The latest TV tech
What to look for in your next TV
TV tech is developing at an awesome pace — Alex Cox delves in to what you should look for in a new set. Is 8K really the future of home entertainment?
There’s no getting away from the fact that tech moves on apace. In the same way as Apple presents us with shiny new iPhones or ever more desirable Macs every 18 months (and seems to love a complete platform switch, like the jump from 68000 to PowerPC, PowerPC to Intel x86, and the forthcoming leap from x86 to ARM chips) the TV market is based on the refresh cycle. Sony, Samsung et al need to make “buying a new TV” something that’s on every tech–lover’s list, and to do that they need to innovate.
You can draw an interesting timeline: starting at the end of the CRT days, we went from 720p to 1080p, from the short–lived obsession with 3D to 4K and HDR, from LCD and Plasma to LED and OLED — all while the smarts of our TVs increased exponentially. We’re now at a point that, barring some firmware disaster, one smart TV is as capable as another. While one might presume 8K is the next battleground, that’s not the next stage in the TV’s evolution. Right now, the big fights are over advanced picture processing and more connectivity.
SMOOTH UPSCALING
Cynically, it would be easy to suggest that fear of missing out is as powerful a driver as the technology itself. Most of us have a TV that works just fine — why do we need a new TV, beyond the argument that new is better? It’s not a case of extreme resolution; with 4K we’ve already pretty much reached the limit of the human eye. Indeed, many (including Steve Jobs) argued that the dot pitch of the iPhone 4’s Retina display outclassed the resolution of the eye way back in 2010. Yes, a 55–inch 4K TV carries around 80 pixels per inch (8K doubles that to 160ppi), which is far less than the 216ppi of even a 27–inch iMac 5K, but you’re very unlikely to watch TV at the same distance you’d face up to a 5K desktop panel or a Retina phone screen. From across the room, even 1080p screens can, for most, seem smooth as silk.
With newer screens, you’ll more frequently be running lower resolution content through a panel that can handle much more, and that’s the pivot point. Picture processing units of high–end TVs, hefty as they are given all the heavy lifting required
to push all those pixels, can now make a very credible stab at upscaling lower resolution content — 1080p will inevitably look a lot better than ever before, even if the TV has only made a cursory attempt to interpret what the extra pixels should be. Many are able to take this concept a lot further: Samsung, for instance, is introducing an AI upscaling engine which analyzes the picture and scales it up intelligently.
BIGGER, FASTER
High refresh rates could be another strong driver, too: if a panel claims it can operate at 120Hz, that means it can (theoretically) display a new image 120 times per second. This might not always be strictly true because some manufacturers are prone to hyperbole and number fudging, and an LCD which does 240Hz is far from the same as an OLED capable of the same. But when it is, it gives lower frame rate content time to breathe on screen, making the transition between frames sharper and less prone to streaking. If you’ve ever watched a show on an older TV and noticed a juddering effect when the camera pans from side to side, higher frame rates can really help to smooth this kind of thing out. And when they can’t, TV picture processors can now pull off the task much more cleanly than the jarring smoothing routines of yesteryear. You may even find modes which blank out every other frame, ensuring you get a new image rather than an interpolated blend of both. However, you may also find that these modes disprove claims that the human eye can’t make out anything beyond 60Hz — they can be somewhat flickery.
So what should you look for in a new TV? Frankly, for all the technological advancements, you should look for something you can afford, something that fits the spot you’ve got reserved for it and (most, or least, importantly depending on your streaming preferences) something which supports AirPlay 2 natively. While we (clearly) loved our time with Samsung’s 8K flagship (see our review opposite), that sort of high end is by no means required: while you’ll eke some spectacular image quality out of it, you’re getting ready for a future which isn’t likely to come for some time.