What you need to know before you shop

4K TVs are the standard these days. If you’re not sure what 4K means, it describes the picture resolution. TVs with 4K have four times as many pixels as standard 1080p resolution sets. But keep in mind most live broadcasts still aren’t shot in 4K, so you’ll mainly see the benefit in apps like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, or if you subscribe to YouTube TV with the 4K premium bundle.

When picking between resolutions, you might see specifications like Ultra HD, UHD, or 4K. They all mean the same thing.

8K resolution has double the resolution of 4K. It amounts to four times the pixel count of 4K and 16 times more pixels than 1080p.

While that might sound enticing, you probably won’t enjoy any of the benefits of 8K since there isn’t any content shot in 8K yet. Not to mention 8K TVs are pricey. Be prepared to spend over $2,000.

HDR, otherwise known as high-dynamic range, allows your TV shows and movies to look as intended by the studio that produced them if they’re shot in HDR. You’ll get more light in darker scenes, meaning it’s easier to see the content. Most 4K TVs have HDR compatibility too.

There’s a wide range in the quality of HDR TVs. Expensive ones can look great, while cheap ones may not. If it’s done right, HDR can actually be a more important feature than 4K.

Good HDR comes down to brightness and contrast. When the light parts of the TV image are brighter it improves the color and makes the picture look like it has more depth and the movies and TV shows can look more lifelike. Let’s say you’re looking at a movie with a shot of the ocean, you’ll be able to see the nuances and textures of the wave, the deepest blues and the white caps, making you feel the realism of the scene.

But HDR performance can vary drastically from TV to TV. Make sure the TV you buying has a brightness of at least 400 nits — a measure the intensity of brightness — since sometimes TVs with levels lower than 400 get marketed as HDR TVs, too. 600 nits or brighter is better, with the best-performing HDR TVs hitting 1,000 nits or more.

You’ll see a lot of different types of HDR marketing. HDR10 is most widely used because it’s an open and free technology standard. Pretty much all TV sets marketing HDR support will work with HDR10 content.

There’s also HDR10+ which is supported by most of the major streamers, except for Netflix. Keep in mind though, TVs can receive updates so if a manufacturer decides to hop on board with HDR10+, the company can add that capability to your TV without you needing to do anything but update the software.

A TV’s refresh rate is the number of times per second it can reset and display an image. Most TVs today offer either 60 Hz, meaning the display refreshes 60 times per second, or 120 Hz, refreshing 120 times per second.

The latter is more expensive but can be better if you watch lots of fast-moving content, like sports of action movies. When refresh rates are low, it creates motion blur, which makes a moving picture look fuzzy.

This number is especially important for gamers. The latest consoles, like PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X offer 120 Hz refresh rates, but you’ll need a true 120 Hz TV in order to see graphics as clearly as possible.

If you’re hooking up a gaming system that uses a higher refresh rate, “make sure the TV has an HDMI 2.1 input,” Gagnon says. That’s the port that will support these fast refresh rates, he explains.

Almost every TV today uses either a liquid crystal display (LCD) or an organic light-emitting diode screen (OLED). The latter is capable of producing the best picture quality while LCDs generally cost less but can still give you a great picture.

OLED is a newer technology. It doesn’t have a standard backlight. Instead, each pixel is illuminated on its own. The best quality LCDs, on the other hand, have local dimming, meaning parts of the screen can get dim without impacting the brightness on the rest of the screen.

“LCD’s biggest advantage is that it’s by far the most affordable of all of the technologies,” says Gagnon. “The very high-end LCD TVs do a pretty good job of coming close or matching the performance of OLED displays.”

With OLED, “then you’re talking about typically what is the highest performance display. So it’s going to have higher contrast levels, and better color performance.” It will also be easier to watch the TV from multiple viewing angles, and it will probably have the fastest refresh rate, Gagnon explains.

There’s also QLED, which stands for quantum light-emitting diode. A QLED TV is essentially an LCD TV with quantum dots. Quantum dots are tiny tiny molecules that, when hit by light, emit their own differently colored light. Because of this technology, QLED TVs more accurately emit colors, which improves the overall picture quality.

With QLED, “you get better color performance, you also get a little bit of an efficiency improvement, meaning the set can be a little bit brighter, and oftentimes these tend to be TVs that include other features, for example, higher refresh rates and more HDMI inputs,” Gagnon says.