The State of TV 2021
Choose The Perfect TV 2021: Here’s what to look for, sports fans
Not all TVs offer equally good picture motion — plus a few more things to consider in that context
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Every year millions of people decide to get a new TV for their home — not just for their living room anymore either — and every year more than a dozen different manufacturers bring out more than a hundred different TV models in total, making the choice between any one of those rather tricky. What’s more, it does not seem to get any easier: new tech jargon gets thrown around in marketing campaigns every year in the hopes of impressing consumers, in practice only confusing them further.
There must be an easier way to choose a good TV set — the perfect one for each and every consumer, even. Indeed there is! This is exactly what 10 concise, to-the-point articles on the subject will help everyone do: learn what they need to know so as to make the best choice for their next television.
Previous articles in this series focused on the two different display technologies available in the market today, the viewing conditions and habits that better fit each one, the viewing distance and screen diagonal that must be taken into account, as well as the choice between 4K and 8K sets. So now that all the important general criteria are covered, it’s time to focus on specific use cases and what to look for in each one’s context: everyone buying a new TV intends to watch a little bit of everything, yes, but many consumers have one or two particular uses in mind that they’d like the specific model they pick to excel at.
These days, for instance, leading up to the UEFA Euro 2021 football championship, a lot of people are looking for televisions that offer a high-quality picture in sports viewing. Modern TVs use certain functions or techniques to achieve that and not all models are equally good at applying those. Let’s break it all down, then!
It’s all about motion handling — but, also, about detail
What sets apart sports content from typical TV shows, movies and video games content is motion: televisions displaying football, basketball, tennis etc. matches need to follow the action as smoothly as possible and as quickly as possible (and do it at the same time). This is not as easy as it sounds: almost every consumer has at some point or another sat in front of a television to watch a match, only to notice the juddery motion of players, the ball getting too blurry to easily follow or general stutter of the whole picture when e.g. a camera is trying to follow a team counterattacking across a playfield.
Modern televisions have gotten better at resolving these issues over the years but some still do a much better job than others. The type of screen used, the speed at which it displays new content (refresh rate), the real-time processing applied to every frame of the movement depicted and several other factors all play their part. So a new TV will have to be able to successfully suppress motion blur, judder and stutter (not the same thing) at the very least in order to offer a quality viewing experience with sports. Advanced TVs can do much more nowadays, creating additional frames on the fly, inserting black frames between actual frames etc. in order to make sports viewing truly enjoyable.
Properly handled motion is one part of the equation, the other is detail: it used to be that when TVs were trying to “smooth out” motion they were sacrificing visual information (motion resolution) in order to achieve it. Quality televisions with powerful processing subsystems can balance that nowadays, but a lot depends on the software algorithms driving those subsystems — so some TVs do a much better job in retaining picture clarity while improving motion than others.
There’s also the small matter of upscaling, as a lot of sports content is still captured and broadcasted in 1080p resolution: some TVs, again, will do a better job at taking this material to full 4K resolution than others. Last but not least: OLED TVs generally offer smoother motion than LED/LCD TVs (because of their much faster screens), while LED/LCD TVs get brighter which is helpful in sports viewing because of the more vivid palette expressing stadiums, playfields, uniforms etc. compared to e.g. a cinematic palette. Quite a few factors to take into account, no?
And three more things to consider when buying a sports TV
Apart from smooth motion and preservation of as much detail as possible when things move really fast, there are additional criteria one should keep in mind when shopping around for a very good sports TV. For instance, company: many people like to watch matches with friends and, for that to work, the television in question would have to offer wide enough viewing angles — otherwise people sitting off-center or even far to the sides will be looking at a dimmer picture with washed-out or inaccurate colors. For loners, of course, that’s not an issue, but still — something to consider!
As with everything else watched on a TV, sports are also affected by screen reflections — but, unlike movies, watching matches in the dark is not something many people do either alone or with company. So it makes sense to pick a TV that at least tries to minimize reflections from light sources around the room it’s placed. It will have to be either that or some handly light control for those occasions when a football match is heading for a late-night penalty shoot-out!
Last but not least: consumers who plan to watch a lot of sports on their brand new TV should make sure that all or most of the sports channels and subscription services they’ll need to have access to in the future exist today as apps for the operating system of the set they’ve selected. Everybody is into cord cutting these days and even if many consumers still use cable boxes or service provider decoders to watch their favorite sports, some future-proofing is never a bad idea, is it?
