We Changed Everything, Now We Need Your Help! (TV 2.0)

We've just launched one of our most significant Test Bench Updates for TVs, TV 2.0! A lot has changed if you were looking at a TV review yesterday and you’re looking at it again today. There’s a new structure, new scores, new tests, and even updates to old ones. We’ve re-worked every single scoring spline on almost every single test to align our scoring with the modern TV market and modern expectations. This video goes into the changes that the testers, engineers, and the writing team have been working for the past nine months. We also turn the tables and ask you for your help to keep us improving!

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0:00 Intro
0:41 Why Are We Doing This?
1:47 Our Solutions
4:23 The Downsides
4:47 We Need You!
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[TechGamesAU]

Please include and follow up on your OLED VRR flicker investigations. We need to keep pressure on manufacturers to solve this!

[ashlol]

personnally I have never used the notation to select my tv, I use the raw values as criteria in the filtering tool, that's also why I love rtings because the subjective part can be totally ignored to look only at real values without any marketing BS or partial bias from the article writter

[moshing]

I trust Ratings reviews the most. Keep up the good work. Still following the OLED burn in testing, looking forward to this years results 👍🏻

[ali]

You should test whether the panel is native or frc. You should also test the changes with TV software updates.

[NightlyHigh]

When it comes to motion smoothing, I'd play some video on every TV, and then try to identify, how many times you can see an error in the motion smoothing. One of the most noticeable errors are those, where object's hard edge moves when it shouldn't (most noticeable when panning a scene), and another would be to look for unexpected jumps with objects.

[CECritic]

Wow! This is amazing. The level of transparency is refreshing. Keep up the good work.

[kicapanmanis]

You guys are a godsend for TV buyers. A lot of things are hard to test for TVs and your work is so detailed and comprehensive covering so many models.

[Kumoiwa]

All I wanted was for the improved response time testing done on monitors to be added to TV tests, but the overall re-structuring and re-evaluation is nice as well.

[SecondBrekfast]

VRR flicker should also be tested for.

[SzymonAdamus]

You guys are amazing!
Great work. Thank you.

[chroma]

Thank you for going back and re-evaluating everything. I will be more interested in the scores now than I was in the past

[JimProfit]

MPRT measurement of BFI/Backlight strobing modes would be fantastic, especially if it is compatible with several refresh rates. Perhaps a scoring scale based to how close to CRT we get (i.e. 1ms MPRT being a 10 score), with points deducted based on the severity of visible artifacts (residual ghosting due to GtG, strobe crosstalk etc, ...) would tremendously help consumers who need the best motion clarity above every other considerations.

[sermerlin]

One thing that you can implement which I believe whole home theater community will benefit WITHOUT A DOUBT is if you can add additional input lag testing... Testing specifically for 1080p and 4K signals at 24hz or to be more technical 23.976hz in the TVs most accurate profile that is outside of game mode.

Doing input lag test at 60hz outside game mode really doesn't help much except tell the idea how much TV is really lagging at 60hz without game mode. Nobody that buys a TV to use it for home theater (basically watching UHD movies and TV shows) uses 60hz to watch a movie or a TV show. We all tell our media players to match the refresh rate to the video content (which is in 99% of cases 23.976 fps and rarely 24.000 or 25.000).
Seeing the numbers at 23.976hz or 24hz would help us greatly to minimize lip sync issues as TVs dramatically change input lag just with refresh rates (and as I observed it's not linear increase in input lag when doing math by adding additional around 27-30ms input lag) if we pick the TV you reviewed.

And as again anyone who is buying TV interested in gaming is not buying a TV to use it at 60hz OUTSIDE game mode so for them as well that test for input lag at 60hz OUTSIDE game mode is also rather pointless beside giving them (and us home theater folks) general idea how much video processing impacts latency.

So please if you can spare couple of minutes of your time to also implement 23.976hz input lag test OUTSIDE game mode at 1080p and 4K resolutions. It would spare us all home theater community a giant headache of figuring out the lip sync.

[bergerbunny]

The Abby to Sam transition on the graphic💀

[catbertz]

A great move to interact with your audience of enthusiasts on the testing methodology. Distributed brainpower is an asset, and will greatly accelerate this process of improving testing results and tracking.

[DEEPY_DJ]

Great work! TV market is truly big. Good TVs become cheaper and cheap TVs become better. Premiums TVs are even more complex to navigate.

It's a perfect timing too. Once spring hits Montreal for real, no one would be to able to sit in a conference room or desk for long. 😅

[seanwhat]

Sounds good! Please also consider testing the wireless screen mirroring functions in the future ❤️

[augustvalek]

that's a lot of work, you guys are legends

[plantsandramen]

Great to see, I was wondering where the reviews went!

[mchlhth]

For me, when it comes to processing, the two most distracting issues are stuttering (or over-smoothing thereof) of camera panning and motion artifacts. To a lesser extent, intelligent sharpening is also somewhat distracting but can be somewhat forgiven depending on the source. Examples by way of two TV's I own -- the LG G4 and the Sony Bravia 7 -- and content that I usually watch that brings out the worst of these issues -- anime... no, really -- would include a background pan with foreground characters in motion. Stuttering abounds with no processing, and bad processing gives the appearance of frame lag or inverse ghosting. For the G4, no amount of processing makes stutter in anime go away without also introducing screen artifacts. With some adjustments to motion processing, the Bravia 7 somehow manages to smooth out background pans with little noticeable stutter, but, for whatever reason, character movement still appears to stutter, so the application is uneven and sometimes a bit jarring. I prefer watching anime on the Bravia 7 over the G4, even though I think the G4 is the better overall TV. However, Sony's Reality Creation -- which I can only describe as "selective on-screen element sharpening" can ruin things by introducing more posterization on already posterized gradients in less pristine content or haloing on static elements (e.g., low bitrate sports broadcasts, especially around score boxes).

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I actually don't think I'd mind soap opera effect in some content, if it actually worked. It just looks bad because the meh processors and algorithms used for TVs for artificial frame creation simply don't work or don't overcome the limitations of existing display technologies.

Hope this helps