In the overall downward trend of the TV market, there is a "treasure" product - game TV. According to Aowei Cloud Network data, the retail sales of "game TVs" with high refresh rates of 120Hz and above in the Chinese market reached 2 million units in 2021, a year-on-year surge of 577%.
Entering 2022, the popularity of game TV has not diminished. Game giant Tencent has worked hard to lay out TV screens through cloud games, and e-commerce giant JD.com has also joined forces with Sony, Hisense, TCL, Skyworth, Changhong, Konka and other head brands to promote game TV. For a time, 120Hz high-brush TV has become a market highland that must be competed for by industry enterprises.
However, with the rise of market heat, the phenomenon of "mud and sand" has become more and more obvious. For today's gamers, buying a true 4K 120Hz TV is not an easy task. Why do different brands claim to be 4K 120Hz TVs, but the difference in playing is very large? What is the difference between a genuine 4K 120Hz TV?
The two "chronic diseases" of the television industry
From 2017 to 2021, the retail volume of China's TV market has been in a state of decline. According to Aowei Cloud Network, China's TV retail market hit a new 12-year low in 2021, and retail sales fell below the 40 million unit mark for the first time, down 13.8% year-on-year.
It is slightly gratifying that although the retail volume in 2021 is declining, the retail sales have maintained an upward trend, and the structural adjustment of products around the high-end large screen has become one of the important strategies for the survival and development of the TV industry in the stock era.
"Nail Technology" observation believes that although the downward trend of the TV market has the impact of high saturation of the demand side, such as the number of TVs per 100 urban households in 2021 exceeds 120, the industry's own problems cannot be ignored.
At present, the television industry has two major "chronic diseases": First, it is keen on the "price for volume" playing method. In this regard, since the CRT era in the 1990s, it has been skillfully operated, especially in the past 10 years, a large number of cross-border entry of Internet brands, the role of "price leverage" has been exerted to the extreme, and the low price has been exchanged for the market and then sought the income of backward operation, which has become a "trend". As a result, the industry's profit margin fell sharply, even falling below 1% in 2017, while users did not deepen their good feelings about the TV category during this period.
Second, the concept of packaging, shoddy skills are skilled, and in the long run, the trust and market are overdrawn. This can actually be seen as a complication of the "price war". In order to avoid users equating "low price" and "low end", some companies will stack out high-end technical concepts, but they cannot really raise the cost of products, so they use "information asymmetry" means to reduce or shoddy products.
Many times, these two "chronic diseases" will be associated with seizures. For example, after packaging the technical concept on the tall, low-cost dumping is carried out in a shoddy way, which exists in the 8K ultra-high-definition and 4K 120Hz TV markets.
"Nail Technology" noted that some TV brands claimed to launch 8K TV, but only the screen body is 8K resolution, the interface, chip is not 8K level, this type of product is actually "pseudo 8K TV". There are also some brands that launch new products that claim to support 8K, but only support 8K decoding, in fact, it is still a 4K TV, and users can't get a real 8K experience.
Although 4K 120Hz high-brush TV is very popular in the game circle, many people may not know that many game TVs and e-sports TVs that claim to support high brushes on the market are actually "pseudo high-brush TVs", and the 8K experience mentioned above, only exists in the manufacturer's promotional documents. So why?
True 4K 120Hz "Three Standards"
Before talking about 4K 120Hz high-brush TVs, let's take a look at how hot the gaming track is. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced plans to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, the largest all-cash acquisition in the gaming space to date. In addition, not long ago, the industry also reported that Apple is considering returning to the console game market. Ampere Analysis data shows that the total spending on console games, hardware and services in the console game market will reach $60 billion in 2021, and it is forecast to exceed $61 billion in 2022.
From a domestic point of view, the game giant Tencent has actively laid out the TV big screen in recent years, and its Tencent Pioneer has formed an account, three-terminal interconnection cloud game ecology, and further optimized the interaction cost for mobile, PC and TV large screens. On the e-commerce giant JD.com platform, game TV sales soared 27 times in 2021, becoming one of the emerging categories with the strongest explosive power of high-end TV. Moreover, Jingdong has also carried out customized cooperation with mainstream TV brands, such as jointly customizing the game TV X91J with Sony, customizing the electric light blue game TV V8Emax with TCL, jointly creating the second-generation game TV E7G-PRO with Hisense, and Skyworth jointly customizing the all-channel high-brush game TV A43.
"Nail Technology" noted that in the hot game TV track, Samsung, Sony, Skyworth, Hisense, TCL, Xiaomi and other mainstream companies are in the layout, which is a great opportunity for the TV industry to promote high-end upgrades, but it is still possible to "overturn" from observation.
The reason is that the above-mentioned industry "chronic disease" outbreak.
To ensure the experience of large-screen games, 120Hz high brush has become just needed, so TV companies have begun to compete in parameters. But in fact, if the user only relies on the parameters of 120Hz, 144Hz, 240Hz to start in a hurry, it is easy to fall into the "concept trap" of some manufacturers.
Just as only the screen is 8K and supports 8K decoding, but it is not necessarily a real 8K TV, the high-brush TV with a 4K 120Hz sign on the market is not necessarily a real 4K 120Hz TV. The popularity of pseudo-4K 120Hz will cause great harm to the TV industry that needs to be upgraded and consumers who are looking forward to high brush experience. So, what is the standard for true 4K 120Hz?
"Nail Technology" believes that similar to the definition logic of true 8K, true 4K 120Hz needs to introduce a "whole process" concept. This is actually not difficult to understand, and the same as the "barrel theory" is the same: if a barrel wants to be filled with water, every plank must not be damaged, and if there is a hole in one or several pieces, the bucket cannot be filled with water.
From the perspective of the "whole process" requirements, the true 4K 120Hz TV must have 4K 120Hz capabilities for screen display, chip decoding, and interface input, and all three are indispensable. Specifically, whether it has a 4K 120Hz high-brush screen, a 4K 120Hz decoding chip, and a full-blood HDMI2.1 interface is the standard for measuring the authenticity of 4K 120Hz high-brush TV.
So, what do those pseudo-4K 120Hz TVs do?
Be wary of the "shoddy" high brush experience
Compared with the standard of true 4K 120Hz, it can be seen that in terms of providing a "high brush experience", many companies will take "allocation reduction" behavior that is not easy for users to perceive in different links based on cost considerations. It usually manifests itself in three ways:
First, the screen body is reduced. For example, the TV is equipped with only a 4K 60Hz screen, and through interpolation/DLG/HSR and other technologies, the approximate 120Hz effect is achieved by interpolating/algorithm.
The application of interpolation technology on TV is not uncommon, it can insert a black frame according to the relationship between two adjacent frames, improve the video frame rate, and make the picture smoother. However, this technology will affect the brightness of the picture to a certain extent.
DLG is also a technology used in pseudo-4K 120Hz TVs. The refresh rate refers to the number of times the electron beam repeatedly scans the image on the screen, the higher the refresh rate, the better the picture stability of the image, and the higher the picture fluency. Pixels are arranged in rows on the display panel, and the display of the image is done by the sequential scanning of each row of pixels by an electron beam. DLG technology is more "clever", it is no longer scanning every line, but every two lines are scanned, on the 4K picture (3840X2160), the original each frame of the image needs to scan a total of 2160 lines, one second can scan 60 frames of the picture, now only need to scan 1080 times, reducing the time by half, you can achieve a second scan of 120 frames. While achieving a high refresh rate, this process has gains and losses, and the two lines of content that were originally different are replaced by the same content of the two lines, and the effective amount of data is halved accordingly, representing the decline in resolution. The advantage is that the refresh rate can be "improved", such as it can be increased from 60Hz to 120Hz, the disadvantage is that the picture clarity drops a lot, and the original 3840X2160 screen has become 3840X1080, with obvious graininess and insufficient fineness.
It can be imagined that the point-to-point express delivery, the ability of the courier is certain, the efficiency is capped, it is a comprehensive consideration of speed and volume, and the speed is required, it is inevitable to give up a certain amount of goods to carry first. The loss of data volume mentioned above is similar to the abandonment of the amount of goods carried.
The HSR is more advanced than the DLG, and through "timing adjustment", it automatically compensates for pixel charging in the panel to achieve refresh rate multiplication drive technology. Specifically, it can be simply understood that the first row shows the whole row of data, the second row shows the first row of data, half shows the third row of data (in fact, it abandons the data of the original second row), and the third row shows the whole row of data, which is significantly better than the DLG that only shows one row of data, but there is still data missing as a whole, and the clarity has also "shrunk".
Still taking point-to-point express delivery as an example, the courier through the ability upgrade or tool upgrade, under the premise of ensuring the speed, the volume of transportation may be improved to a certain extent, but the upper limit of the capacity, still does not match the total amount of express delivery. This situation is similar to the phenomenon that HSR is more advanced than DLG, but still has the phenomenon of "shrinking" clarity.
To put it simply, HSR and DLG technology is to achieve fluency by losing clarity. Therefore, although it can "harvest the mulberry" in the refresh rate, it will "lose the east" in clarity. As for the interpolation technology that relies on the algorithm, it is also impossible to fundamentally solve the problems of stuttering and delay of the game screen from the low brush screen body.
Second, the chip is reduced. For example, although the 4K 120Hz screen is used, the chip does not support full-channel 120Hz decoding. The so-called full-channel 120Hz decoding capability refers to the support for 120Hz decoding, including online streaming, transmission of playback through the HDMI 2.1 interface, and transmission and playback of the USB channel. This is actually related to the computing power of the TV SoC chip, if the computing power is not enough, no matter which way to play high-resolution, high-bitrate video content, forced video decoding, the screen will either be very stuttering, or can not be decoded and played, or will automatically be reduced to 60Hz and then output. In short, the chip does not support full-channel 120Hz decoding, and users cannot feel the real 120Hz high-brush experience.
Third, the interface is reduced. For example, although it has a 4K 120Hz screen and a 120Hz decoding chip, there is no full-blood version of the HDMI2.1 interface. It should be known that HDMI2.1 has two sets of protocols, namely TMDS protocol and FRL protocol, which originated from the HDMI forum canceled the concept of HDMI2.0 and chose to replace the original HDMI2.0 with HDMI2.1 TMDS protocol. Among them, HDMI2.1 FRL is the original standard HDMI2.1, which supports 48Gbps bandwidth, while HDMI2.1 TMDS is 18Gbps bandwidth. Therefore, in the strict sense of the word, HDMI2.1 TMDS is not really HDMI2.1. Therefore, only the full-blood version of the HDMI 2.1 interface, that is, HDMI FRL, can support the bandwidth of 48Gbps at full speed, achieving the highest specification signal transmission of 4K 120FPS 12bit RGB 4:4:4.
Regardless of the above reduction, the experience of 120Hz high brush will not be very good, or the picture clarity will deteriorate, or it will not be able to decode the playback or automatically reduce the frequency playback. These three types of situations, TV companies themselves actually know, but often do not show consumers. Therefore, although some game TVs claim to support 4K 120Hz, users will find that the experience is average after buying home, resulting in "desensitization" of this advanced technology.
"Nail Technology" believes that some technologies themselves do not need to be blamed, such as HSR/DLG such picture quality optimization technology, in a specific situation can improve the picture quality experience, the core problem is that TV companies should be frank and clear about the technology, configuration and experience level they can achieve, can not be based on the demands of market competition, trying to seek a larger high-end share at a lower cost, they deliberately pretend to be confused, using most consumers' "do not know how to do", to play the word game on publicity.
In short, Nail Technology believes that the 4K 120Hz TV market urgently needs to set off a wave of "de-fake and authentic" boom, which is not only responsible for consumers, but also responsible for the future of the industry. Today's TV companies use shoddy, information asymmetric methods to obtain customers in the short term, and tomorrow users will hit the brand and even the entire category into the cold palace because of the gap in experience. The television industry can't do a win-lose outcome with something that could have been a win-win situation. (Nail Technology original, reprint please be sure to indicate the source of "Nail Technology Network")