Here's What 'Upscaling' Actually Means For Your Smart TV

TVs have become increasingly diverse, from  24-inch screens in bedroom corners to 80-inch living room behemoths. And while the technology behind these devices has improved over the years, not all content has been updated to work with the new, higher resolutions that these larger TV screens offer. One way that companies help mitigate this is through upscaling. Depending on the resolution of your TV and how new it is, you might already be taking advantage of upscaling. But what exactly is upscaling, and how does it work on your TV?

The easiest way to break down what upscaling does is to imagine you're watching an older movie or TV show that was released in 480p resolution — that was the standard resolution for a long time — and your TV renders it up so that it fits your 4K television display, offering a crisper, cleaner playback. It also works with shows and movies rendered in full HD, which is 1080p, allowing you to increase their playback resolution to 4K or even 8K levels.

Understanding how upscaling works, though, can help you choose from one of the best smart TV brands, so that you can avoid the worst options out there.

Upscaling these days relies on a process called interpolation. This is where the "approximate value" of something is calculated based on already known values. While interpolating is usually a term you might expect to see more in science and mathematics, it also applies to upscaling technology, because your TV is ultimately just taking the image that the original video uses and then estimating what those around it would look like if the original was spread out across the higher resolution.

This means that watching a standard 1080p image on a 4K television will require stretching an image with 2,073,600 pixels to 8,294,400 pixels. That's a lot of space that needs to be filled to keep the image looking good. The scaling is even greater on an 8K TV, as that spans 33,177,600 pixels.

You'll often get a better image result from something closer to the target pixel amount — so 1080p images to 4K will look sharper than something that was only 720p or 480p. However, if you look at an upscaled image next to one that is rendered at the display's native resolution — the resolution that the TV actually displays at — then the upscaled image will look lower quality. That's one reason why you might want to wait to upgrade to an 8K TV, as display size is one spec you should consider when buying a new TV.