What to look for when buying a new television this holiday season

Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley breaks down what qualities to look for when shopping for a new TV this year.

Video Transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: Sticking with retail, it's still a hot time of year to do some tech shopping ahead of the holidays. Dan Howley here with some tips on what to look for when buying a new TV. Dan, I am in the market. I am paying full attention to this.

DAN HOWLEY: Ooh, all right. Cool. I love TVs. My buddy just bought a 77 inch television.

DAVE BRIGGS: That's a big room.

DAN HOWLEY: It's not. It's in an apartment in Queens.

DAVE BRIGGS: Oh boy.

SEANA SMITH: Wow.

DAN HOWLEY: So he's going to live inside the TV. And let's just run down some of the things that you need to know when you go to buy a TV. First of all, let's look at some of these specs. Size is probably the first one. My buddy did not take that into account. You want to make sure that when you're getting a TV, it's the right size for your space.

You don't want to be too close. You don't want to be too far. And if you're far away, you don't want to have a 40 inch screen and then everything looks like ants. But you also don't want to be watching, I don't know, like Spider-Man, and feel like he's going to attack you in your living room.

That's not what he does. But maybe he would. The other thing is type. There are two different main types of TVs out there. There's OLED and LCD. Most of the ones on the market are LCD. That's fine. You're probably watching this on an LCD. But if you really want the best picture, you should go with OLED. OLED basically allows for pure blacks, which means you're going to get perfect color. You'll get anything that's in kind of like a darkened room.

It's not going to have that, oh, why is this fuzzy in this area? It's going to look perfectly black. Then you'll have a nice kind of flow to the colors around it. Also brighter colors will look even better. Everything pops a lot more. HDR, that is high dynamic range. You'll see that on a lot of TVs now. LCD, OLED, it has it. OLED is going to have it regardless just because, as I said, it's able to produce those beautiful vibrant colors.

If you're getting an LCD, make sure that it has HDR capabilities. Number of ports you want, you need HDMI. Get four. Trust me. I don't care if you don't need four right now. Get them. Refresh rate, the higher the better. And price, anything you can get that's, I would say, a little under a thousand, for a great TV I'm talking, that's good. I picked mine up for 1,200. It's a 65 inch LGC1 OLED.

SEANA SMITH: That sounds nice. I have no idea the size of my TV.

DAN HOWLEY: Oh my God.

SEANA SMITH: When you were talking about it, I was like, it could be 40 inch, it could be-- I have no idea.

DAN HOWLEY: Oh, 65 is the way to go. 77?

SEANA SMITH: I don't-- I don't live in a big enough house--

DAVE BRIGGS: You could close your eyes and think this man is talking about a fine bottle of Cabernet. Right?

DAN HOWLEY: That's usually what's next to me in front of the TV. I'm not going to lie.

DAVE BRIGGS: Dan Howley, great stuff. [KISS NOISE] All right.