Top 10 TVs for Euro 2012

When thinking about what makes a TV great for watching sport on, there are four main issues to consider.

First up is motion handling. Most sports - and especially football - routinely involve players and objects speeding across the screen. So the extent to which a TV can avoid spoiling this motion with the blurring and judder problems so common with flat TV technology is key.

We’ve also found a TV’s combination of size and colour handling to be very important to its effectiveness as a sports monitor. Small screens - anything below 40in - generally reduce your sense of immersion in the action. With colours, time and again we’ve found ourselves unable to fully get lost in the action if the greens of the pitch and the various colours of the players’ shirts don’t look rich and natural; instead of focusing on the game we end up feeling distracted by the technology that’s producing the picture.

An oft-forgotten crucial ingredient for making sports footage come to life is sound. Any TV with the speaker power to recreate the audio atmosphere of a sporting venue will inevitably hugely enhance your sense of ‘being there’.

Finally, and perhaps controversially, we personally feel that 3D can - if done well - have a really positive impact on watching football. Partly because - on a big TV at least - it makes the experience feel more like it would if you were actually in the stadium, but mostly because 3D genuinely enhances your understanding of what’s happening on the pitch, enabling you to tell much more accurately where the ball and running players are heading for.

With all these factors running through our minds, we’ve trawled through our TV review database and come up with the following list of Euro 2012 TV heroes. So all that’s left to say here is: Come on England!