theme, with manufacturers often following their own routes, making it more difficult to compare brand versus brand (as we said, comparing sets in a store remains a of the best ways to choose one). With that in mind, we have the emergence of Mini-LED and Micro-LED, variations of LED (itself an evolution of LCD).
The problem with LED backlit LCDs is that it doesn’t provide much pixel-by-pixel lighting control. This means that you are more likely to see rays of light around bright points on a dark background. To address this, manufacturers began splitting the backlight into smaller zones, controlled individually so that some areas of a screen could be deeper black (or brighter white) without affecting the rest of the screen.
Mini LED and the even smaller ones Micro LEDs are further upgrades of this idea, making the size of the individual LEDs progressively smaller, allowing more control over the image. You’ll see both in use on TV sets in 2021, depending on the manufacturer, but for now, Micro-LED remains much less common and much more expensive (Samsung’s upcoming 110-inch model costs just 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 more affordable and practical over time; for the time being we are all going to buy sets built on the cheaper alternatives. As this is the TV industry, Micro-LED is developed in different ways by different companies under different names: Sony calls it Crystal LED.
Add some Quantum Dots
If you’ve seen a lot of it CES 2021, you would have seen manufacturers show off their own improvements on Mini-LED – LG QNED and Samsung QLED, for example, where the Q stands 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 handle the colors displayed on the screen and the overall contrast of the image.
It’s the same pattern we’ve seen in TV technology over the years: a clever adaptation to an existing technology to address some of its limitations, with a new name. One of the big advantages of QLED and QNED sets is the improved brightness, which can even surpass OLED in some cases (brightness and longevity are the potential downsides of OLED, although manufacturers are making improvements in that area too).
Samsung has been developing QLED for a while, with the latest incarnation Neo QLED. As with many rebrandings like this one, Neo just means new and improved: it refers to (quantum dot) LEDs that are smaller, more accurate, less leaky in terms of light, and more responsive. The technology can also be better managed by the TV’s built-in software. Ultimately, it’s all about getting a 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 deploys a whopping 30,000 LEDs to act as a backlight, so you can see how far we are from the original LCD TVs that used one backlight for the entire set. When comparing televisions with this kind of improved Mini-LED technology, pay attention to the number of LEDs listed and the number of local dimming zones, if these details are listed.
Even more TV technology
If you find yourself confused by a TV spec you come across, a quick search of the official manufacturer page should give you a sense of what it is amid all the exaggerations. As we said at the beginning, looking at specs isn’t as good as seeing a TV for yourself or read a thorough review, but you can at least get a sense of what manufacturers are trying to do, and why one set might cost more than another.
Televisions have processors – if you hadn’t noticed. 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 upscaling all your old content to 4K and 8K in a way that doesn’t look terrible (with a little AI help).
Sony, for example, just revealed what it calls “ cognitive processing ” for its 2021 TVs: it uses special algorithms to figure out where your eyes are likely to be looking (actors’ faces are usually a good guess) and then enhances those parts of the image. These are the kind of minor tweaks and enhancements manufacturers want to add year after year, although you may not necessarily miss them on sets that go without.
Those are the main considerations covered, but there’s a lot more to consider as extras – gamers will want to know about refresh rate and latency, while the built-in software and audio format support can also be important. It’s a good idea to think about the kind of content you want to send to your TV while choosing one, and make sure that the necessary features (from ATSC 3.0 to HDMI 2.1) are supported.