So, you're looking to buy a new TV. You head down to the local store or jump online and are faced with some terms you haven't encountered before, 4K & UHD. What do they mean? Are they important? Well, we hope to answer these questions for you here.

4K and UHD are short terms that refer to new "Ultra High Definition" televisions. Before we jump too far into just what that means, we'll take a moment to cover off what regular high definition is.

Just about any modern television you buy these days will be "Full High Definition", the word "Full" is there because a number of years ago there were a lot of televisions that were just "High Definition" and effectively the "Full" TVs were the next step up. Being a Full High Definition TV means that there are 1920 pixels horizontally and 1080 pixels vertically on the screen (pixels are the individual blocks of light that make up the screen). This "resolution" gives a clean, crisp picture that you couldn't get on the old fashioned "box style" televisions.

Full High Definition has been the standard for a few years now, but as with all technology, times have changed and the quality of screens has progressed. An Ultra High Definition has 4 times the number of pixels of the older Full High Definition televisions, with 3840 pixels horizontally and 2160 pixels vertically. Because they have almost 4000 pixels going across the screen they have been nicknamed 4K screens.

Now the big question, should I buy a 4K television? The short answer is, you don't need to but you might want to.

The 4K technology is still fairly new and there isn't much media readily available that the time of this post that makes use of this very high resolution.

At this point in time you can save money on a TV by not buying 4K. However, if you plan to keep your television for a long time, spending a bit more now will mean that you can enjoy new media when i becomes available in exceptional detail.