What They Won’t Tell You About TVs At The Store

It’s Sunday and you’ve just settled with the morning newspaper and your cup of tea. A full page advertisement for TVs and other consumer electronics catches your eye. The prices are attractive, and you’ve been eyeing that fancy large TV on your friend’s living room wall for quite a while. You turn pages, more ads for TVs while prices seem to be getting better and better. The new models have a lot of features. You realise that your own old faithful TV is now past its prime. But you can’t seem to make sense of the terminology.

After breakfast, you visit the local store where the salesperson leaves you further befuddled, merely parroting the terms Full HD, UHD, 1080p and so on. Since the prices are vastly different, you are unable to make up your mind and since the salesman can’t and won’t explain the meaning of these terms, you leave in confusion.

Below are two typical ads for TVs that routinely appear in every Sunday newspaper, in this case picked out of the Mumbai Mirror. I have attempted to explain the terminology in simple terms, so that next time you walk into a Croma or a Vijay Sales showroom, to see TVs, you can make an informed choice.

In The Beginning

Going back a bit, towards the end of the 2000s or the noughties, digital TV became popular and TV format changed from SDTV (Standard Definition TV) which used 576 interlaced lines of resolution, to the substantially better HDTV (High Definition TV). HDTV came with 1080 horizontal lines scanned progressively from top to bottom every 1/60^th second. This was a step forward from interlaced scanning where every alternate line was scanned or displayed every 1/30^th of a second and the entire picture had to be scanned twice, in order to see the full picture.

Full HD, HDTV and 1080p

HDTV brought vastly improved picture quality. Manufacturers also started writing 1080p (1080 lines progressively scanned), which are really one and the same thing. Interlaced scanning is no longer used for TVs, so if you see 1080i, you should know that it is out of date. Further, HDTV and Full HD are also the same thing.

Each of the 1080 horizontal lines was divided into 1980 pieces, each piece being known as a pixel. Thus, the picture was divided into 1080x1980 or around 2 million pixels. In addition, HDTV brought in a wider aspect ratio of 16:9, meaning that viewers could enjoy a wider screen.

4K, UHD and Super UHD

Just when you thought you’d got your mind around it, along came newer jargon: 4K and UHD or Ultra High Definition. This is a step up from HDTV.

What UHD gives you is better clarity and a sharper picture on account of a much larger number of pixels having been crammed into the same space, four times more to be precise, as compared to HDTV. How it does this is, by increasing the number of horizontal lines from 1080 to 2160 and the vertical lines from 1920 to 3840. This gives you 3840x2160 = 8.3 million pixels working to make a sharp picture for you.

This is most noticeable on a large screen, where it makes sense to have UHD, in order to get a sharper picture, else the picture may get ‘pixellated’, that is you would see pixels, were the original resolution retained.

Besides the fact that you can see a better picture, you can in fact see the TV from a closer range. Hence, even in a relatively small room, you can have a large TV.

Super UHD is no different from UHD and the term only came in because some manufacturers started advertising their UHD products as “Super”.

HDR (High Dynamic Range)

While the 4K UHD TV gives you more pixels, an HDR TV can do a lot more with those pixels.

Contrast is measured as the difference between the brightest whites and the darkest blacks that the TV can display, also known as its Dynamic Range. It is measured in candelas/m², also known as ‘nits’. At the deep dark end is 0 nits, which is completely black, currently possible on OLED (more about that later) TVs.

On the brighter side, it’s a different story. Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) TVs generally produce 300 to 500 nits. This is where the HDR TV scores big. Top end HDR TVs, can display northwards of 2000 nits of peak brightness.

As a matter of fact, at the Consumer Electronics Show 2018, Sony showed off a prototype capable of a whopping 10000 nits of peak brightness.

Dolby Vision®

While there are multiple HDR formats, there are currently two major players: Dolby Vision from Dolby Labs and the HDR 10 open standards. Dolby was the first to introduce Dolby Vision and for some time, HDR meant Dolby Vision only.

Any manufacturer wishing to produce HDR TV had to approach Dolby and pay them a royalty and comply with their terms and conditions. Since this was restrictive, various manufacturers began working on alternatives.

By 2016, the UHD Alliance, an industry group comprising LG, Sony, Panasonic, Dolby and others introduced an HD Premium certification for UHD Blu Ray players. This set the baseline industry standards for HDR (currently minimum 1000 nits).

OLED (Organic LED) Displays

The earlier LCD screens required a set of LEDs behind the liquid crystals on the display, in order to light up the screen as the LCD by itself did not emit light. Flat Light Emitting Technology was made possible by placing a series of organic thin films between two conductors. OLEDs are emissive displays, hence they don’t require back lighting. The result is that OLED displays are substantially thinner than LCD displays.

OLEDs produce the best image quality and can also be transparent, flexible, foldable and even rollable. OLEDs give you a number of things that LCDs cannot viz. greater contrast, higher brightness, fuller viewing angle, a wider colour range and lower power consumption.

And no, OLEDs have nothing to do with organic food. They are organic because they are made from carbon and hydrogen. They contain no bad metals. Examples of mobile phones using OLEDs are Galaxy S8, S8+, iphone X and Note 8.

QLED (Quantum Dot LED)

Quantum Dots are tiny particles between 2 and 10 Nanometres in dia. They have the ability to give off different colours according to their size. The advantage is that they are capable of emitting brighter, more vibrant and more diverse colours – the kind of colours that can really make HDR shine.

Unlike OLED TVs, which require a separate backlight for illumination, QLED TV controls the light emitted by various pixels, so that better contrast ratios are possible.

ThinQ® - LG’s Artificial Intelligence technology

ThinQ is a brand from LG that groups together premium appliances and consumer electronics under one banner. Products that carry the ThinQ brand will be intelligent and able to communicate with one another and employ LG’s own deep learning tech, in order to understand your habits and needs.

Products with ThinQ will employ other companies’ Assistant Technology eg. LG is releasing an updated version of its Instaview refrigerator with Amazon Alexa Support, which has the ability to talk to connected ovens and even dishwashers.

That’s it for TVs, more about mobile phones later.