Beware of these 4 myths before getting your new TV

With the festival season having just started, we presume a lot of you will succumb to the temptation of buying a brand new TV. Well, looking at the number of ad-space allotted to sales and offers on these TVs, you may be forgiven. But before you venture out to check out the TV of your dreams, there are some things you should be aware of. Please note that not everything stated in the TV’s manual or specifications list is to be taken as gospel truth. A lot of it is pure marketing gimmickry. Let us look at four of the most common misconceptions when it comes to buying TVs.

LED TV is better than LCD TV
This myth has become popular thanks to the marketing departments of major TV brands who prefer to drop a very crucial term when describing their types of TV. Let us get this basic fact out of the way - there is no such thing as a purely LED TV. Light emitting diodes or LEDs are the tiny cylindrical bulb-like structures which are illuminated after photons are released, as a result of electrons combining with holes, by the process of electroluminescence. Think of the digital advertising boards you see at stadiums during football and cricket matches. It may seem like a single flat structure on the TV but when seen up close, these advertising banners are made up of tiny LEDs. So when companies say LED TV, kindly add a ‘backlit LCD’ in between LED and TV.  LCD TVs are actually cold cathode flourescent lamp (CCFL) backlit LCD TVs and LED TVs are actually LED backlit LCD TVs. CCFL are like thinner versions of tube-lights which are placed behind the LCD panel which provides the backlight. As a result of this, LCD TVs appear thicker and tend to be more power consuming as they are using CCFL backlight. With LED backlit LCD TVs, LEDs are used around the edges as the backlight. As a result of using LEDs which occupy much lesser space than CCFL tubes, the TVs can be made much thinner and consume less power. While LED backlit LCD TVs certainly have their advantages, it would be wrong to just assume that all LED backlit LCD TVs are better than CCFL backlit LCD ones because we generally watch TV in ambient lighting conditions.

All LED backlit LCDs

To be taken with a handful of salt: Contrast Ratio figures on TV manuals
Contrast ratio is one number which marketers go to town with. Everyone quotes in excess of 1,000,000:1 and a lot of people fall for the maxim, “higher contrast ratio = better TV”. Contrast ratio corresponds to the ratio of the brightest whites to the darkest black levels. Higher contrast ratios are certainly desirable, but the contrast ratios quoted in the specs of most TV manuals are dynamic contrast ratio. Moreover these are evaluated under certain specific TV settings and lighting conditions which are difficult to replicate in a regular home as you will not be told the exact settings at which the said value was arrived at in the first place. There is not single industry standard to arrive at these contrast ratio numbers so you cannot really compare the marketed contrast ratios of two TVs even if you want to, as both numbers have been arrived under completely different conditions. So while going through a TV manual or listing, treat the line talking about Contrast Ratio as wasted ink.

You should always go for 120Hz, 240Hz or 400Hz refresh rates
The refresh rate of the TV is another factor that marketers tend to highlight and try to push for the ‘higher is better’ maxim. In the early years, LCD TVs suffered from blurring, during fast action scenes, in which the foreground involves movement against a steady background. So the idea behind higher refresh rates is to give a smooth output such that there is little or no motion blurring. Going from 60Hz to 120Hz gives shows you some improvement on that front, but the difference can hardly be noticed by the human eye when going from 120Hz to 240Hz or 400Hz and so on. TV companies use fancy terms such as MotionFlow, ClearMotion or the likes. They all mean the same thing - TVs offering higher refresh rates.

Numbers such as these are thrown about by TV companies. Do you really want to pay a premium for them?

Mind you, there is no content being added to the original source. In fact, you cannot add extra content to your original source and most source footage will not be greater than 60Hz ie. 60 frames per second. So higher refresh rate TVs tend to inject frames between two source frames by interpolating the data from the preceding and succeeding frame. So technically, there are no new frames being created but just finer repetitions of the adjacent frames. Persistence of vision will ensure that the motion blur is reduced.

Now while this is great while watching sports where sometimes the motion may be too fast, while watching films it appears very artificial. It seems like the scene is moving too fast and that seems unnatural. In fact even the Blu-ray discs which have the highest detailed format - 1080p60 (Hz) - give you the option to scale the refresh rate down from 60 frames per second to 24 frames per second to give you the feeling that you are watching the movie in a theatre, where they play at 24 fps. So while higher refresh rates do help in certain cases, it is wrong to assume that it will improve the image quality and overall performance of your TV vis-a-vis a 60Hz TV.
 
Bigger TV size is always better
This is a common misconception and the size of your TV should ideally be dictated by the distance at which you will be viewing your TV. There is no point getting a 50-inch TV, if you will be viewing it from a distance of 3 feet. At such a close distance your eye will be able to resolve individual pixel and that can be distracting. Also not all TV channels are upscaled equally well. So if your source is an SD signal then upscaling it on a larger sized screen and watching it from a closer distance will give a patchy output. The below chart gives you the ideal ratio of TV size to viewing distance based on our tests.

No point in getting a large TV for a small room

So the next time you are in the store looking at your next TV, just remember to see through the marketing buzzwords before making your decision.