Home Theatre 101: The Screen

with me, guys. And recently, someone on Twitter called me out for an article that I wrote many years ago for how stuff Works dot com and it was about home theater systems. The article and the person called me out because I used the term man cave right at the very beginning of the article, and the criticism was that that I had fired off a gendered down right at the beginning of a piece. And I want to be clear, that was a crappy thing for me to

have done. It was crappy back then. It's definitely crappy now. I would never right it that way today. I'd like to think that over the following year is from writing that article, I've grown a little bit as a person, and I certainly tried to do that. But all of this is my interest to say we're gonna do an updated episode about home theater systems, actually a couple of episodes,

because there's a lot to talk about. Now. Maybe you want to put together a home theater, or maybe you're just thinking about upgrading your setup, or maybe you just want to know what's the deal with all the latest options out there and to figure out which one might be best for you, and you know your situation. So we're gonna try and build the perfect person cave together. And this episode is really gonna focus on, uh, the TV or the screen, depending on what you want to do.

And here's a tricky thing. So there are a lot of terms and numbers and metrics when it comes to home theater systems, and these are not always the easiest to understand or parse. Also, there's this tendency to think that bigger numbers are better. They're not necessarily better, and that might shock some of my fellow Americans because we typically go with more please when it comes to metrics.

So I'm gonna try and do my best to demystify some of these different features and explain what it actually means. So at a minimum, a good home theater system needs a screen, whether a projection screen or a TV screen,

and a sound system. So we're gonna really focus on the screen part for this episode, and let's start with talking about you know, UM resolutions, because when I first started writing about home theaters, the top of the line TV screens at that time, when I was first writing about them, they max doubt in the h D t V range that stands for high definition television, which is almost obsolete at this point as far as new televisions

are concerned. So it's a good idea to kind of go down the path of those you know, definitions and resolutions to talk about what that means and what the state of the art is today now. Mostly it does come down to resolution, or how many distinct components called pixels ake a little points of light makeup and image on the screen. So when we look at a television, the images we see are made up of thousands of points of light of various colors. We'll get to color

representation in a little bit in this episode. So there's this analogy that I typically use when I talk about resolution. Let's say that you've got yourself a wooden frame and it's on the ground. It's you know, it's edges are a couple of inches high, and the frame itself is

about thirty five inches wide and twenty inches tall. Uh. That is roughly the dimensions of a forty inch television, because we actually measure TVs on the diagonal across the screen, so from an upper corner to a lower corner, uh, diagonally across rather than just vertically or horizontally. So if you've ever wondered, hey, the said it was a you know, forty two inch television, but it's not for you two

inches wide. That's why it's on the diagonal. And let's say that I give you a bucket that's filled with little wooden blocks, and each of these blocks are you know, a various a specific color, so each block is a solid color, and they're all just one inch cubes, so you get one inch per side on these cubes. And I ask you to make a picture using those blocks

inside this frame. And I want the picture to be a cat because I work on the Internet, and that means there's like a chance that any photo I'm talking about is gonna least have a cat in it. Well, because each block is a solid color. You would have to do your best to make a cat image within the confines of this frame I've given you. And those blocks are one inch you know, cubes, so you would end up with some pretty jagged edges for any curves that you wanted to represent in this cat picture. So

this would be a pretty low resolution image. Now let's say we dumped out all those blocks after you made your picture of a cat, and I gave you another bucket filled with blocks. But these cubes are half an inch per side, so you can fit twice as many across the horizontal and vertical lines. So with the one inch cube, if you were to actually fill the entire frame from corner to corner, you would be able to

fit seven hundred cubes total in that frame. Because we multiply twenty times thirty five bytes, we get seven hundred and that, you know, because the cubes are one inch, that tells you seven cubes could fit within that frame. Well, now we're using half inch cubes. With half inch cubes, you could fit two thousand, eight hundred cubes in the frame. So you've half the size and you've quadrupled the number

of blocks you can use. So your cat picture that you use with these half inch blocks is going to be better than the first one because the blocks are using allow you to approach fine detail a little more effectively. So as we decrease the size of the blocks, but we're keeping the same shape of the frame, we increase the number of blocks that can fit in that frame, and our picture starts to look more sharp and clear as we do this. That is resolution to a point anyway.

So by the time resolutions were standardized during the history of television, you really had two broad standards. You had the europe and pal and SCAM systems, which used a resolution that we referred to as five hundred seventy six. That meant there were five hundred seventy six rows of pixels. Uh So, if you isolated one vertical line of pixels from top to bottom on the screen and you counted them all, you would count up to five d seventy six across the screen from side to side, you had

seven hundred four columns of pixels. So seven hundred four pixels from left to right, five hundred seventy six from top to bottom. Multiply those together, that gives us a total of more than four hundred thousand pixels to play with to make our pictures. In the US, it was a slightly different story. Standard definition was four hundred eighty pixels vertically so from top to bottom, and seven hundred

four horizontally left to right. That gave us a slightly lower resolution of than Europe had of around three hundred thirty eight thousand pixels on the screen, a little less than that actually, And I should also add that most screens had an aspect ratio of four to three. This refers to the ratio of the television's width compared to

its height. Now, in the example I gave earlier, the frame that I mentioned that would actually be more the modern standard of aspect ratios for televisions, which is sixteen by nine. That's what we used to call the wide screen format back when those TVs were first hitting the market, and not everyone was sold on them back in those days, because we are also used to the four by three ratio.

But in the old days, most TVs looked a little more boxy than the ones we have today, and this is why when you watch older television shows, you frequently see that the image doesn't really extend all the way to the edges. Of your television screen unless someone has you know, like digitally punched in, which is awful because that means you lose the details that are otherwise at

the edges. The Simpsons did this and it was terrible because a lot of visual gags got cut off because the image was punched in, and um, I want to say Fox and then Disney kind of relented and gave people the option of being able to view those episodes in their original four by three aspect ratio. And that's kind of how things were for decades, with you know, some exceptions, but that's all in the past, so we're gonna leave them for now because we don't really need

to go into detail. But then we get up to the era of h D t V and things started getting really confusing because there were different flavors of h D t V more so than you found was standard definition. So the three big ones were seven ten A d I and ten A DP in most parts of the world. So let's go with the numbers first, then I'll explain what that I M P mean. So seven twenty referred to a resolution of seven D twenty pixels tall by one thousand, two hundred eighty pixels wide. That gives us

a total of nine one thousand, six hundred pixels. This one often was called HD ready as opposed to full H. D t V ten eighty refers to one thousand eighty pixels tall by one thousand nine d twenty pixels wide. And you might say, all right, but when I multiply those two together, I get two point zero seven million pixels. And that's true. But here's where we got to talk about the P versus the eye. So the P stands

for progressive scan, and the eye stands for interlaced. So with an interlaced display, the screen shows alternating horizontal lines of pixels and paints the image across the screen and

then down the screen. So if we were to number the rows of pixels on the screen, going from row one and then working our way down until we had labeled all the way down to row one thousand eighty, and if we were slow things way way way down, like super super super low, we would see that the screen would display the odd rows first, so rose one, three, five, seven, and so on all the way down to one thousand seventy nine would display first. Then you would get the

even rows two, four, six, eight, etcetera. Now this happens at a speed that is so fast our eyes can't detect it, so to us it just looks like a solid image. We don't see that it's really alternating these lines at all. We're getting the experience as if it's all happening at once. But it does mean that effectively, it's only showing half the number of pixels UH in a given moment. Now we say this means an interlaced

screen uses two fields. One field has all the odd horizontal lines of pixels, and the second field has all the even ones, and these are necessary to create a single frame of videos. So each frame is made up a two fields with an interlaced screen. A progressive scan screen draws every line of a frame in sequence, so there's no reason to talk about video fields because field

and frame are essentially the same thing. Here. Now, generally speaking, the edge would go to progressive scan TVs among home theater aficionados. They these screens were just better at showing fast moving sequences in particular, so people who were serious about home theater in the h D t V era often would gravitate toward progressive scan screens. These days, you'll find higher in televisions in the U h D or

Ultra high Definition ranges. In fact, four K is pretty much the standard now um, but you can also find eight K. So now we've moved away from the convention that we used to use to describe resolution in the in the s D and h D eras, and it doesn't help that there's some screpancies here as well. Like one of the issues that you often run into with home theater is that there's a lack of universal standards for a lot of stuff, and that can cause issues

down the line. In televisions, we generally say it's a four K TV when it refers to a resolution of three thousand, eight hundred forty pixels wide by two thousand, one hundred sixty pixels tall and um. First of all, you notice that neither of those numbers is four thousand, right, three thousand, eight hundred forty is close, like you could round up to four thousand, but neither of those are four thousands. So that makes the four K thing a

little confusing. Also, uh, we see that in previous resolution descriptions, the number that we used to refer to how many pixels tall and image was was the dominant one right, ten eighty means that you have one thousand eighty pixels from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen. But with four K without three thousand, eight hundred forty pixels, we're actually looking at the width of the screen from left to right, not the height of

the screen from top to bottom. So those three thousand, eight hundred forty pixels go across the screen. And if you're saying, you know, three thousand hundred forty isn't the same as four K, like I said, you're right. And if you're wondering, well, why don't we call it twenty one sixty because that would still be in the same line as ten eight, Right, we called it ten eight Why don't we call four K six? Well, that's because

I don't know. For some reason, we decided to switch things up and talk about width rather than height as far as pixel density goes. Now, if we're talking about movie projection instead of television screens, four K usually has a different resolution of four thousand, nineties six pixels across and two thousand, one hundred sixty pixels up and down.

So at least there we get to our four K bit, right, But for TVs, it's really more four K ish, and in fact, there are several different resolutions that are in that neighborhood that are lumped together in the four K designation. There even some TVs that you could argue are five K, but they get lumped down with four K, and it gets even more confusing when you start talking about cameras and stuff. But we're gonna leave all that here. It's mostly to say that it's a higher resolution than the

h D t V market. I imagine the switch to four K nomenclature is mostly for the convenience of marketing, plus to cover the fact that there were so many slight variations on resolution that it kind of helped cut down on confusion because the differences didn't really translate to

a massive difference in viewing experience. So, in other words, if one TVs four K resolution was technically slightly less than another four K TVs resolution, typically you couldn't really tell because it was at a level of resolution that's so high that our human i is aren't able to pick up on the differences. So, in other words, you could have two of these televisions right next to each other, they have slightly different resolutions and not be able to

see a difference. Then we've got eight K resolution. And this is where the numbers get even bigger, and like four K, this is more about eight K ish than actually having eight thousand pixels across the width of a screen. That number is really seven thousand, six hundred eighty. And as for up and down the screen, well that's four thousand,

three twenty. That is the maximum resolution allowed by the u h D or Ultra High Definition standards set down by the i TU DASH our recommendation bt DOT twenty twenty. I t U in this case stands for International Telecommunication Union, and we're gonna touch on tech standards a lot throughout this episode, because boy, but at least this one is one that is well and truly set and standardized. It's saying, this is the up end. This is where eight K

ends right here at this resolution. So yeah, eight K TVs that maximum resolution. Have a screen filled with more than thirty three million pixels. If you were to have every pixel light up and you were to number each one of them, you would come up with more than thirty three million of those suckers. So you've got thirty three million and change teeny little blocks of light which you can use to make your images. And right now, that's the top of the resolution charts that you can

find for home theater television screens. So does that mean that more resolution means a better picture. Not quite. It's actually way more complicated than that. Resolution is important, but it's just one component of making a good picture. Also, there's a limit to the amount of detail that our human eyes can see, and that limit depends upon each person's vision. So it's not like I could give you

a specific resolution and say this and no further. If you go any higher than this, it's a fool's errand because you'll never tell the difference. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. But there are some other factors that that tie in with resolution when it comes to your viewing experience and how clear or sharp an image is. One of those

is the size of the television screen. So let's say we have three television's, all of them are at hd TV resolution just to make this easy, And one of those televisions is forty two inches, another one is fifty five inches, and the third is sixty inches, but they all are ten a DP resolution. Well, that means that if you were to count up all the pixels on

each of those screens. Each screen would have the same number of pixels, but that means that the pixels for the six screen have to be a little bit larger than the ones that you would find on the forty two inch screen, and then the fifty in screen would be right in the middle, right, because the same number of pixels are on all three screens, but the screens are different sizes, So it's possible that you would spot a difference in resolution if you were to view the

same video source on that forty two inch screen as the sixty inch screen at the same time. You put those next to each other, and you might say, oh, the picture looks more sharp on thet in screen than the sixty because you have greater pixel density per area there, right, So screen size does matter, and if you want to go really big, like obnoxiously big with your television screen, then you're gonna want to hire resolution to make up for all that real estate that you're gonna be using

to view your stuff. Now, another factor is how close you are sitting to the screen, and this matters for a couple of reasons. The closer you are, the more likely you're gonna see issues with resolution up to a point. Um, So, if you have a really big screen and you happen to sit really close to it and it's all an h D t V resolution, you could end up saying

this doesn't look high definition to me. Now, there are various sources that give out formulas for how far you should sit away from your television depending upon your television size, and I'll cover more of that in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, so I mentioned before the break that we needed to talk about

viewing distances. See now, in the old days, you know, the h D t V days, how close you sat was dependent on a few things, not just the television size, but also the resolution of the TV and how good your vision was, because limitations and resolution would become apparent if the TV were particularly large or if you were sitting fairly close to it. So in other words, you

would say, like, it doesn't look that great. But in the u h D era of four K and beyond, it's getting really super hard to spot those resolution issue unless you're talking about, you know, a gargantuan television like one of those that sharp would show off at c e s on some years something that's like a hundred inches or something. So now the main thing is how

your vision. You know, how much of your vision should the television actually fill, or rather, how much of your field of view should be taken up by the TV. So let's say that you've got typical vision for a human being. And just for the record, I actually don't have typical vision. I have less than what is typical. So if you don't have typical vision, please don't feel badly about it. I'm just using it as a way

of setting, uh, you know, a framework. So typically humans have a field of view of an arc of around two degrees or between two ten and two twenty in front of them, and that is, if you were to draw straight lines out from the very edges of your vision while you're looking straight ahead, then the angle between those lines would be somewhere around degrees. Now, not all of that vision is equal, right, The stuff closer to the edges of your vision, well, that's in your peripheral

and you won't see as much sharp detail there. You're aware of things that happen in the periphery, but you're not focusing on that. In fact, when you get beyond about thirty degrees arc. You're really talking about the mid peripheral part of your vision. So generally speaking, you want your TV to take up no more than say, thirty to forty degrees of your field a few and this should guide your decision when it comes to figuring out where you need to put, say your chair or your

couch or bean bag or whatever it is. But I don't know about you. I don't have like a handy dandy protractor to help me figure out that kind of stuff, like what degree arc am I looking at when I've got something in front of me. So we go to a more basic formula to kind of rough it out. And that formula is to multiply the size of your television's screen and inches by the number one point six.

That's our constant, and that will give us the number of inches that we should sit away from that TV to get that thirty degree view in our field of view. Or let's say that you are starting from the other side right like you already know how far away you plan to be sitting from where your TV is going to go, Well, you can take that distance and inches and then divide that by one point six, and that would give you a rough idea of how large a television you should go and shop. Four all right, so

let's use an example. Let's say that I have just gone out and I've purchased a fifty five inch television, and I want to know how far from this television I should have my couch so that I can get that optimal viewing experience and have that thirty degree field of view view of the screen. So I take the size of the screen fifty I multiply that by one

point six. That gives me eighty eight inches. So when I convert that into feat that's seven point three feet or so, so a little more than seven feet away, and that will give me that thirty degree view of the television. And it doesn't have to be exact. It's kind of the ballpark figure. It tells you, all right, somewhere around seven ft you should have a pretty good

viewing experience. But what if instead, I've got a room and I've got set up so I know where the couch is gonna go, I know where the TV is going to go, but I haven't bought the television yet, but I know the couch has to be this distance from the TV, and I happen to know that it's eight feet away from where the television is going to be, Well, then we convert our eight ft two inches, that's inches.

We divide ninety six by one point six. That gives us sixty So that means we would want something close to us sixty inch television to go in that space. It's a good general rule to follow, assuming that you're talking about uh D televisions, which again, those resolute sans are high enough where you're not likely to have any issues when it comes to resolution quality. Also, you don't have to be right on the dot for any of

these measurements. Thirty degrees is your target, but really just you know, if you're a little bit closer, a little bit further away, it's not going to ruin the experience,

all right. So that's resolution. And I should also add you should really get the benefits of resolution if the source of the video you're watching matches the resolution of your display, or to put it in another way, what you see on screen is limited by the weakest component in your system, and sometimes you might not even be able to view it, Like if your TV is an hd TV and you're trying to watch a four K

video on it. That just ain't gonna work. Period. But let's say that your TV is the highest point in your system. Well, you're still limited about whatever the lowest point is. So if you're watching an old VHS tape and you're using your eight K U h D t V, it's not gonna look like eight K video. It's going to be limited to VHS levels of resolution, which is close to standard definition. So the quality of what you see depends on what that video source is coming from.

If you don't have a source that can create outputs of four K, let alone eight K video, then you're not really going to get the benefit of that higher resolution. Well, there is one thing these higher definition televisions can do to compensate for lower resolution video sources. This is called upscaling, which is really a necessity. It's not like it makes it sound like it magically makes video better. That's not

really what upscaling is doing. But let's say that you wanted to watch a lower resolution video on your high resolution screen and there was no way to adjust for this difference. Okay, so there's no system in place to have this video somehow expand to fill the number of pixels that are on your uh D television screen. Well, that video just contains information for an image that takes

up a specific number of pixels horizontally and vertically. So what you could do is have that video play on your screen, but it only takes up those pixels, so it would be like a little thumbnail video. It would be like maybe in the corner, maybe playing in just the very center of your screen, with lots of black space around it, because it only takes up that subset of pixels and your television is way more pixels than

the video source does. This would be kind of like those thumbnail videos you occasionally see on websites, and it's not a very satisfying experience. Or you could build in an upscale function, and this is a process in which the television essentially starts to fill in pixels to make up for the fact that the video source is a lower resolution than the screen can display, and it's a

way of boosting the pixel count of the original video source. Now, typically this means that the television is is using light that's of a similar quality in neighboring pixels to fill in for missing ones. So let's say that we've got a video and it happens to be showing a green

meadow and a blue sky. Well, the television would essentially be inserting pixels that would be shades of green similar to the green and the meadow over in the meadow side of it, or shades a blue similar to the blue of the sky and the sky part of it, and try to match the brightness to neighboring pixels to kind of fill out and even out this image. So you're adding information to something that was being fed to

the screen. This process does not add detail, however, so it doesn't make those images more clear or more sharp. So the bigger gap you have in resolution between your display and the video source, the less good it's gonna look. So an eight K TV up scaling a VHS video would not just magically like eight K television. It would it looked pretty jankie. All that being said, resolution is really just one factor to consider when you're looking at television's. There are tons of uh D TVs on the market,

and they are not all equal. Some are just playing better when it comes to picture quality, even if they happen to have the same number of pixels as a competing brand. Now, anyone who remembers the days when we used to buy digital cameras, you know, before all of our phones came with one, you'll remember how the megapixel number was a really big selling point for cameras. You know, the general marketing point was that more megapixels means better pictures,

except it didn't, at least not necessarily. Megapixels, which just refers to the resolution output of a camera, is really just one part of what can make a picture good. But it is way easier to sell a camera to the public by saying this one goes to eleven, then it would be to try and describe all the different

factors that go into the quality of a photo. So the same thing is true with television's But another really important thing besides resolution is a television's contrast ratio, and that refers to the ratio that describes the difference between the luminance or the brightness. If you prefer of the darkest shade that the display can produce and the brightest shade that it can produce, and you want a really high contrast ratio which indicates a wide spectrum of luminance,

and that can really impact image quality. I'll explain a bit more, but first let's take another quick break. Okay, we were talking about contrast a shio. Now, some televisions naturally just have better contrast ratios, especially when it comes to showing off the darker colors. And this comes down to the technologies that actually power the TVs. Televisions that have a back light, uh, that is, the image is generated on screen, it's coming courtesy a little tiny lamps

that are behind each pixel. UH, those can have trouble with darker colors. And that's because that lamp is essentially it's always on, even during the dark scenes, and the liquid crystals that are meant to block the light, sometimes they allow a little bit of light to bleed through, and sometimes that means that dark stuff that should be say pitch black, might actually come out looking more like

their charcoal gray when they're on your screen. And if you're trying to watch something in which a character in really dark clothing is moving around in a dark building, it might just look like you're looking at a big, dark, gray screen with nothing going on. In fact, that's what a lot of Batman movies might look like on one of these screens. And this is particularly noticeable if your room is really dark as well, in bright rooms it's

not quite as bad. Some television's have what's called dynamic contrast, which puts the backlight into a low power mode to reduce that kind of bleed through, and that helps a bit. And of course not all televisions rely on the same technology. So l e ED television's have little l e ED you know, light emitting diodes as lamps behind a liquid crystal display or l c D panel, and this type is the kind that can have that light bleed through. The l c D crystals act kind of like window shades.

They control how much light can pass through to the screen, but they aren't necessarily perfect at blacking everything out. There are actually a couple of different LED panels that can have different effects. So a vertical alignment panel, those tend to be more efficient in blocking light, they have better contrast as a result. Uh then you have in plane switching panel. These tend to let a little bit more light through. So this is where you might get some

of that bleed through. But you rarely see these bits of information about what kind of l e ED display the television has on the TV box, right so it's hard to kind of shop for that, But then you could also use an oh LAD screen. Oh lads are organic light emitting diodes. They don't need those little backlights.

They can sort of think of these as little bitty points that act as a light source and a pixel all in one go, and they can actually turn on or off, you know, dynamically, and thus they tend to be much better when it comes to contrast. They can show darker colors with more accuracy, and I would finally be able to tell what the heck Batman was actually doing. Several years ago. I would also be talking about plasma televisions, which could also provide pretty amazing contrast, although at the

expense of brightness. They couldn't get as bright as L E D t vs could typically, but plas the TVs were really expensive, they never really caught on the same

way that L E ED t vs did. Plus, there was this potential issue of burning, meaning that if you had a plasma screen and you were showing the same image for a long time, you might have a remnant of that image that can stick around even after when you're watching other stuff, So it affects the quality of your experience, but the major TV company has pretty much stopped making plasma televisions back in two thousand fourteen, so it's kind of a moot point. And before I move on,

I should also talk about projectors too. So far I've been focusing on TV sets, but one way you can trick out a home theater is to get a really nice projector, which can give you a big screen experience at a much lower price point, depending on you know which model you're looking at, and I do mean depending, because there's some projectors out there for high end markets. They're in the tens of thousands of dollars range. That

is way outside of my budget. But you can find others that are, you know, around five d two thousand dollars. There's still expensive, but they are less expensive per inch than your flat screen televisions typically are. Like you can get screens that are a hundred twenty inches or larger, and if you have a really big home theater set up, that means that you could have a effectively a one or two hundred forty inch TV, but for a fraction of the cost of some of these other flat panel

display styles. You can also find a range of resolutions with projectors as well, including ultra high definition projectors, so you can find four K projectors no problem, uh, and you can really create that kind of theater experience. But one thing that matters a lot with this particular setup is ambient light. You want as little light in your

environment as possible. You want that room to be dark if you're going to be using a projector, So that usually means that projectors are best in spaces that have few or no windows, or you have treated those windows with like blackout curtains or blackout shades so that you can have a really dark movie Dungeon. Um televisions can give you a good experience at other light levels, so they you know, they're not as dependent upon this. So really this comes down to your setup, like what room

you're planning on using as a home theater. If your home theater is going to be out in a sun room, well you're probably not going to have a good experience with a projector unless you're only watching things in the dead of night. Oh and what's more, you can also find projectors that have built in WiFi receivers and even ones that have apps included to let you access popular streaming services. So you don't have to hook the projector up to some other computer or set top box in

order to get those functions. Those projectors do exist, and that's pretty darn cool too that they're kind of neat. Now it's time to chat about another confusing factor in image quality, and that is HDR. And this one's really irritating because while there is a standard HDR, there are other flavors of HDR, and that means there's lots of competing technologies all trying to accomplish the same goal, but

they're not necessarily compatible with each other. That means you could end up buying an HDR TV and HDR set up, and that the two don't necessarily work together. Like if you're set up is working on one set and your TV is meant for a different set, you've got some issues. So let's get into that. So HDR, in case you're not familiar, stands for high dynamic range. This became the buzzword of modern TVs and it tends to be one of those features that gets positioned as a main selling point.

So when resolution used to be the big differentiator, now it's does it have high dynamic range? Well? And it centers around this representation of color and brightness, So dynamics references extremes, right, So like in a in sound, let's say you're talking about music, you would say a song was really dynamic if there were was a lot of variation between the loud parts and the soft parts of the song, if there were a lot of levels there,

volume levels. That's a lot of dynamics as opposed to a piece that maintains more or less the same level of volume throughout the whole piece. With televisions, these dynamics are in the shades and brightness of the colors on the screen, which ideally manifests as really vibrant on screen displays, so the colors really pop out at you, and there could be much more subtle shifts with light and shadow when you're working with a system that has really good HDR.

In fact, a superior television with high resolution and HDR could even give you the feeling that you're looking through a window almost rather than a screen, because HDR, if it's implemented well, can even convey a sense of depth. And this is true even if the television isn't a three D TV. And let me tell you, I'm so glad we are past the three D television fad because that man I didn't have to talk about three D

in this episode. But there are some caveats when it comes to HDR, and one is that every component in your system that deals with video has to be HDR compatible in order for you to get the benefit. So let's say that you have a game console and it supports hd R, and you've got a television that supports HDR, but the cable you're using to connect your console to your TV isn't HDR compatible, Well, you would not be

able to take advantage of HDR. Or let's say that your TV and your cable are both HDR ready, but your video source isn't the same problem, every single component has to be hd R ready in order to take advantage of HDR. Moreover, HDR is kind of it's more of what you call guidelines. As Barbosa would say, it's like a defined goal. It's a system it has to achieve a certain benchmark in uh in in color representation

in order to be considered HDR. But how it goes about achieving that benchmark, which is technically, you know, a resolution of at least four K and a certain contrast ratio that isn't standardized. So in other words, you're saying, here's your destination, but how you get there is up to you. So that means there are different flavors of HDR. There's HDR ten that's your baseline version. Most other versions support HDR ten, so hopefully if you have a setup,

you can use that. But then you have other more you know, uh, feature filled versions. There's Advanced HDR, which was a product from Technicolor. There's Dolby Vision, which is kind of like hd R plus, and there are more besides that. So to take advantage of those versions, you would have to have your television and all your other components be compatible with that specific version of HDR for

you to be able to experience riens it. So you could end up with an HDR system that can't really play certain HDR media, at least not with the HDR effects you were expecting, because the media was built for a different version of HDR, And yeah, that kind of stinks, but when it all does work together, it's pretty phenomenal. So your display should have a great contrast ratio, it should have great resolution, it should have HDR. What else well,

you might consider the refresh rate. I don't see this touted as much as it was a few years ago, right around the time when Peter Jackson was releasing the Hobbit films. That's really when refresh rate became a big thing. It kind of got a bad name at the time too. Technically, refresh rate describes the number of times the television refreshes the image on the screen each second, and we measure this and hurts or cycles per second, and it's somewhat

similar to the frame rate of a film. You know, we typically playback film at a speed of twenty four frames per second. That means the film is really a series of still photographs, but when we play it at a fast enough speed, it creates the illusion of movement. Video is a little bit different. We do still have a way of changing the image super fast, and typically we're talking around like thirty to sixty times per second, sixty times being way more common these days, so that's

like sixty hurts. Higher in televisions can have higher refresh rates, or at least higher advertised refresh rates. Hurts is not uncommon. But what does this mean as far as your viewing experience? Goes well for fast moving stuff, like stuff that's moving quickly across the screen as you're watching it, you would typically see a blurring of that image, and the image kind of looks a little bit softer as a result

with televisions that have lower refresh rates. When you have faster refresh rates, those same images appear to be more sharp and more clear, more solid. So this is really great for certain things like sports, where the effect is almost like you're there in person because you're not getting motion blur and stuff like that. In addition to refresh rate, TVs typically have some other anti blurring technologies built into them.

This can boost the perceived effect. So a lot of companies will actually describe this by just saying the TV has an even higher refresh rate than the television actually does, Like it might really refresh the screen a hundred twenty times a second, but I might be advertised at to

forty or even higher. Because the technical detail of how many times it refreshes the screen isn't as important as saying this is the effect you will perceive when you watch, right, Like, those numbers don't really matter if they don't relate to what it's like to watch something on that television screen. They're just numbers. It means nothing, you know. It's the

experience that actually means something. So if the image seems more sharp and clear, even when you're looking at stuff that's moving fast, that's all that really matters, not which collection of technologies made it possible or what numbers we associate with them. However, these technologies can also create some weird effects that you might not like, so some folks complain that these faster refresh rates make stuff look artificial

or fake. The phrase that you will frequently here to describe this is it makes everything look like a Mexican soap opera. Which don't get me wrong, I am not disparaging Mexican soap operas, but they do have a particular look to them, and you don't necessarily want everything to look that way. A lot of theater buffs I know

would actually turn these refresh rates off. That usually there was a setting somewhere in the television where you could just turn it to like sixty hurts or one twenty anything beyond that, a lot of people just kind of shied away from and they would opt for that lower refresh rate and retain that motion blur for stuff like TV shows and movies, maybe activating the higher refresh rate for stuff like sporting events and that kind of thing.

And as with many of the things I mentioned in this episode, a lot of this falls to marketing strategies, right, Like having a bigger number to point to is a way of saying, this is how we differentiate our product from our competitors. So knowing that being savvy as a consumer is really important, right, Being able to see through the marketing speak in order to understand what's actually being

sold to you. That is critical, especially when you're talking about something like the centerpiece of a home theater, which is going to presumably be a fairly expensive technology, whether it's a television or a projector so it behooves you to do this kind of research, understand what these components do.

Also think about the other things you want to have as part of your home theater and make sure they're all compatible before you go all in, because there's nothing worse than getting a whole bunch of pieces of technology together, hooking them up and then realizing there's a compatibility issue. I've had that happened to me in different aspects numerous times. It is incredibly frustrating and disheartening because you're so excited going into it. So it's good to know this stuff

before you really start making purchases. Well, I'm gonna wrap this up now for the televisions, but we will do a couple more episodes. I want to talk about sound. We need to talk about sound systems for home theaters and what all those mean, because that's another confusing technological mind field to walk through, right because there's so many different variations on surround sound and which ones are right

for you. I also want to talk about some of the other components that you would find, like what are the differences in the different resolution video streaming devices and video playing devices you can find? Does it make sense to buy an eight K television right now? How much eight K content is out there? What are the limiting factors? So we're gonna talk about more of those things in our our next episode, but this episode we're going to

wrap up. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future EPISO, it's a tech stuff, please reach out to me and let me know. The best way is on Twitter. Um you can tell me about things I messed up in old articles. I can't change them. I don't work for Health Stuff Works anymore. But um, you know, we can always write to the editor and say, hey, we should really change this or you should really change this, because I can't. I can't do it because um, I would like to

see that happen. I you know, I I'll own up to when I goof and using a gender now at the very beginning of an article that should be universally you know, applicable. That was a That was a bad That was a bad call on my part. So yeah, glad that I was called out for that. Uh. I mean it stinks that had happened, but that's my fault, not not not the person who told me. If you have any other suggestions, like I said, hit me up on Twitter Tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to

you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.