There are various ways to put a flatscreen TV through its paces. You might fire up a streaming service and watch a medley of Marvel films packed with 4K CGI.
You might reach for a Blu-ray from your collection and feed it a 1080p signal. Or, you could play a few games on a PlayStation 5 if that’s more your scene.
However, there’s another way to challenge your TV this summer, and it doesn’t include watching Tom Cruise hanging off the side of an aeroplane.
How about watching 90 minutes of England playing in and (hopefully) winning this year’s World Cup?
Irrespective of whether we walk away with the World Cup trophy, there lies a serious point here: football (or soccer to our friends across the pond) can be a serious test of your TV’s picture quality. Here’s why.
There’s so much happening, from the action on the pitch to the analysis in the studio; there are multiple opportunities for a TV either to excel or tear a metaphorical ACL.
We’ll start on the pitch, and the most obvious reason why football is a great test for a TV: motion.
If your TV’s ability to handle horizontal and vertical movement on the screen isn’t up to scratch, you’re likely to see a colourful, smeary mess as your TV’s processing struggles to keep up.
This applies not only to the players running around the pitch, but the ball as well, as it moves across the screen with cameras delivering either a wide-angle shot from a distance or a close-up shot of the ball flying through the air towards the goal.
If your TV’s motion processing is too aggressive, the picture will look unnatural, and you’ll get the dreaded soap opera effect as it adds extra frames between the original ones to try to deliver a smoother image.
The good news is that the pictures from modern TVs have become much better out of the box, although you always tend to have a range of adjustment options for picture settings as backup.
Football is also a great test for your TV’s sharpness. There are details to be highlighted everywhere, from blades of grass on the pitch to the laces and studs on the players’ boots to the names and sponsor logos on shirts.
Switch to the studio, and your TV can turn its attention to the presenters’ outfits, the furniture used to help frame the shot, and the cityscape backdrop, should the presenters be lucky enough to be sitting in an outdoor studio.
Opportunities to show off brightness and contrast are everywhere.
When you look at the kits being worn by the players, pay attention to whether the contrast is overcooked. If it is, whites will be blown out to the point where you can’t see any detail on shirts, shorts or socks, or the lines painted on the grass.
Going the other way, is the black of the manager’s tracksuit crushed to the point of it being just a textureless blob of black with a vague outline?
If so, consider experimenting with both settings, as altering one will affect the other. Ideally, you want a TV to balance the contrast and sharpness so it’s not so dark that it crushes low-level detail, but also that it’s not so bright that it loses any sense of subtlety.
You’ll notice that even the cameras filming the action will struggle to get the perfect shot for your TV.
If large areas of the pitch are in blistering sunshine and other areas are in the shadows caused by the stands around the pitch, you’ll often see the picture being fed to your TV switching as the camera tries to work out what it should be prioritising.
If you do think your TV’s struggling, just make sure it’s not the channel that you’re watching that’s actually the problem.
Depending on how the feed is handled and the channel's bitrate, some matches might appear fuzzier and less defined on one channel than on another. In my experience, for example, ITV’s pictures tend to look lower quality than the BBC's.
Some TVs love to push the limits of their colour palettes, and bold colours can be handled reasonably well if they aren’t
It’s when it comes to more subtle shades required for, say, skin tones that need to be processed. The best TVs will be able to present them in a more realistic manner.
Some of those high temperatures in the US are delivering a few flushed faces, but do they look naturally all hot and bothered, or would you say they are overblown?
Use this year’s tournament or any football match as a way of helping to fine-tune your TV’s performance, and you might be surprised by what you discover.
MORE:
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