GAMERS BEWARE

If you’re a serious gamer who already has or plans to get an Xbox Series X, PS5 or a highend AMD or NVidia PC graphics card, you need to be particularly careful about which TV you buy. The best features of these new gaming devices place some pretty extreme technical demands on the displays they connected to. Delivering 4K resolution at 120 frames a second and variable refresh rates, in particular, require TVs to carry the latest HDMI 2.1 connectors capable of handling data rates of 40Gbps or higher. Practically no budget TVs can provide even a single sufficiently specced HDMI 2.1 port to unlock these next-gen gaming features. But nor, actually, do many mid-range TVs. And even mid-range and high-end TVs that do support 4K/120 and VRR often only do so over one or two of their HDMI connections, not all of them. Which could mean having to switch HDMIs over if you have more next-gen gaming devices than your TV has next-gen HDMI ports. Unfortunately, making sure a TV definitely supports the gaming features you want is complicated by the fact that TV brands are unhelpfully allowed to say they have HDMI 2.1 ports even if they don’t. Instead you need to check specifically that a TV’s features include 4K/120 and VRR support.

This seems fair enough – until you realise that TV brands aren’t all great at making it clear exactly which gaming features their TVs support. Some brands – LG in particular – do better than others at supporting cutting edge gaming features. But ultimately this is something you’ll need to either look to reliable product reviews to tell you about, or else obtain a sufficiently trustworthy/official answer (sadly, this may not include the advice of customer service agents) before you part with your cash.

PHILIPS 55OLED806 Philips’ legendarily powerful picture processing and OLED technology are a match made in heaven. Rather than energy expended on just combatting LCD technology’s inherent flaws, Philips processing elements on the 55OLED806 feel like they’re being used instead to maximise OLED’s potential. Colour, sharpness, contrast, motion… all the key picture elements feel enhanced by Philips’ latest P5 picture processor. So much so that pictures actually look more than 4K, colours seem to enjoy jaw-dropping levels of vibrancy, and the brightness peaks of HDR footage somehow hit with more intensity than the panel should logically be able to reach. £1,099, philips.co.uk

SAMSUNG QE50QN90B Samsung’s first mini-LED TVs last year were game changers. Shrinking LEDs to just a 40th of their previous size meant thousands more could be used. Combined with local dimming able to set light levels independently for hundreds of different ‘zones’, this resulted in levels of brightness and contrast the TV world hadn’t seen before. Now with the 50-inch QE50QN90B, the first of Samsung’s second-gen mini-LED TVs, things just got even better. The main reason for this is Shape Adaptive Light Control. This adds more variation to the light within each dimming zone so that bright highlights look punchier. If there’s a more spectacular 50-inch screen for gaming and movies, we haven’t seen it. £1,399, samsung.com