A new television isn’t a frequent purchase for most people. Unless you’re an AV fanatic (and there’s nothing wrong with that!), you’re probably not upgrading your TV as often as your smartphone, or your laptop.
It’s not uncommon for people to hold on to a TV for a decade, and if it still works for you, there’s nothing compelling you to spend more money. However, if any of these things are true about your current main TV, you might want to start looking at a new modern TV set.
You’re Still on 1080p
It may have taken a while, but 4K TVs are now mainstream, and you’d be hard-pressed to even find a new 1080p TV to buy even if you wanted one. While 1080p is still fine as a resolution and most content out there is still 1080p or less, there’s no shortage of 4K content. Whether it’s streaming content or 4K UHD Blu-ray, you’ll have no trouble finding something to take advantage of those extra pixels.
If you’re a current-generation console gamer, the jump to 4K is honestly quite massive on large format TVs, so I’d go as far as saying it’s essential to get the most out of those consoles.
Perhaps most importantly, if you’re still rocking a 1080p LCD TV (not plasma or OLED), then you’re likely also dealing with display technology that has plenty of other quality problems not related to resolution.
Your HDR Sucks
HDR is the biggest upgrade to TV picture quality by far. Most people think it’s the jump from 1080p to 4K, but even if you don’t care about the extra resolution at all, the benefits of HDR can’t be denied. HDR expands the color and contrast limits of traditional TV standards to offer incredibly vibrant.
If your TV has no HDR at all, well let me tell you it’s worth the upgrade just for that. There’s plenty of HDR content to watch, and many good TV models can also map SDR content to HDR rather effectively, so you should see an improvement across the board.
However, if you have a TV with bad HDR, then you’re also in a position to consider something new. What’s “bad” HDR? Well, the problem is that many TVs that have an HDR label slapped on them can’t actually produce a proper HDR image. A good rule of thumb is that if your TV can’t produce 600 nits of peak brightness, it’s not really showing you HDR. 1000 nits would be ideal, and many new TVs can push past that.
My point about needing at least 600 nits of peak brightness for effective HDR mainly applies to LCD TVs. OLEDs can achieve excellent HDR results with lower peak brightness because they can achieve perfect black levels and effectively infinite contrast. So they produce HDR by lowering the floor rather than raising the roof, so to speak.
The other issue is black levels. If you don’t, at the very least, have a TV with Full-Array Local Dimming (FALD), then you’re not getting proper HDR. This only applies to LCD TVs, of course. If you have an OLED, then every individual pixel is its own dimming zone. A sweet and affordable upgrade you can make, even from FALD, is a mini-LED TV, which uses lots of tiny LEDs to create hundreds or (preferably) thousands of dimming zones. Even entry-level mini-LED TVs can offer proper HDR thanks to this backlight technology.
Be sure to read up on the various HDR standards before locking in a purchase!
- Display Size
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65, 75, 85, or 98-inches
- Operating System
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Google TV
Bad Contrast and Brightness
This relates to the point I just raised, but in the last ten years or so there have been massive improvements to contrast and brightness when it comes to TV technology. LCD TVs with edge-lit LED backlighting or older (i.e. no dimming zones at all) just can’t produce good contrast, and so dark images will always look grey and washed out.
When it comes to brightness, well, here at last we can throw in some older OLED TVs, since peak brightness has been a weakness of OLEDs for quite some time, and really only the latest models have started to address this.
A modern mini-LED, RGB LED, or OLED will immediately improve your experience by leaps and bounds just by offering a brighter picture with deep blacks.
Not Enough HDMI Ports
I don’t know about you, but one of the reasons I upgraded from my last TV was its lack of HDMI ports. With an Apple TV, Xbox, PlayStation 5, Switch, and a Blu-ray player, I ended up needing an HDMI switch to have enough room for everything. I get that this is probably an extreme case, but another problem is that older TVs don’t offer their best features on every port. So you might have older versions of HDMI on some ports on your current TV.
If I were buying a TV today, I’d want one with at least four HDMI ports that all support HDMI 2.1. Speaking of which…
No HDMI 2.1
If your TV has no HDMI 2.1 at all, then you should start thinking about an upgrade. The pressure isn’t on quite as much, but if you’re a console gamer in particular, you’ll want a TV that offers HDMI 2.1 in order to benefit from all the neat tricks possible with the extra bandwidth. Of course, your new TV also needs the actual features too. These include VRR, ALLM, or a 120Hz or higher refresh rate.
HDMI 2.1 is the standard of the future, so if you’re ready to buy a new TV, make this a priority.
7/10
- 4K Capabilities
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HDR, Up to 8K
- Game support
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PS5, PS4
- Processing Power
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16.7 TFLOPS, AMD Radeon RDNA-based graphics engine
- Storage
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Custom 2TB SSD
Input Lag in Games
A big problem with older TVs when it comes to playing video games, in particular, is input lag. This is the gap in time between pressing a button on your controller and the image on-screen responding. Flat panel TVs have to do a lot of image processing, and this takes time. It can be so bad on some older TVs that games are effectively unplayable.
TVs usually have a “game mode” that removes a lot of the image processing to reduce lag, but on older TVs this can come with a significant quality drop. Modern TVs have game modes that don’t trash the image quality, and much faster image processing hardware. Not to mention that features like VRR and high refresh rates come with built-in lag reduction by virtue of how they work.
Obsolete Viewing Angles
This last one only really matters for TVs where multiple people watch the same TV. If you only watch TV alone sitting dead center in front of it, or it’s only two people sitting side-by-side, it might not matter that much.
However, older TVs can have poor viewing angles that make colors and brightness go dramatically off the further you increase the vertical or horizontal angle. Modern TVs can have viewing angles on both axes as high as 178 degrees, which means that effectively everyone in the room gets a picture that looks correct.
Again, if you’re happy with your TV, don’t feel pressured to buy a new one. In the end, only your subjective enjoyment matters, but be aware that TVs have become a lot better, so if you haven’t been keeping track there’s a good chance you’re missing out on a few transformative improvements to your viewing experience, even with budget-segment TVs.
