LCD contenders
LCD still dominates the lower end of the TV market — o en called ‘LED’ by virtue of the backlight which shines through the panel, as opposed to OLED’s frontemissive technology. But the best LCD models today can rival OLED in most performance aspects, especially their brightness for use in anything less than a dark viewing room. SAMSUNG: QLED technology optimises the frequency of LED backlighting using quantum dots, so as to more eiciently match the colours to which our eyes are most sensitive. The result is higher perceived brightness that can far exceed what’s possible from OLED. Samsung also has some neat ‘Frame’ models which are responsive to the room’s colour temperature to appear as a passive artwork rather than an active TV when not in viewing mode. TCL: Chinese brands can oer great TVs at high-value prices, as shown by TCL with its current ‘QLED’ models (above). TOSHIBA: An LED-LCD from Toshiba in Australia won our 2018 Best Buy TV Award, and we understand that OLED models are due to join them in the second half of 2018.
For anything above 55 inches you will want Ultra-HD resolution, and even at 55 inches the majority of available TVs are now UHD. Of course, the World Cup broadcasts will only be 1080i, but UHD TVs are able to deliver more subtle results, with less visible processing artifacts than 1080 HD TVs. They also handle scaling up from SD (576i) a little more elegantly than full-HD panels.
So the rule is, you want more pixels and the biggest panel size that works in your environment and with your budget.
If you’re going small for whatever reason, do remember that most 32-inch TVs are actually only ‘HD’ rather than ‘FullHD’. That’s 1366 by 768 pixels, which means downscaling the 1080i broadcast signal.
For viewing the soccer, you won’t need such things as HDR and Dolby Vision and Wide Colour Gamut. Sports broadcasting will remain firmly in the 8-bit world for the foreseeable future, despite the rapid advance of Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG), an HDR system that was specifically developed for live television by the BBC and Japanese broadcaster NHK. It’s already available on some premium TVs, but we don’t expect it to be used for Australian TV broadcasts, well, at least until UHD broadcasts come. But you will likely want to enjoy UltraHD discs, or perhaps premium HDR Netflix, on the TV as well. So look for at least HDR — High Dynamic Range — support. In theory, a fully-supported HDR signal allows a TV to go from complete black to a blastingly bright 10,000 nits. In practice, no TV can yet encompass such a range.
Furthermore, you need to keep the two concepts separate: signal support, and delivery. Most UHD TVs will accept HDR and WCG signals these days, and do the best they can with them. But at the lower end many still use 8-bit panels. So the 10-bit or 12-bit input signal physically can’t offer more picture quality. Look for things in the specifications and features like ‘perfect black levels’, nits brightness ratings of a thousand or more, and 10-bit panels.