Buying a new TV can be an overwhelming experience these days. With so many brands and features available, where do you even start? This short guide will point you in the right direction.

TVs are improving rapidly each year. With higher resolution density to more connectivity, you don't want to purchase a TV that will become obsolete in one year. For that reason, I recommend purchasing a TV with at least 4k quality to make sure you'll be able to take advantage of the ever increasing amount of 4K content available. Avoid any TV set that is offering 720p or 1080p resolution. That's ancient technology by today's standards. 8K TVs are great, but they are still too expensive for the average TV buyer, so you can pass up on it unless you can afford it.

You've probably seen OLED or QLED plastered all over the place. But what exactly is it? LED, QLED, and OLED specify how your TV set emits light. This changes the contrast ratio and therefore realism of your TV set. Let's discuss each one briefly to get a better understanding.

LED TVs - LED televisions have a backscreen which projects light through all pixels on your TV set. This means that you can get very bright screens with LCD screens. However, because the backlight is always projected, you do not get great contrast. Black colors look bright and greyish instead of black. LEDs are the cheapest available screens and are cheaper to pack more pixels in the same area. This means that LED TVs are the cheapest of the 3 options.

QLED TVs - QLED TVs are similar to LCD due to the ever persistent backlight. However, QLED TVs also come with a quantum dot film sandwiched between the many layers of a normal LCD. When the backlight hits that quantum dot film, it provides further improvements over traditional LCDs. Expect to get a slight visual improvement, but also pay slightly more for QLED TVs.

OLED TVs - OLED TVs are a completely different type of technology. There is no more backlight that sends light through many layers of the TV screen. OLED TV screens are packed with pixels that emit their own light. This means that when you need to draw darker colors on screen you just dim the individual pixels or turn them off completely. This provides unlimited contrast ratio since this is how light behaves in the real world. The downside is that you can only pack so many of these pixels at an affordable price, which means that OLED TVs are very expensive. The other downside of OLED TVs is that they cannot compete with LCDs in brightness. However, OLED TVs provide the best picture quality available on the market overall, provided the resolutions are equal.

The TV refresh rate tells us how many times a second the TV will update the image on screen. The standard is 60 times per second (or 60 hertz) but some TVs will offer 120Hz which will reduce motion blur and provide a much better viewing experience. If you can afford it, try a 120Hz TV and see the difference yourself.