How to choose a TV | Articles | Gadgets, gifts and accessories

We all receive infor­ma­tion and enter­tain­ment through elec­tron­ic devices. At the same time, if we want to do this togeth­er with some­one, we need a large TV screen, which is vis­i­ble from all cor­ners of the room where it is locat­ed. In addi­tion, a mod­ern TV can be used not only for watch­ing pro­grams and movies, but also as a com­put­er dis­play, game con­sole.

So, TV is the cen­ter of fam­i­ly and friend­ly enter­tain­ment, which remains rel­e­vant even with the spread of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy.

At the same time, the cost of the top ones can be com­pa­ra­ble to the price of the car. Our arti­cle will tell you how to spend mon­ey wise­ly in a store that sells TVs.

Among TVs there is no clear divi­sion into class­es, they all, in fact, per­form the same func­tion and use sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies. The dif­fer­ences here are most­ly quan­ti­ta­tive, so let’s look at the char­ac­ter­is­tics that apply here.

Screen diagonal

The diag­o­nal of the TV dis­play is per­haps the main char­ac­ter­is­tic that users pay atten­tion to. It is mea­sured in inch­es and is a mea­sure of the size of the image.

From sell­ers, as well as on the Inter­net, you can find such a thing as “opti­mal view­ing dis­tance”: it is believed that TV should be watched from a dis­tance of 3–4 of its diag­o­nal. In our opin­ion, it is wrong to reduce every­thing to such a rule. It may be con­ve­nient to watch var­i­ous talk shows and sports on a small dis­play, but movies, as a rule, are designed for a huge screen, often stretched hor­i­zon­tal­ly. In addi­tion, few peo­ple live in a house with a huge liv­ing room, but you want to use the achieve­ments of mod­ern tech­nolo­gies.

Screen resolution

In paint­ing, there is the tech­nique of “pointil­lism” — when a draw­ing is applied to the can­vas with dots. Any elec­tron­ic screen also con­sists of dots — pix­els. Pix­els become vis­i­ble from a short dis­tance: for this, you can, for exam­ple, use a cam­era with a macro mode.

Liq­uid crys­tal dis­play matrix at high mag­ni­fi­ca­tion

Each pix­el con­sists of three sub-pix­els: red, green and blue, and by chang­ing the bright­ness of each of them, all the shades that we see on the screen are obtained.

Nat­u­ral­ly, the more pix­els on the dis­play, the poten­tial­ly sharp­er image it can dis­play.

There are cur­rent­ly three actu­al dis­play res­o­lu­tions:

1. 1366x768, or HD, also called 720p (though it’s high­er than 1280x720). Such a res­o­lu­tion is the lot of com­pact and bud­get mod­els. For those who use the TV to watch TV broad­casts, this res­o­lu­tion is also enough.

2. 1920x1080 or Full­HD or 1080p. The most com­mon res­o­lu­tion that is suit­able for movies, games and the Inter­net.

3. 3840x2160 or 4K or UHD. This for­mat is becom­ing more and more rel­e­vant over time, you can watch movies in this res­o­lu­tion, you can play games. The only down­side is that this res­o­lu­tion implies a fair­ly large screen size. Well, the cost here, of course, is high­er.

It is worth men­tion­ing, also, the emer­gence of curved screen TVs. This design enhances the feel­ing of pres­ence, how­ev­er, at a large angle, such a screen will not be very con­ve­nient to look at, since the near edge will sim­ply not be vis­i­ble.

Curved TV

Display technologies

In addi­tion to screen size and res­o­lu­tion, what mat­ters is how the pic­ture looks as a whole.

We have already described in a sim­pli­fied way how the col­or of the image on the screen is formed, how­ev­er, it is clear that we see the pic­ture on the TV even in com­plete dark­ness, that is, the screen itself glows.

The most com­mon now are screens with a translu­cent matrix on liq­uid crys­tals, behind which there is a pan­el on LEDs that acts as a back­light. These are the so-called LCD/LED dis­plays. Since the back­light works all over the area at once, as long as the pow­er is on, even if we “tell” the screen to show black, the pix­els will still let some of the light through, and the screen will not be com­plete­ly black. That is, there is no “real” black col­or here.

Anoth­er tech­nol­o­gy is OLED, here each pix­el has its own back­light, which can be turned off regard­less of the back­light of any oth­er pix­els dur­ing screen oper­a­tion. If we send a black out­put sig­nal to any part of the screen, the back­light turns off in this place. Thanks to this, the black col­or here is much deep­er, the con­trast, and hence the “juici­ness” of the pic­ture, is increased.

A kind of inter­me­di­ate option — quan­tum dot TVs from Sam­sung, or QLED, they also require back­light­ing, so there is no ide­al­ly deep black here, but there is bet­ter col­or repro­duc­tion. Quan­tum dots here are locat­ed between the back­light and the liq­uid crys­tal lay­er, they com­ple­ment the col­or fil­ters on the pix­els.

HDR

Under this abbre­vi­a­tion lies the con­cept of High Dynam­ic Range, which means “high dynam­ic range”. Dynam­ic range is the dif­fer­ence in illu­mi­na­tion between the light­est and dark­est object. The fact is that images obtained with con­ven­tion­al cam­eras and video cam­eras exag­ger­ate this con­trast, com­pared to what we see with our own eyes. A TV, on the oth­er hand, can com­pen­sate for this by show­ing more detail in the dark and light areas of the screen.

Smart TV

The name of this func­tion can be lit­er­al­ly trans­lat­ed as “smart TV”. This means that the TV has the abil­i­ty to con­nect to the Inter­net to view mul­ti­me­dia con­tent, as well as Inter­net sites. Smart TV func­tion­al­i­ty is imple­ment­ed through an inter­face with a set of appli­ca­tions for con­nect­ing to YouTube, Net­flix and sim­i­lar ser­vices.

To explain it in a sim­ple way — Smart TV is the func­tion­al­i­ty of a com­put­er (albeit great­ly cur­tailed) on a TV.

Connectors and modes of digital television

Of course, only dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy can pro­vide max­i­mum pic­ture qual­i­ty on the lat­est gen­er­a­tion TVs. There­fore, they use con­nec­tors with dig­i­tal data trans­mis­sion.

In Rus­sia, the DVB-T2 dig­i­tal tele­vi­sion stan­dard has been adopt­ed, this is not some kind of phys­i­cal con­nec­tor, but a tech­nol­o­gy that is sup­port­ed by the “stuff­ing” of the TV. It is de fac­to sup­port­ed by devices adopt­ed in our coun­try, if you buy a TV in a Russ­ian store, there are no prob­lems. It is also adopt­ed in Europe and the coun­tries of the for­mer USSR.

If you want to dis­play the image on the TV screen from any oth­er dig­i­tal device, the ubiq­ui­tous HDMI con­nec­tor is used.

If you want to con­nect sev­er­al sig­nal sources, you should pay atten­tion to the num­ber of such con­nec­tors. Such sources can be: media play­er, game con­sole, dig­i­tal cam­era.

The Eth­er­net input is used to con­nect a net­work cable, for a per­ma­nent and sta­ble Inter­net con­nec­tion.

Also, mod­ern TVs may have built-in Wi-Fi.

The USB con­nec­tor on the TV is used to con­nect exter­nal stor­age media, as well as pow­er media play­ers.

An opti­cal out­put is need­ed to con­nect exter­nal speak­ers to the TV.

conclusions

The most obvi­ous part of the process of improv­ing tele­vi­sions is to improve the size and qual­i­ty of the pic­ture. How­ev­er, this is not enough for a mod­ern user: after all, every­one is used to inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment (those in which the user him­self choos­es what to do). There­fore, the TV is no longer just a screen with a TV tuner.

That is, mod­ern TVs are try­ing to become some­thing more: per­haps it is time for them to come up with a new name.

Nev­er­the­less, in the end, tele­vi­sions remain tele­vi­sions, and they are one of the main prod­ucts in hard­ware stores.