About 2kit

Why tv-test.com?

Our TV apps have passed 100 million downloads, and with that many users comes a lot of mail. Over the years a pattern emerged in it: A large share of the problems people reported were not bugs in our apps. They were the television. A panel with a dead pixel. A set quietly cropping the edges of the picture. A platform that claims to support a video format and then refuses to play it. Sound running half a second behind the picture.

We got good at telling those apart, because we had to. Every one of those reports needed an answer, and the honest answer was often "your TV is doing this, and here is how to see it for yourself". tv-test.com is that knowledge, handed to you directly instead of through a support ticket.

The test lab

We keep more than 100 televisions and streaming devices on site, and we test on them. Not a rented cloud device farm: Real sets in a real room, switched on and driven with a remote.

The collection reaches back to some of the oldest Smart TVs ever sold, including Samsung's C and D series, and it includes the first generation of Chromecast, Fire TV and Roku alongside current models. That matters more than it sounds. A tool that only works on this year's flagship is no use to someone whose problem is a seven-year-old set in the bedroom. We know which browser is inside which television, what it can do, and where it quietly gives up, because we can walk over and check.

It is also why this site is built the way it is: Plain code that runs on a 2013 TV browser, a layout sized for ten feet away, and navigation that works with the arrow keys on a remote. Those are not guesses about old hardware. They are what the hardware in the next room demanded.

Why TV quirks matter

Every platform has them, and so does every panel. Tizen, webOS, Android TV, Fire TV and Roku each report the same hardware differently, and some of them report it wrongly: A set that insists it is showing 1080p while driving a 4K panel, a browser that lists a codec it cannot actually decode, a device that reports a screen size belonging to a different model entirely.

Knowing those differences is the difference between a test that gives a real answer and one that guesses confidently. When a result on this site looks surprising, it is usually because we corrected for something the device got wrong, and the page will say so.

What we will not pretend to know

A web page running inside a TV browser cannot measure everything. It cannot read HDR brightness in nits. It cannot see your panel's true refresh rate, because the browser is capped near 60 frames per second whatever the screen does. It cannot tell you what your Netflix app supports, only what this browser supports.

So we mark every result as measured, reported by the device, or unknown, and we explain which is which. Where the honest answer is "nobody can know this from here", that is what you get, instead of a number that looks authoritative and is invented.

What we do not do

We do not review televisions and we do not publish "best TV" lists. Plenty of sites do that well, with lab equipment we do not pretend to have. Nobody pays us for a result, and no test outcome on this site is influenced by a commercial arrangement.

What we do is help you check the television you already own, or the one you are about to buy from someone's living room.

The company

2kit (Kraus und Karnath GbR 2kit consulting) in Düsseldorf, Germany. Alongside this site we make TV Remote, TV Cast, Screen Mirroring and Screen Recording, among others.

Questions, corrections or a result that looks wrong on your set: info@tv-test.com. Reports from real televisions are how this site gets better, and we read all of them.

Imprint

The use of third-party trademarks on this site does not indicate any relationship, sponsorship, or endorsement with the respective trademark owners. Brand and product names are used only to say which device a test or a guide applies to.