The Best TV for Sports

Some things you just don’t want to see that clearly. A documentary about cockroaches? A vlog about extreme couponing? The news? We’re hazarding a guess that most of us hope those details get left out. But, sports — sports you want the combat sharpened, the mud under the cleats spattering the screen, and the beads of sweat exploding from the face of the heavyweight knocked to the canvas.

With today’s TV technology, you can feel like you’re inside the gladiatorial mayhem of centers duking it out in the post, or running backs finding invisible seams. We’d even argue that it’s better than sitting up in the nosebleeds, squinting at the jerseys swimming like dots at the bottom of the stadium. But what’s the best TV for watching sports? Depends on the type of viewing experience you’re looking for. Read on for our rundown of the features that a top-of-the-line sports TV offers so you can decide which one is ideal for you.

Which TV Features are Best for Watching Sports?

You reserve the family room months in advance. You get the knuckleheads over for the World Cup. You grimace as Doug spills beer on the couch. You repeat “Hmm” as Chris recounts the wondrous returns of crypto. But you know what? You watched Messi lead Argentina to their first championship in 36 years, and it didn’t matter that Doug’s beer went flying out of his hands. At least, not right now. Because amid the screams and the airborne suds, you thanked yourself for taking the time to research the features of a TV that make the velocity of the game much more vivid. Here are those features:

Screen size

If you were to time travel back to 1946, consider inviting any billionaires who’ve gotten bored with taking a spin into outer space or creating their own immortality serums. But also take $200 with you, because that will buy you a television set…by which we mean a brownish, fusty box resembling an old-timey suitcase with a few knobs stuck in it next to an ivory-colored screen spanning an entire 10 inches wide.

Let that marinate: A 10-inch screen. Today’s TVs regularly come in 75-inch, 85-inch, or 100-inch models. To each their own, but here’s the benefit of a large TV: You can fit the stadium inside your living room. The viewing angle will be wider and you can bask in the dazzling physical force of the competition.

Picture quality

“4K” and “8K.” These names might sound like marathons, but they actually refer to the resolution and image detail of a TV screen. A 4K TV boasts over 8 million pixels, making images more vivid than traditional Full HD TVs. 8K, meanwhile, has 16 times more pixels than a Full HD TV. With all that intense clarity, streaming Tapeworms: A History might be risky. But it’s perfect for letting you marvel at how LeBron can still throw down violent dunks on the doorstep of forty.

Two other terms in the world of TV to familiarize yourself with: “Contrast ratio” and “color palette.” Contrast ratio is the range of luminosity, from lightest to darkest, that a screen can display. A high contrast ratio will ensure that bright images still show up on a TV mounted in a room aglow with sunlight. (Imagine turning on the game at noon on Sunday and the brightness outside washes out the action onscreen. Not ideal.)

The color palette is also crucial for enhancing your viewing experience. The more colors a TV displays, the more details appear — the dimples on a golf ball, the band of muscle in a racehorse’s thigh, the spray and whorl of the waves beneath a surfboard. Make sure your TV can handle smooth color gradients that stencil forth the contours and shades within an image, creating a lifelike sense of depth and dimension.

Sound system

Remember when the NBA was playing in the Bubble during COVID? That was bizarre. Anthony Davis of the LA Lakers shouted “Kobe!” — commemorating the Lakers legend who died that year — and hit the game-winner, and the place exploded. Except it didn’t. Because they were in the Bubble, a bio-secure, $190 million, quarantined site complex specially-built to protect the NBA’s 2019–20 season. Not a single fan was allowed in. So the drama of the contest unfolded against the muted backdrop of a soaring, sterilized building, as if the flares of temper and the pyrotechnics of talent were all swirling around at the bottom of a giant tub of yogurt.

To feel the game shoot through your spine and fire your blood, you need sound — but you also need the electricity of the crowd. Even when the reaction of the fans is silence, you can hear it, in a way that’s different from the hush of an empty arena. Because silence in the rafters one moment can turn into roars of exultation the next. And you’ll want to bring all those sounds home with a Dolby Atmos speaker system, which provides an immersive, lifelike, encompassing audio experience.

Smart TV

A smart TV comes with its pros and cons, but our vote is that TVs are getting more intelligent every year, and you’re better off with the latest models that graduated at the top of their class. Smart TVs can also send you reminders about upcoming games and offer more apps and sites online where you can view even more sports content.

Refresh rate

Flipbooks are something that you probably last picked up when you were back in elementary school. Those pocket-sized blocks of index-card-looking-pages that you adjust your thumb against imperceptibly, and a mini-movie of a stick-figure falling off a tightrope onto a trampoline bursts into being — remember those? That’s the basic production concept for video: A slideshow of thousands of images revved up to replicate the illusion of motion. The refresh rate of a TV refers to how many images a TV can show in one second. The higher the refresh rate, the smoother the action appears onscreen — from Messi sprinting downfield to Jokić powering through the paint en route to his first championship. And oh, by the way, Hisense makes the official TV of the NBA. Just a fun little tidbit for you.

Most TVs have a 60 Hz refresh rate, meaning they can display 60 still images per second. But in order to keep pace with the fast motion of live action sports, a TV with 120Hz is ideal. Thing is, most channels still broadcast their content at 60 Hz (for now). Some of the latest ULED series TV’s from Hisense, such as the U7K, and U8K not only boast 144 Hz refresh rates (talk about being future-proof!), but they also employ an ingenious proprietary technology known as Motion Estimate and Motion Compensation (MEMC) feature to make the picture quality smoother — scanning the backlight in LED TVs to reduce motion trail. Go to your settings and select “Motion Enhancement.” You’ll find options like “Smooth,” “Clear,” and “Film” that reduce the judder and blur so that you feel like you have a ringside, rinkside, courtside, or field-side view from the comfort of your family room. 

What is the difference between refresh rate and motion technology?

So far in this blog, you’ve learned about refresh rates, 8K resolution, Dolby Atmos technology, and the perils of letting your fantasy football buds drink too much in your house. All insider knowledge in the TV industry. Now for another domain expert discussion: Refresh rates versus motion rates. Here’s an overview of how those vocab items compare:

	Refresh Rate	Motion Rate
What is it?	The process of speeding up still-frame images to replicate animation.	Image processing technology meant to sharpen motion clarity.
When was it released?	1941	2016
How do you measure it?	Hz (hertz)	Hz (hertz)
Who developed it?	NTSC (National Television Standards Committee)	Samsung
Fun Facts	The optimal refresh rate is 120 Hz.	Samsung came up with the term, which is not useless — but not universally adopted.

Scanning that table, you might be thinking, ‘Wait … are motion rates real, or just trumped-up marketing-speak?’ Granted, “motion rate” is sometimes referred to as the “fake refresh rate.” But many companies have developed their own versions of motion rates:

Company	Motion Rate Software
LG	TruMotion
Sony	MotionFlow XR & XR Motion Clarity
TCL	Clear Motion Index
Vizio	Effective Refresh Rate

Motion rates came about because a 120Hz refresh rate on a TV for 24–30 fps (frames per second) broadcast — which is how most TV channels display shows in the NTSC format — can appear blurry when you’re watching dazzling speed in a high-definition program, like a car race. Motion rates aren’t as fast as refresh rates, but they can make 60Hz refresh rates for 30Hz presentations sharper via two techniques:

Black Frame Insertion (BFI)

Some manufacturers add a black frame between images that only lasts a fraction of a second, but introduces contrast that converts blur into focus. (Be warned: BFI can also lessen the brightness of a screen.)

Frame Rate Interpolation

Ever heard of the soap opera effect? Frame rate interpolation is a technique by which a TV processes one frame at a time and guesstimates what the next frame should look like, providing an unreal transition frame that the TV spins up from the original content. That technique is useful for sports — where you want to feel justified when you scream at the ref for not calling the and-one — but it tends to impart upon the hallowed reels of great cinema the glossy atmosphere of a soap opera. (Which makes Tom Cruise unhappy, even though he seems to be on the edge of laughing throughout his entire PSA about how switching on video interpolation is a very bad, no good, immoral thing to do.)

Compounding the confusion here is that, as we saw above, a bevy of companies have a bevy of terms for motion rates, so you gotta hunt and peck to find the appropriate name of the setting and turn it or off, depending on the viewing experience you want. Studying Citizen Kane? Switch off motion rates. Hoping, against all odds, that the Mets will break free from their seemingly perpetual mediocrity? Turn on motion rates and keep those fingers crossed.

Watch the next game on Hisense.

Doug, Doug, Doug. You knew him in college, you drifted apart, but he moved five minutes away and now you feel obligated. The guy eats the lion’s share of the snacks and homemades, there’s the beer-spillage issue, and he always wants to watch documentaries. What are you gonna do? Doug may never learn, but you can browse Hisense’s award-winning TVs and select the one with the features that make watching your next sporting event of choice pristine and epic, regardless of your company.