If you’ve read any TV product page or advert in recent years, it's likely you will have come across the term “nits”.
The nit is the latest measurement that manufacturers have jumped on as an easy way to communicate a TV’s superiority.
That’s why this year you will see everything from next-generation Mini LED sets to step-down OLEDs throwing big nit counts around, like the Billy Big screens they think they are.
That was certainly the case with the LG C5 I recently helped review with senior staff writer, Lewis Empson. LG is selling the set’s Brightness Booster engine – which does what it says on the tin – as a key reason to buy the C5.
In some ways I get the appeal. As with megapixels on cameras, or clock speeds on CPUs, having an easy to understand “bigger is better” number to differentiate your product from its rivals is a nice thing to have for marketers.
And the nit-count is actually a valid stat in some instances. The short version of what a nit is, is that it's a measurement of luminance. Fun fact: a single nit is roughly the luminance of a single candle.
So having a higher number of nits, when the technology is put to good use, can have a serious impact on operating and peak brightness – two factors that help to inform things such as light detail, contrast and HDR performance.
But the focus here should be on the “when put to good use” part, as it is just one ingredient in the recipe for solid picture quality.
It's a fact that was well showcased by the LG C5 during testing. While the TV is certainly moderately brighter than the LG C4, it wasn’t that part of the picture that made me and Lewis go “wow”.
Rather, it was the combined efforts of a wealth of subtle improvements to the TV’s handling of colour, contrast and general light control that led to one of the most three-dimensional movie-watching experiences we have seen on a C-series to date.
A good example of this came when watching Blade Runner 2049 on our 4K Blu-ray test disc.
During the first scene, we found the C5’s colour reproduction to be improved over the C4, with skin tones in particular looking more pleasant, and colour volume being much better throughout what is an incredibly dark scene.
Key details including wrinkles in the sofa in the near pitch black farmhouse’s lounge retained colour variations lost on the step-down OLED models we reviewed last year.
The combined effect led to much better contrast, with a wider separation and range of colours between the lightest and darkest parts of the picture making everything look more solid, three-dimensional and generally true to life.
As we say in the review:
“Subjects stand out against the background to striking effect, with sharp, yet never over-etched or artificial-looking edges.”
Had LG simply gone brighter and ignored all the other optimisations, the improvements wouldn’t have been as palpable.
So there you have it: in my opinion, the LG C5 is a great example of why you shouldn’t base your next TV purchase purely on its nit count.
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