Televisions

LED, QLED, Mini LED and OLED televisions:

the difference is how the picture is lit. A plain LED set is an LCD panel with a white backlight behind it, the cheapest way into 4K and most of what Sankey and Westinghouse sell. QLED, the core of the TCL and Hisense ranges, adds a quantum-dot film for stronger colour. Mini LED splits the backlight into many zones that dim separately, keeping blacks dark in a bright room. OLED, from LG and Samsung, has no backlight at all: each pixel makes its own light, so black is truly black, at a higher price and with a risk of burn-in from a channel logo left on all day. Size decides more than panel type in most homes. A 55-inch suits a sofa about two metres away; a 65-inch is nearly a metre and a half wide, so measure the wall. For a PlayStation 5 at 120 frames per second the panel has to be a true 120 Hz with an HDMI 2.1 port, and plenty of budget sets are 60 Hz. Disc collections need a separate player from Blu-ray and DVD players.

The tuner on a television brought from the United States:

only matters if you watch free-to-air. Costa Rica broadcasts digital terrestrial television on the Japanese-Brazilian ISDB-Tb standard. Sets made for the Latin American market have that tuner built in. Sets made for the US carry ATSC instead and show nothing through an aerial until you add an ISDB-T converter box. On cable or streaming it makes no difference, so a US set can still be a sound buy: ask which version it is and look for ISDB-T on the box or the spec sheet.

What a 65-inch costs new, and why used screens fall fast:

big screens have become cheap: A mainstream 4K 65-inch from Samsung, TCL or Hisense runs around ₡300,000 to ₡450,000 new, and a basic 32-inch smart set is under ₡100,000. So a three-year-old LED set competes with a new one of the same size, and the buyer is taking on an ageing backlight, so it only makes sense at a price that leaves room to replace the strips. OLED and high-end Mini LED hold value longer, because a new one still costs several times a budget set.

Backlight strips, storm-damaged boards and burnt-in OLEDs:

are behind most dead televisions. Let the set run for a quarter of an hour, then put up plain white, grey and a dark scene, looking for dim patches and lines. Sound with a black screen almost always means the LED backlight has gone; shine a phone torch close to the panel, and if a faint picture shows, the strips are the fault and can be replaced; a cracked or lined panel cannot. A set that died during an afternoon thunderstorm usually lost its power board or main board to a surge, which can arrive through the antenna cable as well as the plug, so treat “it stopped after a storm” as a parts set. On an OLED, the grey screen shows any burnt-in logo or news ticker. The sticker on the back, with model code and manufacturing date, gives the real series and age.

Getting a flat screen to its next living room:

starts with honest photos: the screen on with a bright image, the back sticker, the ports and the remote. Give size, panel type, year and refresh rate, say whether it is a Latin American or US model, and mention any line or burn-in up front, since it shows the moment the set is on. Keep the stand or bracket with it, and the box if you have it. A flat panel should travel upright and a 65-inch will not lie across the back seat of most cars, so someone coming from Ciudad Quesada or Puntarenas wants to know how it gets home. Offering to leave it running while they look settles more sales than a discount does.