2024 TV Buying Guide (2024) - What You Need to Know!

these are two of the best TVs you can buy right now we've got the Samsung s95c and over there the LG G3 the problem is they're about three and a half thousand pounds each for these 65-inch models which is kind of ridiculous so if you spin over here this is a TCL 55 inch for about 400 quid and it kind of makes you think why would you need to spend five or six times more on a TV like that well I'm gonna tell you in this video we're going to run through everything you need to know about buying a TV from the picture quality gaming Port sound and also just how much you actually need to spend so hopefully by the end of it you have a better idea and I'll leave some links to my favorite recommended models in the description below and if you do find this video helpful a cheeky like And subscribe would be lovely tip number one don't buy a TV right now although I guess it depends when you're watching this but the cycle is pretty much the same every year in January at CES all the big manufacturers announced the new lineup of TVs then a few months later around May or June they launched them but obviously at the full retail price ice but then three or four months after that maybe around November or leading up to Christmas we see big discounts so the best time to buy is around Black Friday Cyber Monday or in the lead up to Christmas or really if you can and you don't mind going for last year's model pick up one of those because you'll save a lot of money versus buying a new TV that's just come out in fact this LG G3 is already a couple hundred quid off when it launched like last month as I'm recording this so if you can wait I would definitely recommend it and to be honest the year or new upgrades often aren't that significant a little bit brighter a little bit faster maybe although I would say for this year with the G3 and the new meta MLA technology which we'll talk about more later we have seen a significant Improvement in brightness but for more regular TVs that aren't crazy expensive there often isn't that much difference year one year tip number two look past your regular big Brands your Sony's your Samsungs your LG's because while they do offer fantastic TVs recently over the last three or four years the likes of TCL and Hisense have really disrupted the more affordable budget market and you can get some terrific TVs like this for some pretty crazy cheap prices as I say 400 pounds for a 55 inch 4K HDR TV with Dolby Vision uh we've got an e-arc Port nice and thin bezels and also Fire TV built in which I really like while it is fun to look at the latest oleds and cutie oleds for the vast majority of us this is the TV that we might actually be able to buy as fantastic as these higher end Flagship TVs are and you know in this room side by side you can definitely see the difference particularly in the image quality I think it's gonna be a tough sell to convince you to spend five times more on that and as my dad always says it doesn't make the TV shows you watch any better also newer budget models have plenty of goodies for gaming like 120 hertz vrr and auto low latency although we'll come back to these later on tip number three and we have to talk about size really the sensible thing to think about is how big is your room will it fit in your room is it going to look ridiculous and also of course budget the bigger you go the more expensive it is in my book though the bigger the better if you can get away with it for example they jump from 55 which we have here to 65 over there doesn't sound like a lot but in real terms of screen area it's 40 bigger on this guy and I think for me right now The Sweet Spot is 65. to be fair though in my living room I do have a 77 inch LG TV which is again about 40 bigger than a 65 inch although what I would say to the five of you who are maybe considering buying an 8K TV is don't go for anything under 75 inches you need at least that size or bigger to really appreciate that 8K resolution also if you do want a bigger screen maybe consider last year's models for example this 65-inch LG OLED C2 from last year is nearly 500 quid cheaper than this year's 55-inch C3 and they offer very similar picture quality tip number four change the settings even if you just spend a couple of minutes flicking through the different picture modes it can make a big difference for example most TVs will come in the standard mode but then you'll have filmmaker or expert bright or something similar and generally well you can see here this is vivid and maybe if you're watching a Pixar movie or football or something and you want the most crazy contrasty and vibrant picture but most the time I stick to like an expert or natural mode or filmmaking mode this is generally the most accurate for colors a little bit darker but if you're watching movies this is what you want a couple of simple things make sure it's in home mode and not like a store or retail mode because that will give you really blown out colors also turn off any kind of eco mode generally I mean that might save you a little bit of money but it will also drop the brightness you might prefer that but generally I always like it as bright as possible also make sure you've checked for updates because they can add new streaming apps or improve the processing a little bit through updates game mode is also essential for consoles and helping to reduce response times for gaming although most new TVs will automatically switch to Game Mode because they have a llm or Auto low latency mode but we also have to talk about motion smoothing because while this can work well for sport making 24 or 30fps video look like a higher frame rate and making it easier to keep track of the fast movement most the time for movies and TV turn off motion smoothing it can create an overly smooth cheat looking soap opera effect luckily there are often less intensive smoothing options like LG's cinematic motion which selectively Smooths fast motion while backing it off when things become more static but as always with the TV you buy and the settings you use it's entirely up to you get a sound bar it'll make a world of difference to the audio from your TV I have the Sonos Arc down here normally I'd have it on top of here but I had to move things around for filming and I love this thing it's about 700 pounds in a year or so old now but I think it does a great job although there are great Alternatives from pretty much every big TV brand as well yes it's more expensive and of course you can buy one later but if you spend all that money on a great TV then you'll probably want great sound quality to match pricier TVs already have pretty decent sound quality from their built-in speakers with some even getting surround sound well Irish but even these will be outclassed by a mid-range sound bar and versus a budget TV any Soundbar will be a big Improvement obviously you could go with separate speakers and a receiver but for me I always find a sound bar a nice and easy all-in-one option and there's tons of great models out there for pretty much every budget I mean you don't need a Dolby Atmos one with its fancy angled extra speakers that can bounce the sound around your room but it does give you that extra level of room filling sound plus a lot of newer content does support Atmos most of the time you'll want to connect your Soundbar or speaker system to your TV via an arc or a more recent e-arc enabled HDMI port and this allows you to use your TV remote to control it anything that comes down on remotes is fine by me but TVs aren't just about specs and image quality if you're going to have a big black rectangle dominating your living room then you want it to look pretty good as well the good news is even more recent TVs like this that are a bit more affordable have nice and thin bezels and look pretty smart I think but then the more you pay generally the fancier design both from the front and the back pretty much every TV you will mount on what we call feet or a stand although this particular TV over here the G3 the gallery design from LG is meant to be wall mounted they actually put the bracket in the box and actually one of the benefits of OLED TVs is generally they're a lot thinner and particularly with new models where you have a uniformity of the thickness it can be pretty much flush to the wall this actually has ended up looking more like a 55 inch next to that which is obviously a foot or so off the wall so I would actually recommend wall mounting when you can obviously you might want to hide the cables which can be a little bit tricky but the good news is pretty much every TV is Visa Mount compatible or they'll have their own bespoke option like the LG just make sure the TV you're buying with its feet will actually fit on your TV stand or the table you're putting it on as you can see with this one the feet go almost to the edge of the TV so you need quite a bit of space contrast that to Samsung's design and on their higher end TVs we have these pedestal stands which are in the middle obviously there's no issue with the edge of the TV being too wide for your TV stand I must admit I don't love these stands I feel like the installation is a little bit fussy takes me like 10-15 minutes compared to two minutes but what I do like about some of Samsung's TVs particularly higher end models is the use of the one connect box so you simply have one cable around the back that connects the TV to a separate i o unit which you can then either mount on the back of the TV or put anywhere else you like and then you plug all your HDMI and extra ports in there so there's less cables less fuss around the TV and if you are wall mounting it it means you just have a single cable running down and that is it compared to any other TV you can have hdmis you can have your power it's going to look a bit ugly now what we've done over here which has taken a bit of effort is actually drill into the wall and Route the cables down I think if you are going to warm out your TV and spend a lot of money on it and you want it to look nice I would definitely encourage you to do that because it looks a lot smarter let's talk about gaming and to be honest with you any recent TV even cheap ones like this are plenty good enough they're 4K you got basic HDR 60 hertz for the vast majority of games that is all you need obviously there are differences in picture quality and the reflectivity of the TV you can see my white T-shirt clear as day through this but I think if you are looking for a higher end gaming TV uh you want 120 hertz and also an HDMI 2. 1 Port cheap TVs are still HDMI 2 more mid-range and higher ends have at least one 2.

1 Port which has a higher bandwidth which means you can game on your PS5 series X or even your PC at full 4K 120. very few games actually support that it's more about future proofing and actually the Samsung s75c over there does support 144 Hertz which is quite rare but only for PC games we also have extras like vrr or variable refresh rates which can help reduce screen tearing in games and also a llm or Auto low latency mode and this puts your TV into its optimal game mode when it detects a console input so turning off all that background stuff and giving you the fastest response time which for high end and particularly for Twitchy competitive Gamers is really important but arguably more important than all of that is how good the picture quality is which leads us nicely into tip number eight image quality the picture quality which for a TV really is the most important thing right and I think beyond the 4K resolution which pretty much every TV is these days obviously you've got a handful of 8K models and some very cheap smaller TTP models but the 4K resolution is standard and with that comes some level of HDR so really what makes all the difference is what kind of backlight it uses the contrast the brightness and of course viewing angles for your mates sitting in the cheap seats at the side not everyone has that sweet spot it's pretty important that your TV looks good from as wider angle as possible so your basic entry level LED LCD TV may hit around 500 nits of peak brightness while you're more premium Q LEDs and mini LED TVs can hit up to 2 000 nits while OLED TVs boast the best black levels and brightness is particularly important when it comes to HDR content now the good news is that all new 4k TVs will support some form of HDR like regular hdr10 which brings out extra details and shadows and brighter areas and makes the whole experience more immersive more vibrant then we have more advanced HDR like Dobby Vision or HDR 10 plus which will give you even more detail as each scene's HDR has been optimized the thing is even cheap TVs these days have Dolby Vision HDR uh but because the brightness just isn't that high as I say around four or 500 nits it just isn't that impressive compared to a higher end or Flagship TV like this that can push fifteen hundred two thousand nits those bright whites the color what they call color volume in their marketing Spiel sometimes it's just a lot more impressive and I think that brightness that knit level the peak brightness is a really important metric to look at when you are reading reviews for TVs essentially the brighter the better particularly if you're in a bright room and you've got windows and maybe you can't control the lighting you just simply want a brighter TV so it can offset the bright ambient lighting if you're in a nice dark room then perhaps an older OLED that doesn't get as bright but has those nice Inky dark blacks will be fine for your movies also bear in mind there's a lot of magic going on behind the scenes the processing the obscaling particularly from low resolution content up to 4K how effective that is is very much down to the process of the chip inside TVs they're all pretty good these days but generally the more advanced higher in the TV the better processing the better motion smoothing and the better upscaling you'll see very hard to quantify especially on our YouTube video like this with compression but it is one of the advantages of going through a higher end tv and all this brings us to the big question of what is the best TV technology at the budget end we still have led LCDs these have been pretty common for the last five years or so and they're absolutely fine nothing wrong with them the downsides generally are poorer viewing angles uh they don't tend to have a great anti-reflective coating not as bright colors perhaps aren't as accurate but a lot of those things are hard to see unless you have it side by side with a higher end tv nothing wrong with it at all and the best bit is they're a lot more affordable blacks can also look a bit more grayish thanks to the universal backlighting which can only dim the whole screen rather than individual areas now this is also important while this is an LED LCD TV it's actually a qled TV as well basically that means that there is a quantum dot layer in the back of this that can help boost the brightness and give you more punchier accurate colors so it's basically like a slightly higher end LED LCD TV and that is something that we sing a lot more even on more budget TVs in the sort of five six seven hundred pound region and it's definitely an Advan but it doesn't bring it up to a high-end qled or an OLED level of Technology as you can see it's still not the best picture in the world but it's better thanks to qled then we have mini LED panels which are a great upper mid-range option and these get much brighter and have better contrast than your typical LED LCD thanks to having a backlight with lots more and much smaller LEDs so you get more precise lighting these are also grouped into zones which can be dimmed individually meaning less backlight bleed into dark areas and improving your contrast and your HDR massively so the rule of thumb for any TV really except for oleds is the more dimming zones the better at the high end though things get a little bit more complicated we have Samsung's Neo qleds and LG's Q Neds both of which combine qled quantum. tech with mini LED backlighting kind of for The Best of Both Worlds and these are ideal for bright rooms although they can be quite expensive for what you get then there's OLED which I reckon is the best right now OLED pixels can turn themselves on and off individually they're self-emitting which gives us near perfect black levels and contrast they're color accurate we have great viewing angles and recent oleds are also brighter than ever downsides while they can suffer from image retention AKA burning if you leave it for hours a day on the same screen the same static elements but recent TVs come with OLED care settings like pixel shift and pixel refresh so unless you really abuse it and keep it on the same bright screen all day long you're not really going to have a problem also older oleds can't get anywhere near as bright as a mini LED or a Neo qled however some newer high-end oleds use the same quantum dot layer Tech hence the QD oleds that you may see from Samsung or in LG's case with this new G3 we have a micro lens array or MLA which massively boosts the brightness Without Really increasing the risk of burning so that's all well and good but really it's all going to come down to what you can afford and I would suggest looking at last year's models or even the year before that of a higher end OLED perhaps than a new cheaper LED LCD yeah let's talk about these guys smart sticks because every TV now is of course a smart TV which means it's connected to the internet and you have a variety of streaming apps your Netflix is your iplayers here in the UK YouTube Amazon Prime video all that good stuff now you may not actually like the UI of the TV you buy particularly in which case you can plug in maybe one of these which is a Chromecast with Google TV or an Amazon fire stick and actually this TCL comes with Fire TV OS as its UI which is pretty cool you've also got Apple TVs you've got Roku sticks lots of options and they're all dirt cheap like 30 40 50 pounds obviously the Apple TV's a bit more but that is a great way of not only bringing your old TV into the 21st century if it doesn't have a great uh smart home hub like this or if you just simply don't like the look of it or it doesn't have the app you want get yourself one of these okay let's wrap this up and I think my number one takeaway would be read reviews because one 4K HDR qled TV is not going to be the same as another 4K HDR killer TV you've got to look at the brightness the backlight the contrast also what UI does it have the right streaming apps the ports HDMI 2.