SPORTS VIEWING
If you’re after a big-screen sporting experience, check our all-you-need-to-know guide. Result!!!
There being no World War intervening, June this year we will be seeing the 2018 FIFA World Cup broadcast from Russia. It’ll all be available for our delight courtesy of SBS TV. And the best news of all? It’ll be in HD, which is the way sport ought to be seen.
That should have the thoughts of every red-blooded Australian TV viewer turning towards a TV upgrade. If you were planning on doing that sometime in the next few years anyway, why not now? Here we’ll guide you through the most important things to look for in a new TV, or maybe even something a little larger, both for watching sport, and for all your other entertainment options.
The most obvious way to watch TV is... with a TV! So we’ll go there first. But then we’ll also look at the way you get a truly enormous picture: with a home theatre projector.
TV size & resolution
Sports broadcasting in Australia was frustratingly low in moving to HD. But in recent years all the channels have taken to replicating their main station in HD. Even, belatedly, regional PRIME TV began that this year. So if it’s AFL or cricket or rugby or, of course, soccer, you’ll get 1080i picture quality. And that means you can now go for a much bigger screen than before, without the softness that’s wearing on the vision. And since the HD stations are encoded in Blu-ray-like MPEG4 AVC (aka H.264), there are few if any of those dotty MPEG2 artifacts in the picture. That also encourages a big picture.
All of which means, you can enjoy sports — and your Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray and streaming Netflix — on a screen of up to 65 inches, subject only to your budget, and perhaps even bigger depending on your circumstances.
I routinely use a 65-inch TV and sit 2.7 metres from the screen, and with HD or better, the picture quality is excellent. With the quality of modern TV image processing, even SD broadcasts can be okay with this arrangement.
TVs are now widely available up to 88 inches in size. If you’re contemplating that, check it out in store on a Saturday afternoon when some live sport is being broadcast. Take a tape measure. Step back to the distance from which you will be viewing it in your home and make sure it looks good. (You may need to ask the shop to switch the TV from ‘Shop’ mode — which will be producing a lairy picture — to ‘Home’ mode.)