Demystify key terms before buying your next TV

Shopping for a TV raises many questions in terms of resolution, screen size, and sound quality leaving the buyers in a state of confusion. The screen and video resolution can spark up confusion easily, which cannot be solved through thorough debate even. From QLED, UHD, 8K resolution, 4K resolution, MEMC, HDR, HDR 10, HDR 10 Plus, WCG, Dolby Vision to Dolby Atmos, one could simply categorize all of them as HD and move on.

Are these just high definition or is there more to add to it?

We have outlined brief descriptions of all these technical terms involved in TVs and created the difference between them.

1. QLED

QLED stands for Quantum Dots technology that offers a unique way for the screen to produce colour different from the one used in LEDs. The dots in question vary between 2 – 10 nanometres in diameter and produce different colours depending on the size. For example, the smallest dots focus on blue whereas, the bigger ones focus on red. The key differentiating point about QLED technology is that it can produce more heavily saturated and precisely defined primary colour giving cinema-quality resolution in the comfort of your home. Also, QLED produces 58.3% more colours than a conventional LED, has a lifespan of 100K hours and saves 30% more energy.

2. UHD

UHD stands for Ultra-high-definition, which is a digital television display format. In UHD the horizontal screen resolution is on the order of 4000 pixels (4K UHD) or 8000 pixels (8K UHD). Both 4K and 8K UHD screens are the most common HDTV formats, which avoid image blurring and consequent loss of detail that usually occur when different screen resolutions fail to evenly divide vertically and horizontally.

3. HD

High definition is also known as 720p HD. It has a display resolution of 1280x720 and brings a clearer image and video quality to smart TVs. As high definition TVs transmit more than six times information, it leads to a huge improvement in quality and sound. These TVs potentially offer a better picture quality than the standard television.  

4. MEMC

MEMC stands for Motion Estimation, Motion Compensation, and is infamously known as the “Soap opera effect” due to the way it makes what you are watching look like a soap opera. On a few TVs, it is known as motion smoothing. MEMC works by artificially adding frames to a video with a low frame rate so that it has a higher frame rate resulting in a smooth effect.

5. HDR

High dynamic range is usually with 4K resolution, but it's not always the case. It has built-in support for more than one HDR formats and makes your HDR TV look it's very best. HDR TVs have a brighter image with a higher level of contrast between dark and light areas on the screen. It also takes advantage of more colours to create a much more realistic image.

6. HDR 10

 HDR comes with 5 different varieties, one of which is HDR 10 and is the original and most common form. High dynamic range 10 has an open standard that has been adopted by various manufacturers, Blu-ray Disc Association, and streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+. HDR 10 makes your TV more compatible with the most broadly available 4K Blu-ray discs, 4K streaming content, and 4K players, ultimately giving you a far better picture than any 4K TV without any HDR.

7. HDR 10 Plus

HDR 10 plus takes the good parts of HDR 10 and enhances them. HDR 10 plus increases the maximum brightness to 4,000 nits, which increases the contrast too. But the major variance is how HDR 10 plus handles information. In this, the metadata that is fed by the source of content is static leaving one set of values recognized for a whole piece of content such as an entire movie. The metadata becomes dynamic, allowing it to alter every frame of video. It ultimately means that each frame is treated to its own set of brightness, colours, and contrast parameters giving a much more realistic-looking image. Areas of the screen that might have been over-saturated under HDR10 display their full details with HDR10+.

8. WCG

 Wide colour gamut is often tied with HDR. Although widely concurrent, these two are not entirely intrinsically interlinked. HDR upsurges the dynamic range of the image with darker darks and brighter brights, whereas WCG enhances the colour reproduction – bluer blues, redder reds, greener greens, etc. In simpler words, HDR improves image clarity quantitatively, whereas WCG does that qualitatively.

9. Dolby Vision

 Dolby Vision lays out much more specific instructions for compatibility with its format. In reality, Dolby’s specifications have commands for how broadcast TV, movie production, and TV displays should decode and encode Dolby Vision HDR material. In the world of TVs, Dolby vision is more theoretically demanding than HDR10. Dolby vision allows dynamic metadata to be added on a frame-by-frame basis to get the picture as intended. It has adapted to the particular abilities on your TV too, resulting in subtler and improved image.

10. Dolby Atmos

 Dolby Atmos for the home brings the ultimate cinema sound experience to your home theatre to create moving audio that flows around you, creates compatible playback, reproduces all the audio objects in the original cinema mix, and has a growing library of content.

11. Refresh Rate

The refresh rate is the number of times per second a TV refreshes an image. It is written in Hertz aka Hz. Movies are almost always filmed 24 frames per second, or 24Hz. Live TV shows at 30 or 60. Most TVs refresh at 60, some higher-end models refresh at 120. The point of a higher refresh rate is to reduce the motion blur inherent in all current TV technologies.

12. IPQ engine

It’s a smart performance control that expands the capabilities beyond an algorithm running on the TV, adding functionality that allows an app to improve the performance even more. IPQ Engine allows the customers to apply an automatic, simple TV colour calibration to deliver colour accuracy.

With a wide variety of TV series, TCL TVs are designed with the latest screen and video resolution providing the viewers with the perfect experience. Its latest QLED series consists of C716 and C815 consisting of all the high resolutions mentioned above to give a perfect viewing experience. For more details of the availability of these resolutions in our smart TVs visit the following link: tclpakistan.com/qled

Also given below is a detailed feature-wise comparison of the QLED range: