smart tv

Mini LED as the entry tier is the line in this rumour that made me stop. It comes out of South Korea via ETNews and got picked up by HIFI.DE in Germany, and Samsung has confirmed none of it, so treat it as a leak with a motive behind it. The idea is to borrow the phone naming: Basic, Plus...

This comes up every few months in the outdoor and second-TV threads, usually with someone insisting a big panel left running will wreck the power bill, so here is the arithmetic. A 55-inch drawing 100W left on for a full 24 hours, at 18 cents a kilowatt hour, comes to roughly 43 cents a day...

Someone over on r/4kTV asked a version of this that I think gets answered badly most of the time. Their watching is mostly YouTube, Netflix, sports and the occasional film. Gaming happens but is not the point. They came from a normal LED set and want to know whether the jump to OLED is something...

Six brands got graded across pricing, design, features, performance and software, and the pricing category ended in a three-way tie between Hisense, TCL and Vizio. Design went jointly to Samsung and Sony. Features went to LG outright, on the argument that its top sets are the most...

If you are in the UK and you have quietly let your licence lapse while still opening iPlayer, that gap may not stay open much longer. The BBC has said it is open-minded about shutting the app off to households that do not pay, and it is being floated as part of the wider charter talks with the...

Four live games on one screen sounds brilliant right up to the point where you divide a 55 inch panel by four. Each quarter is a window about 27 inches on the diagonal, and that is before you account for broadcast graphics that were laid out to be legible at full size. Anyone who has messed...

Sky switched on a feature called Your Multiview over Premier League opening weekend, and it does what the name says: up to four live sports feeds on screen at the same time, across Sky Q, Sky Glass and Sky Stream. You can change the layout, pick which of the four you actually hear, and throw any...

Divide a 55-inch screen into four equal windows and each one has roughly the diagonal of a 27-inch TV. That's the maths behind Sky's new Your Multiview, which went live on Sky Q, Sky Glass and Sky Stream on the day the Premier League season started, and it lets you put four live sports feeds up...

The most useful line in the current crop of TV tech explainers has nothing to do with panel physics. There are two kinds of television: OLED, where each pixel makes its own light, and LCD, where a panel filters light from a backlight. Everything else on the shop floor - QLED, mini LED, QD-OLED...

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...