I'm confused about HDR on TVs. I've been looking at TVs to replace my old 1080p TV and found one for £300 that supported Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos and was 4k.
If I were looking in the £300 range, what would be the best TV to get that would be good for an Xbox Series X and an Apple TV 4k? Does a TV with a 120Hz refresh rate significantly increase the price?
HDR breaks down like this. There are two base standards:
HLG is for broadcast TV (Sky and Virgin at the moment, maybe Freesat at some point in the future. Freeview, unlikely because it doesn't have the spare broadcast bandwidth to accommodate 4K channels.)
HDR10 is for disc playback and streaming and applications such as gaming.
If you think about HDR10 as a base level, then there are two enhancement layers on top. These are in competition with each other (Oh great! Another format war). These are HDR10+ and Dolby Vision.
Any and every TV sold in the UK with HDR should support both HDR10 and HLG. Whether they have the enhanced layers is down to the manufacturer's choices. There's licencing fees for Dolby Vision, and the choice to support HDR10+ is more of a political decision.
Here's the first important bit of info for TV buyers:- If your telly only supports HDR10, but your programme or film is shot with one of the advanced formats, it will still play. The base layer is a fall-back position. For DV content on a TV without Dolby Vision, it will play back using HDR10. You still get HDR, just not the full beans version the programme can deliver. The same is true that HDR10+ content plays back at HDR10 level if the enhanced format isn't supported. Now that has got the formats out of the way, let's look at why some TVs do better with HDR than others.
In order to do justice to any HDR format, the TV backlight needs to get extra bright. This is where budget TVs fail badly. The same cost-cutting that makes it possible to buy a 43" 4K smart LED TV with a load of apps and Dolby Vision for just £300 is also the reason why that sort of TV sucks with any type of HDR. The problem here is that a whole bunch of corners got cut to get the TV down to that retail price.
One of these cutbacks s the backlight. The cheaper sets skimp on the number and brightness of the LEDs. This means that the TV is running at close to flat-out with just standard dynamic range content. There's nothing left in reserve to give HDR the extra brightness boost it needs.
This is what the guys have been trying to tell you.
LG budget sets are particularly bad in this respect. Over the last few years they have got themselves a bit of a reputation in the trade for the LEDs either failing - they turn the picture purple in patches - or bursting in to flames! Luckily the plastics are fire retardant, but the heat melts the screen diffuser and reflector panels, and might even cook the LCD panel itself. At that point the TV is toast. Cheap Samsung aren't immune to this either.
Cheaper TVs struggle to hit 300 Nits for SDR content, and struggle to go much brighter for HDR. The LG UN7300 is particularly poor in this regard. The SDR peak brightness is just 249cd/m2, and HDR scrapes by on 319cd/m2. The LG43UP75006LF is a close replacement. The Samsung Q60 fares a better at 419 and 440 cd/m2 respectively, but IMO there's not much else to recommend it.
There's also a slightly annoying issue too regarding screen size. You see, 43" and smaller are kind of regarded as bedroom/kitchen TV sizes. That might not be how you or I think about that size of TV, but when you look at the bell curve of what sells, 55" is now considered average, and the trend is for bigger and bigger sets. That creates a bit of a problem when it comes to producing high performances sets in smaller sizes. They don't get much of a look in on features such as 100/120Hz panels, 10bit colour, Full Array Local Dimming (FALD) or high peak brightness. You need to up the screen size if you want all the toys.
The Hisense 55U8GQTUK is worth a look if you can fit in a 55" screen. The review site rings were very impressed. It's on sale at Costco for under £600. This is a 100Hz native panel with full array local dimming, excellent SDR and HDR brightnesses, and it has all the various HDR formats.
