Saturday, August 13, 2016

Things to Look for in a New TV, Beyond the Usual Ones

At some point I'll have to upgrade my TV. My current one is "non-smart", and works fine but is getting old. Since you can't practically get a dump TV any more, I'll have to accept that will come with the package.

Other than the usual specs like screen size, resolution, refresh rate, colour reproduction, there are a few things I want to look at when buying any new TV:

  • Turn on time from cold start. The time it takes some TVs to turn on these days is really annoying.
  • Channel change time. Likewise, changing channels for some reason can take a ridiculous length of time.
  • Input lag. Good to know in case the TV is ever used for gaming.
  • What firmware is the "smart" bit based on? Is it an open source or community supported firmware, so that when the manufacturer gets bored of supporting that model you can still get updates? If I don't want to agree to the T&Cs of an update, will it stop playing any specific media formats? Can I be held hostage to the manufacturer in order to play content?
  • 4K refresh rate. Does the 4K refresh rate match the advertised rate, or it that a sneaky "only at lower resolutions" thing?
  • HDCP. Given I run my own HTPC, this is a really important one. Will the TV's HDCP implementation work via the HDMI connection on a laptop? Will it work with a desktop GPU connection? I'll take a laptop when looking at TVs to test this.

No comments:

Post a Comment