Must Haves for Your Black Friday TV

You’ve scored a great deal on a Black Friday TV, and now you want to enjoy your TV. These simple and easy upgrades will take your experience to the next level.

Soundbar

The number one thing you can do to improve your viewing experience is to upgrade the sound. When TVs were large and weighed hundreds of pounds they were able to house large speakers that could fill the room with sound. Today’s TVs are literally an inch and a half in thickness, making it essentially impossible to fit quality speakers. It’s physics. The image is only half of the experience. Upgrade your sound to get the experience you were meant to enjoy.

soundbar
Samsung HW-K850

Soundbars are the easiest way to upgrade your sound. All you have to do is place it in position, and plug the power cable into a power outlet and the audio cable into your TV. It really is that simple. Dialogue will be easier to understand, and you’ll be able to hear all the separate sounds in the scene without them seeming mushed together.

Most models include a wireless subwoofer that only needs to be plugged into a power outlet, allowing you to place it anywhere in the room. Subwoofers provide those low and deep bass sounds that you can often feel. It’s the difference between watching TV and feeling like you’re there.

Soundbars are by far the easiest way to upgrade your TV. There are budget, mainstream, and premium models available.

Streaming Media Player

Yes, most TVs have some form of streaming built-in already. That’s fine if all you want to do is watch Netflix (it’s on basically every TV). But there’s a better way… Here are a few good reasons to upgrade to a streaming box.

roku1
Amazon Fire Stick with Alexa Voice Remote (left), Roku Ultra (right)

Media streamers have more content. Of course everything has Netflix, but beyond that it becomes uncertain. Do you want to buy or rent current TV shows and movies? Smart TVs are generally limited in their app offerings. With a media streamer you have more apps. For example, no TV has iTunes (which has one of the largest content libraries), but you can get it with a streamer.

icons

Media streamers are faster and easier to use. Everything is laid out well so you can get to what you want quickly and easily. A few TVs do have decent menus, but there’s still one more advantage the streamers have…

tv

Media streamers are constantly releasing updates that improve the experience by tweaking the interface and improving the available apps. If you bought a smart TV a couple of years ago, chances are that its interface and apps remain the same.

Wall Mount

mount

Ditch the extra furniture, reclaim your floor space, and place your TV wherever you want. Wall mounts aren’t just an aesthetic option—they can actually improve the image quality. If you have lighting issues in your room, you can tilt the TV up or down to side to side to reduce glare. You can also pull the TV away from the wall and angle it to provide a better viewing angle or allow for multi-room viewing.

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Player

You can stream 4K content through recently released streamers like the Roku Ultra and Amazon Fire TV, but there’s a catch. Even though it’s much higher quality than 1080p, it could be better. 4K video takes up an enormous amount of bandwidth on your Internet connection. Streamers minimize this by compressing both the audio and the video which means …

bluray
Samsung UBD-K8500

To get the highest quality 4K content, you’ll want to use a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Player. With the 4K Blu-ray, you’re seeing the original uncompressed file, and that means better image quality and better sound quality. You will notice the video quality improvement, but the sound quality improvement is something you will notice if you use high quality external speakers (and you should definitely upgrade your speakers, even if it’s as simple as a soundbar).

One more bonus: 4K Blu-ray players like those from Samsung and Philips support HDR, which shows exceptional contrast for deeper blacks and brighter whites. Your video will look incredibly real when combined with 4K and HDR.