Connecting old equipment to a new television, or a new device to an old one, comes down to a small number of questions. Get them right and a five dollar adapter solves the problem. Get one wrong and no amount…
Retail groups every rod, whip and wire under one heading called antennas, which invites a reasonable assumption: that one will work in place of another. It will not. Frequency, polarization, impedance and whether the antenna must transmit all differ, and…
The number on your internet bill is a ceiling, not a description of what any single stream receives. Plenty of households on fast plans get soft looking 4K, and plenty on modest plans never see a problem. What separates them…
ATSC 3.0, marketed to consumers as NextGen TV, is a genuine improvement on the broadcast standard the United States has used since the digital transition. It is also surrounded by more marketing than any other part of over the air…
Almost every complaint about television sound comes down to one sentence: you cannot move much air with a small driver in a shallow box. Everything else, the muddy dialogue, the absent bass, the way an action scene turns into a…
A wall mounted television is a heavy, expensive object suspended over the place people sit. Getting it wrong is not an inconvenience, it is a serious injury risk, and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission has documented deaths and injuries…
Console gaming pushed televisions to change more in five years than the previous fifteen. A set that is excellent for films can still feel sluggish and untidy with a controller in your hand, and the specifications that decide this are…
The most common television buying mistake is choosing a set for a room it will never be in. A panel selected for its performance in a dim showroom or a reviewer’s blacked out test room can be the wrong panel…
Every television sold today runs an operating system, and you will touch it every single day you own the set. Panel quality decides how good a film looks. The platform decides whether finding that film takes four seconds or forty,…
HDMI is the least glamorous part of buying a television and the part most likely to leave you stuck. A set can have the panel you want and still refuse to run your console at its full frame rate, or…
Of all the numbers printed on a television box, the motion figure is the one most likely to be inflated. A set advertised at 240 may have a 60Hz panel. A set advertised at 120 may have a 60Hz panel…
Most reception problems are solved by moving the antenna, not by replacing it. Height, direction and polarization change results by amounts that dwarf the difference between two competing models, and all three are free to adjust once the hardware is…
Adding an amplifier to a television antenna sometimes fixes reception and sometimes destroys it. Which one happens is not luck. It depends on where the amplifier sits, how strong your local stations are, and two published specifications most listings never…
The number printed largest on an antenna package is its advertised range in miles. It is also the least reliable figure in the entire product category. Understanding why it misleads, and what to check instead, is worth more than any…
High dynamic range is the single biggest picture quality change since the move from standard definition, and it is also the most badly explained. A television listing that says “HDR” has told you almost nothing. What matters is which formats…
Screen size is the one television decision that cannot be fixed later with a settings menu. It is also the one most often made by guessing. The useful way to approach it is not “how big will fit on the…
Television marketing has produced a vocabulary that hides more than it explains. LED, QLED, OLED and mini LED sound like four competing panel technologies. They are not. Two of those terms describe the panel itself, one describes a color layer…
Free over the air television is the least understood part of cutting cable. It is genuinely free after the hardware, the picture on main network channels is often better than the same channel delivered any other way, and it covers…
Streaming boxes are sold on headline numbers: 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, 8K. Those numbers rarely separate one box from another, because almost everything claims them. The specifications that actually decide how a box behaves two years from now are memory,…
A smart TV already runs apps. A streaming player runs the same apps on a second box. The useful question is not which one is better in the abstract, it is which one stops being supported first, and what you…