A guide to the new TV technology of 2021

On the one hand, choosing a TV is a simple job: get the most expensive you can afford from a brand you love. On the other hand, there are so many types of screen technology and associated labels and acronyms that you’d be forgiven for feeling completely overwhelmed by it all. Here’s your (relatively) straightforward guide to the TV tech you’ll encounter in 2021.

As has been the case for a long time, reading reviews and even checking out TVs in person is the best way to pick a new model for yourself – better than trying to compare one spec to another on a list of products. , anyway. That said, it can definitely help to know some of the tech and jargon that manufacturers are going to push you.

The basics

The key specs of a TV remain the same as ever: there’s the screen size, which is the size of the TV when you bring it home, and there’s the resolution, which is the number of pixels packed. in the screen and how it’s going to be sharp. 4K is now the norm, with more 8K TVs this year (although televisions remain prohibitively expensive overall).

Then you have the two fundamentally different ways of putting an image on a TV screen, which you will also see mentioned with smartphone screens. There’s the superior but more expensive OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode), where every pixel of light is illuminated independently, versus the cheaper and still very good LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), which uses a layer of backlighting.

The LCD screen has improved in recent years through the use of LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) in various configurations, allowing them to come close to the sharp contrast and deep colors of the OLED. LCD TVs are now often referred to as LED LCD TVs, or even just LED TVs, which makes it difficult for consumers to make purchasing decisions. These two main categories are now also broken down into different sub-groups, as manufacturers refine their technology and the differences between types of technology become more blurred.

Don’t forget HDR, or High Dynamic Range, the capacity of screens to balance the colors so that the darkest and lightest spots are still full of detail. There are different types to consider here – HDR10, HDR10 +, Dolby Vision and others – but you can make your shopping life easier by finding out which standards you prefer. content providers and decoders offer and choose a TV to match.

Mini-LED and MIcro-LED

As mentioned above, TV technology is divided into more and more sub-categories and variations on a theme, with manufacturers often following their own routes, making it more difficult to brand against brand (as we As said, comparing sets in a store is still one of the best ways to pick one). In this spirit, we have the emergence of Mini-LED and Micro-LED, variations on LED (in itself an evolution of the LCD).

The problem with LCD screens using LED backlights is that they don’t give 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 backlights into smaller, individually controlled areas so that parts of a screen could be deeper black (or brighter white) without affecting the rest. of the screen.

Mini-LED and the smallest Micro LEDs are further improvements on this idea, making the size of individual LEDs smaller and smaller, and thus allowing more control over the image. You’ll see both used on TVs in 2021, according to the manufacturer, although for now the micro-LED is still much less common and much more expensive (Samsung’s next 110-inch model will cost a little over $ 150,000, if you want to invest).

In theory, micro-LED offers the advantages of LCD and OLED displays in a new package, and manufacturers should be able to get the technology more affordable and convenient over time; for the time being we will all buy sets built on the cheaper alternatives. This is the television sector, Micro-LED is developed differently by different companies under different names: Sony call it Crystal LED.

Add some quantum dots

If you’ve seen a lot of CES 2021, you would have seen manufacturers showing their own improvements on mini-LEDs – LG QNED and Samsung QLED, for example, with Q for “quantum dot”. Ultimately, these are variations on the same LED LCD model we’ve seen before, but there’s 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’s the same pattern we’ve seen in TV technology over the years – a smart modification of existing technology to address some of its limitations, with a new name. One of the big advantages of the QLED and QNED sets is the improved brightness, which is even able to outperform OLED in some cases (brightness and longevity are the potential drawbacks of OLED, although manufacturers also make improvements in this area).

Samsung has been developing QLED for some time, with the latest incarnation being Neo QLED. As with many brand changes like this, Neo simply means New and Improved: it refers to (quantum dot) LEDs that are smaller, more precise, less light leakage, and more responsive. The technology can also be better managed by the onboard software of the TV. Ultimately, this is a better and better picture.

LG QNED, meanwhile, is the newcomer to the scene, though it incorporates established LG technology called NanoCell. The N actually refers to the nano: LG’s QNED packs 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 all. If you are comparing TVs 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 those details are listed.

Even more TV technology

If you’re confused by a TV spec you come across, a quick search on the manufacturer’s official page should give you an idea of ​​what it is, amid all the hyperbole. As we mentioned at the start, looking at specs isn’t as good as seeing a TV on your own or read an in-depth review, but you can at least get a feel for what the manufacturers are trying to do, and why one set might cost more than another.

TVs are equipped with processors – iif you hadn’t noticed. Faster, more advanced, and more expensive processors help TVs handle all those millions of pixels better, changing colors faster, interpreting brightness and contrast more realistically and scaling all of your old content to 4K and 8K in a way that doesn’t look great (with a little AI help).

Sony, for example, just revealed what he calls “cognitive processing” for his 2021 televisions: he uses special algorithms to determine where your eyes are likely to look (actor faces are usually a good bet) then enhances those parts of the image. These are the kinds of little tweaks and upgrades that manufacturers love to add year after year, although you might not necessarily miss them on sets that don’t have them.

These are the main considerations covered, although there are a lot more to consider as extras – gamers will want to know more about refresh rate and latency, while onboard software and audio format support can also be important. It’s a good idea to consider what type of content you want to send to your TV while choosing one, and make sure that the features you need (from ATSC 3.0 at HDMI 2.1) will be supported.