smart tv

Everyone tells you to turn off motion smoothing, and yes, do that. But if you have just set up a new set and it still looks inconsistent, the ambient light sensor is the one quietly undoing your work. It ships enabled on basically everything now, it is tuned aggressively, and it will keep...

Strip the acronyms back and there are only two kinds of television being sold. OLED is emissive, meaning every pixel makes its own light, the way plasma and CRT did. Everything else - QLED, mini LED, RGB backlit, whatever the badge says this season - is an LCD panel with a backlight behind it...

Freeplay has been the live channel grid built into Google TV for a while now, and Google has just bolted video on demand onto it for the first time. More than 10,000 movies and shows you can start whenever you want, ad supported, no separate app to install and no subscription. Studios named...

What Hi-Fi has put up a phone-to-TV guide and the useful part is the distinction most people never get told. Casting hands the job to the TV, which then streams the content itself while your phone acts as a remote, so you can leave the app, take a call or switch the screen off and playback keeps...

Read another best QLED TVs for 2026 roundup this week and the top pick was Sony's Bravia 9, whose own spec box in the same article lists the display type as mini-LED. That is not a mistake on the writer's part so much as a symptom. QLED stopped describing anything specific years ago and nobody...

Tom Parsons at What Hi-Fi wrote this up on 15 August and it's a familiar kind of misery. His Bravia 8 II OLED took a firmware update and now anything played through an external source, an Apple TV 4K or a Sky Stream puck, drops audio when routed to his external sound system. The TV's own apps...

What Hi-Fi ran a piece where one of their writers admitted he had been wrong about automatic firmware updates. He spent weeks chasing audio dropouts, swapped cables, went through settings, and it turned out to be the most recent update on his Bravia 8 II. The failure only appears when an...

The 7985 is the follow up to last year's 7875, same Roku platform, same Ambilight strip on the back, and quantum dots added to the series for the first time. That is the whole upgrade as far as the announcement goes. No sizes, no prices, no dimming zone count, nothing about peak brightness. QLED...

Eclipsa Video is another HDR format, this one built on SMPTE ST 2094-50, an open standard Google put together with Apple and NBCUniversal. The pitch is consistency: the same clip should look the same on your phone, your tablet and your TV, and you should stop getting slapped in the face by a...

A What Hi-Fi writer just went public with the argument we have all had here for years: he let his Bravia 8 II take an automatic firmware update and now half his system is out of action. The symptom is oddly specific. Anything arriving through an external source, his Apple TV 4K or a Sky Stream...

There is a piece at ecoustics arguing the television is absorbing work that used to belong to the receiver, and I think it is right about who it actually affects. Nobody running an Anthem with seven passive speakers and four ceiling channels is unplugging anything this year. The person being...

The Dolby Vision 2 update has actually started landing on Hisense sets. The 6 August announcement lists UX, UR9, UR8 and U7, and it works whether your set runs Google TV or VIDAA, which is not nothing given Hisense uses different platforms in different regions. Rollout runs for weeks by region...

Since the redesign started rolling out in late May this keeps coming up, so here is the short answer: Roku does not give you a way back. Once the new home screen lands on your set or player, the old app grid is gone. What you do get is a handful of settings that let you switch off most of what...

Australia's ABC has pushed four free ad-supported channels into LG Channels on webOS this week, no account and no subscription needed. Which ones you get depends entirely on where you live. The UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Singapore get the full set: ABC...

Roku OS 15.3 has started landing on some Roku TVs even though Roku still lists the release as a developer beta under NDA, with no public release note and no timeline for the wider rollout. It surfaced through a reader tip rather than any announcement, which is a strange way to ship software to...

Epson has said select Lifestudio projectors running MediaTek's smart platform will pick up Google TV with Gemini through a firmware update, with the Lifestudio Grand first in the coming months and other models following through 2026. The pitch is conversational search instead of menu diving, one...

Someone over on AVForums is stuck in a loop I have seen a few times now. New LG 50UA8550, ThinQ installed on a Samsung S21 Ultra, TV and phone both registered to the same LG account, all working. Then something small went wrong, they reinstalled the app, and now selecting that same LG account at...

The Hisense update went out today and it covers the UX, UR9, UR8 and the U7 - U7 Pro if you are in Europe - running either Google TV or VIDAA. North America, Europe and APAC all at once, over the air. Hisense beat TCL to it, and TCL plus European Philips are supposed to follow later this year...

Engadget ran a reminder piece on this and it is worth repeating here because it catches people every single year. New televisions frequently ship with store or demo mode already enabled, including sets bought online that never sat on a shelf under a single fluorescent tube. The mode cranks the...

A date has landed for Gears of War: E-Day, October 6, and every time a big console exclusive gets a hard date the same threads start up about whether the TV needs replacing first. I have been through this cycle enough times to have a view on it. The features that actually change how a game like...