Duncan Bell Is In Ultra HD

Today’s mega-tellies practically force you to watch pretty pictures and blockbusters.

Although I wouldn’t claim to know a lot about TVs, I do like being shown new ones, and nodding sagely while someone yaks on about ‘bezels’, ‘HDR’ and ‘Super OLED Ultra Mega Hi Definition-o-matic’. Well, it gets me out of the office.

I do feel, however, like the current generation of goggle-boxes is reaching some kind of pinnacle of frenzied tech willy-waving. Are they now so massive, so pristine and so perfect that they’re too good for us mere humans?

TVs are nearly always sold on their picture quality being ‘realistic’. But OLED 4K, at least as presented in shops and at trade shows, is not realistic at all.

It’s so ultra-vivid and hyper-real. You’ve got colours like an explosion in a Dulux factory, yet with blacks that are blacker than the interior of a broom cupboard in a black hole. At night. Motion is smoothed out to a pristine sheen, pixels are polished and bezels banished, so the image seems to hang in the air.

It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t resemble my life in any way. Maybe if I was a Kardashian, it would seem real. But although, yes, you can stand a pint glass on the perfect curve of my buttocks, and I regularly break the internet, I’m not a Kardashian. Alas.

Club too def