Look out for REAL 4K TV's This Holiday!

Don't get skrewed this holiday when buying a 4K TV. What do we mean? Here is some info that may help you understand HDR and UHD 4K.

4K usually means 3840 x 2160 pixels on a display, as opposed to the previous standard of 1080p, which is 1920 x 1080. But most of the stuff you’re watching is still going to be 1080p. Consoles like the Xbox One S and PS4 Pro will convert 1080p stuff to a proper 4K signal with pretty OK results. However, cheaper TVs — even some not-cheap TVs! — are really bad at converting content to 4K. If you buy a 4K TV that doesn’t do this “upscaling” well, 1080p content might actually look worse on it than on your existing TV. Then there’s HDR. HDR means two things, for practical purposes: how dark and bright the TV can get, and the range of color it can display. There are TVs that have great HDR capabilities, with brilliant picture quality, deep blacks and bright whites — HDR10, the most widely adopted format of HDR, supports brightness of 10 times that of the calibration standard for non-HDR TVs.

When HDR is working, it’s brilliant, and immediately apparent. It’s like someone put, say, the LED lights from a car’s brights on top of your screen (in a good way). But even if a TV says it “supports HDR,” and can accept an HDR signal from your device, if the TV can’t get bright enough and it can’t display a very deep black — that is, the darkest darks on the display aren’t cloudy, uneven, or grey rather than black — then HDR doesn’t really work.

This is where gamers are even more likely to get screwed. HDR is a new, cool thing in a lot of games, because it looks great, and it’s much easier to see than the jump from 1080p to 4K. But even on TVs that have great HDR capabilities, there’s another possible problem: input lag. Input lag is caused by the time it takes your TV to generate a picture from the signal your game console is sending. The longer the delay, the more time between what you do on your controller and what you see on the screen (and the longer the delay between something happening in the game, say, in multiplayer, and you seeing it happen). Many TVs with great pictures have input lag higher than you'd want, though your sensitivity to it might vary.

Look at it this way. It takes a game running at 60 frames per second 16.7 milliseconds to generate a frame. A 30 fps game takes about 33.3 milliseconds to generate a frame. This is why games that run at 60 fps feel more responsive — because they are more responsive. Any latency from your TV is added to how long the game takes to generate an image. Some displays get as low as 15-20 ms of lag; others hit around 30 ms. Higher than 30 ms, and you might really start to feel it. Many 4K/HDR TVs have latency sitting around 60 ms or higher.

Almost every modern TV has a "game mode" to compensate for this. Game modes disable a lot of the picture processing that adds time to how long your TV takes to generate an image. The result is faster, though not as good-looking. But some 4K/HDR TVs don't support HDR and game mode at the same time.

If I've just convinced you not to buy a 4K/HDR TV, well, maybe that's not a bad thing. It's the second half of November when I'm writing this. In less than seven weeks, every TV manufacturer is going to announce and shortly thereafter release new, better displays at CES 2017. No matter what TV you buy right now, there are better ones almost literally around the corner.

Also, prices on 4K/HDR TVs have fallen through the floor in the last six months, in part because of a lot of disruptive competition in the space. Prices on this year's TVs are going to drop even more once next year's models are announced. So maybe take a deep breath and think for a minute.

But guess what? There's never a good time to buy a TV. There's always going to be a better model and a cheaper option around the corner. It's always going to be a risk. So with that in mind, the following is a list of good 4K TVs with proper HDR support, along with their caveats. These are the TVs I think you won't hate yourself for buying in six months, massive price shifts notwithstanding. They won't always be the cheapest, but they're good deals for what they are.

-Love Gamepodd