STACK #247 May 2025

TECH FEATURE

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From helpful AI assistants to higher refresh rates for gamers, we take a look at what’s new under the hood of this year’s smart TV line-up. Words Scott Hocking SMART TVS FOR 2025 NEW TECH CHECK

What’s trending in 2025 TVs Anti-glare and -reflection screens Many high-end TVs this year come with a special screen coating to reduce any pesky reflections and glare that might ruin your viewing. You’ll find it on Samsung’s flagship OLED and Neo QLED TVs, along with selected models from Hisense, LG and TCL.

AI TVs AI is rapidly becoming a part of everyday devices, and that includes new TVs. You’ll find it working behind the scenes, upscaling content and audio, recognising what you’re watching and adjusting things like colour and motion smoothing on the fly, and more. TVs with inbuilt AI are also designed to provide a more personalised user experience – for example, LG’s AI (dubbed ‘Affectionate Intelligence’) can recognise the individual voices of up to ten users and suggest personal recommendations for each profile.

AI makes searching for content easier, too. LG’s AI includes a chatbot that can search, troubleshoot, and adjust picture and sound settings with a simple voice command, while Samsung’s new Vision AI enables fast searching without leaving the movie or show – handy if you’ve forgotten the name of a familiar actor. Vision AI can even generate subtitles during live broadcasts, and wallpapers to give the TV a lifestyle look

when it’s idle.

Hisense’s AI TVs can auto select the best picture mode for the content you’re watching, while TCL TVs use it to enhance HDR and perform dynamic colour calibration. AI integration also means that you’ll now find a dedicated AI button on the remotes of selected models to call up your helpful TV assistant.

More Google TV While some brands use a proprietary OS, others offer Google TV built-in to streamline your streaming. Google TV’s simplicity and content variety has made it the go-to OS for many brands this year, such as TCL and Philips.

THE MINI-LED DIFFERENCE

If an OLED TV is beyond your budget, the good news is that Mini-LED TVs are improving in the picture quality stakes, delivering deeper blacks and super bright whites comparable to OLED. Plus, the high brightness of Mini-LED TVs makes them a great choice for living spaces with lots of natural light. Mini-LED TVs take the traditional LED backlighting used in LCD TVs and cranks it up to the next level, often incorporating quantum dot tech to boost colours.

Where regular LED TVs might use hundreds of lights, Mini-LED TVs have tens of thousands of super small LEDs – up to 75% smaller than standard ones. Functions like Local Dimming and Full Array Local Dimming allow a Mini-LED TV to fine-tune the brightness in different areas of the screen independently, so dark scenes look more natural without losing clarity in the brighter areas. You’ll pick up fine details in both the brightest and darkest parts of a scene, like a glowing streetlamp on a pitch-black night, without any annoying halo effect surrounding the light. Indeed, 2025 TCL Mini-LED TVs feature a dedicated ‘Halo Eliminator’ for this very purpose. Mini-LED tech will continue to improve, and moving forward we can expect to see RGB Mini-LED, which uses red, green, and blue LEDs for even finer control of colour without impacting brightness.

165Hz VRR There’s good news for gamers, with many 2025 TVs supporting a new, higher VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) of up 165Hz, meaning ever better quality gaming if your PC or console can handle such high-end output. More XXL-sized screens This year, you’ll find more mega screen sizes offered across the range, with 83-inch OLEDs from Samsung and LG, and a wider selection of 98” and 100” whoppers from Hisense and TCL.

10 MAY 2025

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