Cheers Lucid, so the native refresh rate is the important one, and I can ignore the motion refresh rate, and 50Hz is fine but 100 hz is better? I just want to get the important bits clear before I take the plunge, Thanks.
Here be dragons.
There's a whole raft of things that have an influence on picture quality. If money was no object, you'd buy one of the new generation quantum dot (QD) OLED TVs 80% of the time. The remaining 20%, for those times when the TV has to compete against huge amounts of ambient light because your lounge is the equivalent of a south-facing conservatory, you'd buy one of the high-light-output LED TVs, either QNED or mini-LED.
With a top-of-the-range set you get everything. 100Hz* native refresh rate; a true 10-bit colour panel, variable refresh rate (VRR) for gaming, low lag (also for gaming but benefits video too); either a backlighting tech split into hundreds or thousands of dimmable zones (FALD - full array local dimming) based on LED or mini-LED tech, or OLED which can switch off and dim every individual pixel for the ultimate in contrast ratio from pure black to full white. If you go OLED then you don't need to make the choice between viewing angle and black depth.
Something that's overlooked in the race to flog ever cheaper tellies is screen brightness. Compared to all CRT TVs, flatscreen tellies are brighter, and that means the pictures are easier to see when there's some ambient light. (Are you old enough to remember having to close the curtains to watch a CRT TV in summer?) The industry was making good progress on this during the HD Ready and 1080p TV era. We should have hit turbo boost when TVs got LED backlights. The combination of lower heat, less power, far less space, brighter, easier to work with, and possibly cheaper than CCFL tube could have been the golden ticket for all TVs. But it isn't. Since we hit 4K too, progress in light output for cheaper TVs has stagnated and even gone backwards.
The desire to sell more TVs rather than better TVs has created a monster that looks to cut corners. One significant casualty has been backlighting. "
Use fewer LEDs and drive them harder" has been the mantra. The fly in the ointment here is HDR. It's possible to get away with a dull TV if all it is showing is standard dynamic range material (SDR). Now we have HDR, this is no longer the case, or not if you want HDR to pop like it should.
A TV where the backlights are struggling to make SDR look acceptable has nothing left in reserve when it's time to hit boost for HDR.
How do we know about screen brightness, and what's a 'good' brightness level?
Better quality reviews use gear to measure the screen brightness. They give figures in cd/m2 (candelas per metre squared). Budget TVs and a surprising number of midrange sets struggle to do more than **300cd/m2 in both SDR and HDR. This included some of the older entry-level LG and Samsung LED TVs. There are review out there for 2019/2020 models that barely scrape 260 and 280cd/m2. Newer Samsung CU8500- and LG UR9100-series are marginally better (340-370cd/m2) but there's still underwhelming. Compare this to say the Sony X85L which will his around 560cd/m2. Okay, the Sony is £899 for the 55" set vs £500 for the Samsung in the same size. However, you get a lot more with the Sony besides just the brightness. Step up again to an LG C3 OLED at £1,299, and not only do you hit 800cd/m2, but virtually all the wish list of features is ticked. The only major omissions are HDR10+ and the DTS audio pass-thru could be better.
The reviews at rtings and AVForums are good. They breakdown exactly where a TV is strong and weak. The rtings site gives a comprehensive list of TV comparisons. Something to be aware of though is that the US gets some different model specs to the UK and Europe. Their Hisense models are far better than we get even though the model number is the same. (Bizarre but true.) Panasonic doesn't feature much in the US, nor does Philips. They have more Vizio and TCL models than we get.
* 100Hz means it does 100Hz and 120Hz. Certain TVs will go beyond this. 144Hz at 1080p for gaming for example.
** based on 10% white screen area
