What is 4K?
Just when you’ve got used to HD, along comes the next big leap forward. A 4K or UHD (Ultra High Definition) TV has a resolution four times higher than Full HD, packing in more than eight million pixels. That extra fine detail on screen gives an astonishingly lifelike picture that can feel more like looking through a window than watching the box.

As with HD when it first arrived, there’s not a lot of actual content to watch in 4K right now, but that will change quickly. Netflix and YouTube both have plans for 4K in 2014, while Sony has launched its own 4K download store in the US – don’t bet against the PlayStation 4 eventually receiving a firmware update that enables 4K playback either. Until then, the best 4K TVs do a great job of upscaling current HD content to near 4K quality – the same might not be true of lesser-known brands, so be wary of any too-good-to-be-true bargains.

The bigger issue for many early adopters will be space. To really appreciate all those extra pixels from the comfort of your sofa you’ll need a big screen, which is why current 4K options are mainly 55-inch or bigger. Time will tell whether we’ll see many 4K TVs at smaller sizes in 2014, but for now you’ll need a big living room and a bigger budget.

OLED screens
Long before 4K came along, OLED was the next big thing – and it’s still one of the next big things today, as it hasn’t yet taken off in the way the TV industry promised. OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode, and it’s a more advanced type of panel than LCD because instead of a backlight, every individual pixel is its own light source. This makes an OLED TV much more power efficient, with perfect blacks and a contrast ratio current TVs can only dream of. Everyone who sees one in action wants one, but even though the first TVs hit the market a couple of years ago, there’s still only a few out there – and the prices remain astronomical. Keep an eye on OLED, but don’t expect to combine it with 4K for a while yet.

Curved TVs
The final big idea of 2014 is a strange one. When you watch a flat screen head-on, your eyes are slightly further away from left and right edges than the middle, which can have a small effect on colours and focus. The solution? Curve those edges towards the viewer, obviously. Now, this makes perfect sense on a gigantic IMAX screen where the far edges would otherwise be several metres further away than the middle, but on the average 40-inch telly you’d have to be sitting a few feet away to be in that viewing sweet spot. Best reserved for truly giant screens or close-up computer monitors, for now we’d put curved TVs in the wait-and-see pile.