On the one hand, choosing a television set is a simple task: buy the most expensive one you can afford of a brand you like. On the other hand, there are so many types of screen technology and associated labels and acronyms that you would be forgiven for feeling totally overwhelmed by it all. This is your (relatively) straightforward guide to the TV technology you’ll find in 2021.
As has been happening for a long time, reading the reviews and even checking the TV sets in person is the best way to choose a new model for you – better than trying to compare one specification with another in a product list, anyway. That said, it can definitely help to know about some of the technologies and jargon that manufacturers are going to push for you.
The basic
The main specifications of a TV remain the same as always: there is the size of the screen, which is the size of the television when you get it home, and there is the resolution, which is how many pixels are placed on the screen and how sharp it will be. 4K is now the norm, with more 8K TVs this year (although TVs remain prohibitively expensive in general).
So you have the two fundamentally different ways of placing an image on a TV screen, which you will also see mentioned on smartphone screens. There is the superior but more expensive OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode), where each pixel of light is illuminated independently, against the cheaper and still very good LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), which uses a backlight layer .
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The LCD has improved in recent years with the use of LEDs (Light-Emitting Diodes) in various configurations, allowing them to get closer to the sharp contrast and deep colors of OLED. LCD TVs are now often referred to as LED LCD TVs, or even just LED TVs, which does not make buying decisions too easy for consumers. These two main categories are now being divided into different subgroups as well, as manufacturers refine their technology and the differences between the types of technology become more confused.
Don’t forget HDR, or High Dynamic Range, the ability to screens to balance the colors so that the darkest and lightest spots are still full of detail. There are different types to think about here – HDR10, HDR10 +, Dolby Vision and more – but you can make your shopping life easier by finding out which patterns are your favorites content providers and decoders offer and choose a TV to match.
Mini-LED and MIcro-LED
As mentioned above, TV technology is dividing into more and more subcategories and variations of a theme, with manufacturers often going their own way – making it harder to brand against brand (as we said, comparing sets in a store remains one of the best ways to choose one). With that in mind, we have the appearance of the Mini-LED and the Micro-LED, variations of the LED (itself an evolution of the LCD).
The problem with LCDs that use LED backlight is that it doesn’t offer much pixel-by-pixel lighting control. This means that you are more likely to see halos of light around bright spots on dark backgrounds. To address this, manufacturers began dividing the backlights into smaller, individually controlled zones, so that some parts of the screen could be a deeper black (or a brighter white) without affecting the rest of the screen.
Mini-LED and the even smaller Micro-LEDs are another update of this idea, making the size of individual LEDs smaller and smaller, and thus allowing more control over the image. You’ll see both in use on TV sets in 2021, depending on the manufacturer, although for the moment the Micro-LED remains much less common and much more expensive (Samsung’s next 110-inch model will cost 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 make the technology more accessible and practical over time; for a while we will all buy sets built with cheaper alternatives. This being the TV business, Micro-LED is being developed differently by different companies with different names: Sony call this LED crystal.
Add some quantum dots
If you’ve seen a lot of CES 2021, you would have seen manufacturers exhibiting their own improvements to the Mini-LED – LG QNED and Samsung QLED, for example, with the Q meaning ‘quantum dot’. Ultimately, they are variations of the same LCD LED model that we saw earlier, but there is an extra layer of these quantum dots that can further refine and process the colors shown on the screen and the overall contrast of the image.
It is the same pattern that we have seen in TV technology over the years – a clever adjustment to an existing technology to address some of its limitations, given a new name. One of the great advantages of the QLED and QNED sets is the improved brightness, which is even capable of overcoming OLED in some cases (brightness and longevity are the potential disadvantages of OLED, although manufacturers are also making improvements in this field).
Samsung has been developing QLED for some time, with the last incarnation being Neo QLED. As with many redesigns like this, Neo just means new and improved: it refers to LEDs (quantum dots) that are smaller, more accurate, with less light leakage and more responsive. The technology can also be better managed by the TV’s on-board software. In the end, it all comes down to a better and better image.
LG QNED, meanwhile, is relatively new to the scene, although it incorporates a well-known LG technology called NanoCell. ON actually refers to nano: LG’s QNED sets up to 30,000 LEDs to act as a backlight, so you can see how far we’ve come from the original LCD TVs that used a backlight for the whole set. If you are comparing TV sets with these types of enhanced Mini-LED technology, look for the number of LEDs mentioned, as well as the number of local dimming zones, if these details are listed.
Even more TV technology
If you are confused by any TV specification you find, a quick search of the manufacturer’s official website should give you an idea of what it is, in the midst of all the hyperbole. As we mentioned at the beginning, looking at the specs is not as good as watching the TV on your own or reading a full review, but you can at least get an idea of what manufacturers are trying to do and why one set may cost more than another.
Televisions have processors – if you didn’t notice. Faster, more advanced and expensive processors help TVs better manage all those millions of pixels – changing colors faster, interpreting brightness and contrast more realistically and increasing all of 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 he calls “cognitive processing” for his 2021 TVs: makes use of special algorithms to find out where his eyes are probably looking (actors’ faces are usually a good bet) and then highlights those parts of the image. These are the types of minor tweaks and improvements that manufacturers like to add year after year, although you may not necessarily lose them in bundles that don’t come.
Those are the main considerations covered, although there is a lot more to ponder as extras – players will want to know about refresh rate and latency, while integrated software and audio format support can be important as well. It’s a good idea to consider the type of content you want to send to your TV while choosing one and make sure that the necessary resources (from ATSC 3.0 for HDMI 2.1) will be supported.