Whether you call it football or soccer, the Beautiful Game is the best. As someone whose soul is nourished to an unhinged degree by watching 22 millionaires bashing a synthetic sphere around a field, I’m incredibly excited about the upcoming 2026 World Cup, which kicks off on June 11.
That said, I’m much less enthused by the prospect of huge amounts of people watching the world’s biggest sporting event on the wrong type of TV. Okay, maybe “wrong” sounds absolutely obnoxious to say. I’ll retract that. How about a ‘less than ideal’ type of display?
A huge number of people are buying (or plan to buy) bigger screens for the World Cup, and these days you can get amazingly cheap TVs in giant sizes. These will be LCD TVs with basic backlights (which means a set of LED lights that shines through the pixels, creating the light your eyes will actually pick up), but they’re exactly what I want to warn you against.
But a super-cheap LCD is quantifiably the last type of TV I’d want to watch the World Cup on, due to one extremely annoying screen defect you’re likely to encounter if you TV is too basic. Let me explain.
The dreaded dirty screen effect
Before I break down exactly what ‘dirty screen’ effect or ‘DSE’ is, I’ll flat out admit I utterly loathe this particular screen quirk that can be particularly obvious on many cheap LCD TVs.
How much do I detest DSE? As a coulrophobe who hates mushrooms and is also deathly afraid of heights, I’d rather go on a date with Pennywise involving a 10-course sampling menu of nothing but portobello-based appetizers atop the CN Tower, before I’d watch a single World Cup match on an LCD display.
What exactly is the dirty screen effect? It’s an issue where inconsistencies in a TV’s backlight levels quickly lead to visible onscreen blotches.
These smudgy areas, where particular areas of the panel look darker or lighter than others, are especially easy to spot while watching something with a pretty uniformly colored portion of the screen, and with lot of fast-paced camera pans.
And wouldn’t you know it? Football/soccer has a whole lot of constant back and forth camera swings every time the ball is booted from the center circle to the edge of the opposition’s D.
Dirty screen effect is easiest to identify when watching content where large parts of the screen are made up of a single uniform color. Whether that’s pans across blue skies or across a green field, whenever a camera is swinging from side to side against large patches, DSE will rear its ugly head on lower-quality sets.
What causes the dirty screen effect?
Rather than being caused by a single factor, there are multiple issues that can lead to the dirty screen effect occurring. Though I’ve finally stopped worrying about OLED burn-in thanks to Light-Emitting Diode displays combating the issue through features like pixel cleaning cycles, DSE on huge cheap LCD panels remains as bad as it was on smaller cheap LCD panels a decade ago, because the fundamental problem hasn’t changed.
The production process that goes into making LCD TVs is largely to blame for the soccer-ruining dirty screen effect. LCDs use multiple layers and diffuser sheets, which often leads to backlight uniformity issues when panels are being assembled.
If a cheaply-made panel is combined with not having enough LEDs behind the screen to illuminate it all uniformly (you can even end up with parts of the panel’s interior casting shadows), you’ll end up with some areas being more strongly illuminated than others.
In order to make TVs today so much bigger than they were, but affordable at the price most people want to pay, corners have to be cut — and the quality of panel assembly and backlighting can end up as a casualty.
And yet, giant screens are where you’re most likely to notice these issues, because there’s so much more space for you to notice the imperfections.
Despite, some folks will be completely oblivious to DSE. I get that. But as someone who is cursed with obsessive eyes that still hates myself for enabling motion smoothing on a TV when switching on sports (but you should do it — as I explained in that article), my peepers are constantly drawn to the lighting defect while watching soccer in a bar.
And trust me, as someone who watched over 60 Arsenal games last season (hoo-boy does that Champions League Final defeat in Budapest still sting), I know a thing or two (times 30) about watching football on subpar screens out in public.
What can you do about it?
Personally, I’d buy an OLED TV. I’ve watched nearly all of my football at home on OLED panels since 2015. If you have the budget for it, and watch to enjoy the World Cup with the best image quality and least distracting visual issues, check out the best OLED TVs. If you go OLED, your eyes will never be bothered by LCD’s biggest deficiency when watching footy/soccer. The LG G5 is a bargain while stocks last, as is the cheaper LG C5. The Samsung S95F, with its anti-reflective screen, is particular good for daytime sports viewing.
However, big-screen OLED TVs are expensive. They’re also nowhere near as bright for fullscreen viewing as decent mini-LED TVs, meaning they’re more prone to distracting reflections if you’re watching during the day (though the Samsung S95F and LG G6 are better for this — but they’re still pricey).
So here’s some very basic advice: get a mini-LED TV instead of a regular LED TV and you’re less likely to have a noticeable dirty-screen problem. All mini-LED TVs use a grid of LEDs across the whole back of the screen with support for local dimming — and more premium sets use much smaller LED and fit in many more of then, which helps with the uniformity of lighting. And they’ll pack in more LEDs are larger sizes, to avoid any problems from going big.
If a mini-LED doesn’t fit in your budget at the size you’re thinking, you should drop down a size, rather than getting a poorer-quality but larger screen. You don’t want to spend a whole tournament getting distracted by a strange shadowy effect on the screen.
The cheapest TV TechRadar’s reviewers recommend to avoid a major dirty screen effect is the TCL QM6K in the US, or the TCL C6K in the UK. The uniformity on this set still isn’t always perfect, but it’s as good as you get for the price.
If you step up to the TCL QM7K (US) / TCL C7K (UK) or the Hisense U7N, you’re at the point where you’re unlikely to notice it.
Going further to the premium Samsung QN90F (which we rate as the best TV for sport), the TCL QM8K (US) / TCL C8K (UK) or the Hisense U8N means you won’t need to worry about DSE.
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