What Does The SKU of Your New TV Mean?

When you're in the market for a new TV the brand name can be a factor. But it's not everything because each manufacturer makes multiple lines of products. There are budget-friendly TVs with low price tags and performance. There are midrange models. And there are expensive high-end televisions with exceptional performance. If you simply purchase a "Samsung" or "Sony” or any other model just because it’s on sale, you really have no idea exactly what kind of TV you're buying, or how good it is.

But the “SKU” or Stock Keeping Unit, can tell you lot about the TV you are considering. Television SKU’s are long, complex strings of letters and numbers that identify features of each model. They can tell you the product line, screen size, and even individual retailer variants of TV’s. And they're the key to decoding just how good that TV really is. 

Will Greenwald writing for PCMag has created a helpful guide to decoding the SKU’s of different TV manufacturers. At first this seems complicated, but once you break down each label to its parts it becomes much easier to understand. Here are the basics of interpreting an SKU:

Screen Size: A number indicating how big the TV is.
Product Line: A set of letters or numbers indicating what product series the model is in.
Generation: A set of letters or numbers indicating what year the TV was made.
Retailer Sub-Model: A number indicating a specific model is intended to be sold at a specific retailer.
Other Variations: A set of letters or numbers indicating the TV is of a specific variety outside of its product series. This is most commonly seen in Hisense and LG TV’s. Hisense designates Android TV’s with an H and Roku TV’s with an R, and LG specifically calls out OLED TV’s with the OLED designation.
Fluff: Additional numbers or letters that indicate the sales region or other broad categorizations that are similar across all TVs available from the manufacturer in your market.


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