The best TV in 2023: our top picks from LG, Samsung, Sony, TCL, Vizio and more

Finding the best TV shouldn't be a full-time job. Our list of the best TVs you can buy will help you get the set that delivers the best performance for your money. We test all the top TVs each year — both in our lab and in our living rooms — and these are the 4K TVs that we recommend. 

Because TV technology evolves fast, we're frequently updating this guide to keep up with the latest and greatest models, whether that's a QLED TV from Samsung, an OLED from LG or Sony, or a Mini-LED TV from the likes of Hisense or TCL. 

To that end, we want you to get the whole package when buying something new: great picture quality, rich sound, and all of the smart features available today, and it would be nice to save a buck or two while you're at it.

So what are the best TVs available now? The LG C2 OLED is now the best TV that we've tested. Not only is it the best OLED TV thanks to an impressive display panel, but a premium design, maximum versatility and great smart TV platform hit all the high marks, too. Why not the new LG C3 OLED? It's a great option, yes, but we found in our testing that the LG C2 OLED delivers 99% of the same performance at a lower price point so we've decided to keep that on our list for another few months.

With so many new TVs coming onto the market this month, we've been reviewing them as they become available and we'll be adding them to the list below when they've cleared our tests and proven that they deserve a spot on the list. 

Written by

Written by

Nick Pino

My name's Nick and I look after our guides to the best TVs, best OLED TVs and best 4K TVs. Most of my day is spent watching and evaluating new screens from LG, Samsung, Sony, Hisense, TCL and Vizio. I have 10 years of experience in AV, and before I joined Tom's Guide I was formerly the Senior Editor, TV and AV at TechRadar. I love helping people find the perfect TV, so please feel free to reach out over email or tag me on Twitter and I can help you out.

The best TV in 2023: a visual guide

The quick list

Here's a quick overview of the best TVs you can buy right now based on our testing and reviews. And keep up on scrolling if you want to see our in-depth analysis of all the top TVs for every budget. 

The full list: Best TVs in detail

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What you need to know
The LG C2 OLED isn't the newest OLED on the block (an honor that belongs to the newer and pricier LG C3 OLED) but it has mostly everything we want to see from a premium OLED TV — the style, the performance, the smart TV platform and more — for an incredibly reasonable price. As much as the LG G2 OLED is a spectacle of a TV, it’s a bit fussy needing professional installation and it doesn’t make as good a gaming TV. Plus it’s several hundred dollars more than the C2. That’s why the LG C2 is the OLED TV most people will want to get this year. 

Design: The LG C2 OLED TV is a familiar, yet stunning piece of hardware. The panel itself is impossibly thin, measuring 0.1-inch thick across the top half of the TV. The component compartment extends out on the bottom half of the back chassis, but it’s still very sleek overall. Even better is the fact that the LG C2 OLED TV has four HDMI inputs. All four of those are HDMI 2.1 supporting 4K at 120Hz, with one supporting HDMI ARC/eARC (enhanced audio return channel). If you have a Blu-Ray player, soundbar and gaming console like we do, the full array of 2.1 inputs comes in handy. 

Performance: The LG C2 OLED TV’s upscaling is powered by the Alpha 9 Gen 5 Processor 4K while the addition of OLED evo promises better and brighter overall picture. Now, we found evo fell short of promises when it debuted last year on the LG G1 OLED, so we went into this review with tempered expectations. But the C2 rose to the occasion in our test. Color accuracy is a highlight of the LG C2 OLED TV, with the set earning a 1.7 Delta-E score. The LG C2 also provides an impressively wide color gamut, producing 134.45% of the Rec 709 color space, surpassing the basic color standard by a significant margin. 

Smart TV: All LG 2022 TVs ship with webOS 22, an interface that gathers content on a whole-screen home page. The interface feels mostly the same from the other best LG TVs from last year, but with added user profiles for curating recommendations and keeping each user’s relevant content in reach. When nothing’s being watched, the LG 2022 TV Always Ready tool is an ambient mode that displays art, photos or a music player.

Value for money: The LG C2 OLED TV’s price definitely makes it more premium than any of the best cheap TVs, though it’s a tick more affordable than the LG G2 OLED TV (65-inch, $2,999). 

Read the full review: LG C2 OLED

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The best QLED TV

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What you need to know
With the Samsung QN95B Neo QLED TV, Samsung once again proves why it’s the QLED TV king. Thanks to best-in-class brightness, cable management convenience and impressive performance across most content genres, the QN95B is a tough TV to beat. At a time when OLED TVs steal most of the hype, Samsung’s premium Neo QLED technology stands out in one big way: brightness. By introducing a Mini LED backlighting, the panel can achieve higher levels of brightness without sacrificing depth and gradations of luminance.

Design: The Samsung QN95B Neo QLED TV looks like a premium piece of equipment, complete with flush bezels and thin body that measures under 1 inch wide. It comes with a low-profile central stand that might limit the size soundbar you can place under it, but you could also hang the TV with a 400 x 300 VESA TV mount. What’s unique about the QN95B is that it uses Samsung’s One Connect box that houses the TV’s port array, including 4 HDMI 2.1 (1 supporting ARC/eARC) and 3 USB ports. The box then connects to the TV from a single cord, providing the choice to conceal unsightly cables as well as easy access to the ports.

Performance: Brightness is perhaps the QN95B’s biggest strength. In Standard mode with HDR content, the QN95B reached 1905.8 nits in a 10% window in our testing. For comparison, the LG C2 OLED TV hit 800 nits in the same window. Perhaps the only anecdotal shortcoming is a slight banding and blooming effect on the dark skies when you sit approximately 45 degrees off-angle to either side. Spec-wise, no Dolby Vision support is a setback for fans of the popular format; however, the set does handle HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ formats.

Smart TV: The Samsung QN95B Neo QLED TV uses Samsung’s proprietary Tizen smart TV platform. We have mixed feelings about the overall ease of navigation and content exploration, but it’s similar to LG’s Web OS and the Google TV interface. The home screen displays tiles for different content and channels, which you can customize to suit your watching preferences. In terms of streaming services, you’ll find popular choices such as Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max, as well as some free streaming services including Samsung TV Plus. 

Read the full review: Samsung QN95B Neo QLED TV

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The best value TV

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What you need to know
The TCL 5-Series Google TV (S546) wowed us with its combination of smart TV features, solid performance and great value for your dollar. Building on the foundation of the already-good 5-Series, the move to Google TV gives the affordable 4K smart TV a more premium smart TV platform, one that offers personalized and customizable suggestions, a huge assortment of smart features, and deep Google Assistant integration that makes it a viable center for the entire home of connected gadgets. But it also offers a step up in other aspects of the TV.

As we found in our extensive testing, the 5-Series Google TV is a more polished version of the 5-Series TV when it comes to everything from color quality to lag times. And as well as delivering an excellent QLED 4K display, you also get a slick remote control, and a surprisingly wide array of gaming features for a 60Hz TV. For a smart TV that sells for under $1,000 for most size options, it's easily one of the best TVs on the market.

Design: TCL's mid-range TV designs aren't going to win any prizes, but the basic black plastic construction does the job, providing a sturdy housing for a decent 4K smart TV. It may not look flashy, or be the slimmest thing on the TV aisle, but it gets the job done. The chassis includes holes for a 200 mm by 300 mm VESA bracket, meaning that it can be easily hung on the wall using any of the brackets on our list of the best TV mounts.

Performance: Though some cosmetic differences from the 2020 TCL 5-Series Roku TV were a pleasant surprise, we were even more pleased to see that performance had improved across the board, with the display offering better color, brightness, and shorter lag times than the already excellent Roku model. Color accuracy was great right out of the box, with a Delta-E average of 1.3 as measured by our X-Rite spectrophotometer. Lower scores are better. Color reproduction was also impressive, with the S546 reproducing 99.97% of the Rec 709 color space.

Smart TV: There's a strong case to be made that Google TV is the best smart TV operating system on the market, offering a clean, easily-navigated home screen, with useful content recommendations, easy access to live TV and the convenience of voice control through the remote's built-in mic or the TV's integrated far-field microphones. The home screen and menus of Google TV look great, improving upon the already solid experience that Android 10 provided. 

Read the full review: TCL 5-Series Google TV (S546)

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The best QD-OLED TV

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What you need to know
By any standard, the Sony Bravia XR A95K OLED is a remarkable TV — and often, it’s far better than that. This set, which sits at the top of Sony’s expansive TV lineup, unites the industry’s defining technologies and Sony’s own groundbreaking processing and picture enhancements to deliver superlative performance in every area. And  our own test results back this up.

The color and brightness on the Bravia XR A95K are dazzling. Unexpected but genuinely useful smart features transform everything from how you interact with the screen, how you make picture adjustments, and even what you do if you lose your remote control. Perhaps most important, this Sony OLED TV looks and sounds like a dream, no matter what you watch on it, making everything a transcendent viewing and listening experience.

Design: Outlining the jet-black display on all sides is a metal bezel only one-sixteenth of an inch thick, though there’s an added 0.75-inch band along the bottom for displaying the power light and, on the far left, a nearly imperceptible Sony logo. The screen is thicker than on most recent OLED sets (about 0.5 inch), but it's still super sleek.

Performance: One of the first TVs on the market to fuse OLED and quantum dot technologies into a single set, the A95K all but promises next-generation picture quality by dint of its existence — and it delivers. The picture on all of the movies, as well as a few TV series and YouTube videos we tried, plus our standard full-field, one-screen color screens, dazzled from anywhere in the room, as the set maintained almost its full color fidelity at even extreme angles relative to the screen. In the end, the A95K isn’t just first-rate today — it’s also sufficiently future-proof that you won’t need to worry about how it will handle next-generation content when it becomes more prevalent in the market.

Smart TV: Google TV is in serious competition for the simplest, cleanest, and richest smart TV interface, and it’s right at home on A95K. Simple and quick to navigate, easy to search, and adept at presenting plenty of new and recent options without overwhelming, it makes finding and watching movies, TV shows, and anything else a breeze.

Value for money: For $3,000, it's a bit much to ask — even given the myriad positives — considering the stiff competition out there from the likes of Samsung and LG, which are nipping at Samsung’s heels with new TVs that will build on the advances from their excellent last-generation sets, the S95B and the C2 respectively.

Read the full review: Sony Bravia XR A95K

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The best TV for gaming

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What you need to know
The Hisense U7H is a killer option in this price range — which is exactly what we’d expect from Hisense at this point. It doesn’t necessarily beat all the competition, like the TCL 6-Series, in all situations, but as a package deal it’s a seriously strong contender — and ultimately, worth buying. The Hisense U7H may not have Mini LED backlighting, but it does offer a QLED panel, and the ever-improving Google TV operating system. And, for the most part, it succeeds in delivering an impressive low-cost QLED TV-watching experience, but there are a few caveats to keep in mind.

Design: The overall design of the Hisense U7H is nothing to write home about, but it’s still sleek and stylish enough to fit in most living rooms. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the new legs on offer by the U8H, but the understated legs on the U7H still look decent, and can be installed in two different positions — closer to the center, or closer to the edge. The bezels on the TV are relatively slim, with the bottom being the thickest. The TV itself is relatively slim too, though of course thicker towards the bottom. On a TV stand or mounted to the wall, it will look thin and stylish.

Performance: The Hisense U7H may not have the Mini-LED backlighting on offer by the higher-end Hisense U8H and Samsung QN95B, but it gets so close to the same level of excellent image quality, that without a side-by-side test, it can be hard to tell. The TV is being billed excellent for gaming. The fact that it has two HDMI 2.1 ports seems to confirm this, however note that it isn’t the lowest when it comes to input lag. Generally, it’s considered that a TV with less than 15ms of input lag is good enough for the majority of gaming situations, and the Hisense U7H just breezed under that at 14.6ms.

Other gaming-focused features include VRR, ALLM, and Dolby Vision Gaming. Gamers will be happy with what’s on offer here. The TV excels at controlling its backlighting in a way that ensures you’ll never experience blooming to a level of being distracting. That’s all despite offering a great level of brightness, both in day-to-day viewing and in our lab testing. 

Smart TV: There's a strong case to be made that Google TV is the best smart TV operating system on the market, offering a clean, easily-navigated home screen, with useful content recommendations, easy access to live TV and the convenience of voice control through the remote's built-in mic or the TV's integrated far-field microphones. The home screen and menus of Google TV look great, improving upon the already solid experience that Android 10 provided. 

Read the full review: Hisense U7H QLED TV

The best mid-range TV

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What you need to know
TCL has long been acclaimed for bringing a lot of performance to TVs that don’t cost a lot of money. That trend continues with its latest 6-Series Roku TV, the 65R655, which amps up key aspects of its performance—particularly brightness and gaming potential—while keeping the price affordable. Throw in the super-easy-to-use Roku TV interface and you have a set that more than delivers on its picture promise without busting your budget.

You will have to make a couple of sacrifices to take full advantage of the good deal the 65R655 offers, a set this simple won’t appeal to everyone, and there aren’t a ton of innovations when compared with earlier 6-Series sets. But in what it does offer over its predecessors and competitors, the 65R655 offers a compelling amount of TV while minimizing most of the compromises. If you’re looking for one of the best TVs you can find for less than $1,000, this one is an excellent place to start.

Design: Though the 65R655 is not a bad-looking TV, it’s not exactly sleek. Measuring 2.7 inches at its thickest point, it will jut out noticeably from the wall if you choose to mount it using the 300x300mm VESA holes that are the black, ridged rear panel’s most prominent feature. The thinner part of the screen measures about 1.2 inches by itself, and the whole thing is framed by a brushed-metal strip surrounding the screen. The bezels it creates are themselves quite slim: less than one-eighth inch on the left, right, and top, and just under a half-inch on the bottom (to allow for the TCL and Roku TV logos). The IR receiver and the status light and front and center below that.

Performance: TCL promises outstanding color and brightness from its new 6-Series TVs, thanks to the use of mini LED and QLED technologies and the presence of so-called “Contrast Control Zones” (aka dimming zones). With many sets, the picture mode you choose is essential to your watching experience, but that’s unusually true with the 65R655. There are five picture modes for SDR content and more for HDR (depending on the technology you’re using), but regardless of which dynamic range you’re playing in, the main mode you’ll need and want is Normal.

Smart TV: Although it may not be as powerful, extensible, or attractive as other smart interfaces on the market, Roku TV wins points for simplicity. The home screen is divided into two zones: The left third is devoted to a scrolling menu that provides you a number of options for either surfacing or searching for content or configuring the TV itself, and the right two-thirds expands on your choice to provide additional interaction possibilities.

Read the full review: TCL 6-Series Roku TV (65R655)

Best Roku TV

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What you need to know
The Roku Plus Series 4K QLED TV marks the streaming giant’s first foray into sets after long focusing on software and set-top and plug-in devices — and the move is a successful one. In addition to delivering a ton of screen for its starting price of $499, these TVs also give you surprisingly good picture quality and sound, two things that are usually the first to go with budget sets.

No, you don’t get everything with a sub-$650 set, and you never will. Blazing brightness and a full array of HDMI 2.1 ports just aren’t in the cards here. But you don’t have to make many more compromises. With a fine picture buoyed by high-quality HDR color and unusually good sound, you’ll be able to watch just about anything without feeling as though you’re making many sacrifices.

You can find a number of TVs better than the Roku Plus Series 4K QLED TV if you’re willing to spend more than $1,000 for them — but even compared against its more expensive rivals, the Roku Plus Series 4K QLED TV is an outstanding bargain that doesn’t let you down.

Design: Despite its price, the Plus Series does not look cheap. Our 65-inch review unit measured a hulking 33.1 x 57 x 4 inches (H x W x D) and weighed just under 37 pounds without the stand (see below). A gray, metal bezel surrounds the screen on all sides, measuring less than an eighth-inch on the left, right, and top, and about two-thirds inch on the bottom to allow for a front-and-center chrome Roku logo. 

Performance: The Plus Series uses quantum-dot LED technology to produce more and more vivid colors and increased brightness. Picture vibrancy does start fading as you move away from the center of the screen, but it took a fair distance for the display to look unbearable. All in all, the Plus Series is well-suited to watching just about anything except super-fast action such as sports, thanks to the panel’s limited 60Hz refresh rate.

Smart TV: As you’d expect from the company that made its reputation on streaming, Roku’s delivers one of the most satisfying and intuitive smart interfaces on the market. A text menu on the left lets you scroll through a wide variety of top-level options including Live TV, Featured Free, What to Watch, Sports, The Buzz (a sort of grab bag of trending videos), Streaming Channels, and My Offers, and the right side of the screen changes to display the navigable contents of that menu. 

Read the full review: Roku Plus Series 4K QLED TV

The best 8K TV

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What you need to know
Boasting a stunning design, dazzling picture quality, unmatched brightness, excellent black levels and a wealth of gaming features, the QN900C is every bit as premium as its hefty price tag would suggest.

Want high peak brightness? Samsung's delivered a TV that could inspire you to wear sunglasses indoors. Looking for the ultimate gaming setup with full HDMI 2.1 support? You'd be hard-pressed to find a more robust set of gamer-centric features anywhere else. What about top-notch upscaling, excellent black levels, stunning colors and immersive in-built sound? Tick, tick, tick and tick.

If you're unwilling to settle for anything but the most premium TV Samsung has to offer, the QN900C is the one to go for. Not only is it one of the best 85-inch TVs we've tested, it's one of the best TVs of 2023, period.

Design: The first thing you're likely to notice is that the QN900C maintains the striking bezel-free 'Infinity Display' design that was introduced with the QN900A back in 2021, and it's every bit as dramatic now as it was then. 

With only the most minimal black line present to distinguish the display from the millimeter-thick speaker grilles surrounding it, there's nothing to distract you from whatever content you might be watching. 

Performance: As you might expect from Samsung's top TV model, picture quality is astonishing, and much of this can be attributed to the Neo Quantum HDR 8K Pro processor that powers it. Taking advantage of AI and neural networks, along with 14-bit processing capabilities, the Neo Quantum HDR 8K Pro is able to analyze and improve image quality at a pixel-by-pixel level. Obviously, quantifying this claim is more than a little tricky, suffice to say that upscaled 4K (and even Full HD) images appear cleaner and less noisy than last year's already-impressive QN900B. Additionally, Samsung has included a few other quirky settings for gamers, including an ultra-wide viewing mode for PC gamers, a Mini Map Zoom feature that lets you magnify a portion of your screen, and a Virtual Aim Point setting that places a cursor in the middle of your display. The only downside? Black crush, which led to some loss of detail in very dark scenes. In some instances, movies watched using the TV's default Filmmaker Mode settings almost tipped into the realm of German expressionism.

Smart TV: The QN900C runs on Samsung's Tizen smart TV platform and offers a home screen experience that takes up the entire display, showcasing recent shows and suggested content. Long-time Samsung users will still miss the old pop-up menu, but it seems like the platform has landed in a nice middle ground of sorts. 

Read the full review: Samsung QN900C Neo QLED 8K TV

The best Hisense TV

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What you need to know
The Hisense U8K Mini-LED offers flashy colors that look great in a brightly lit room. Even in a room with lots of ambient lighting, colors with deep hues don’t lose their saturation and the results are truly mesmerizing. Key to the U8K’s success are the Mini-LED Pro with Full Array Local Dimming panel that helps the TV retain good black levels in scenes with higher levels of brightness and a quantum dot layer that allows the TV to cover a groundbreaking 80% of the Rec2020 Color Space. It might be a party in the front, but it’s all business in the back of the screen. 

Despite these enviable qualities, the Hisense U8K isn’t without its faults. Among the ones we found during our testing period were middling input lag (13.2ms) and slightly long load times when jumping from one streaming app to another. The TV’s color volume is absolutely massive, but its accuracy of 4.46 as measured in our Delta-E test leaves a lot to be desired. These issues don’t prevent the Hisense U8K from being one of the best TVs on the market — and one I’ll keep coming back to watch — but it does mean that gamers looking for the fastest response times and cinephiles looking for the most accurate colors might want to look at some other options like the LG C3 OLED or Samsung S95C OLED instead.

Design: At 56.4 pounds this TV is relatively hefty and will require two people to put into place, especially if you plan on wall-mounting. Thankfully, the U8K uses the 400mm x 400mm VESA Wall Mount Standard so you won’t have to struggle too hard to find a mount that will fit the screen. If you want to place it on a table or entertainment center, like I did for our review, you can use the included metal legs to hold it upright. The U8K allows for two different leg configurations, a wider stance and a narrower one, to accommodate different spaces. If you can, we suggest going for the wider stance for better stability — at nearly 60 pounds you wouldn’t want this TV tipping over — but the narrower stance works fine, too.

Performance: Saying that we’re shocked about the Hisense U8K’s test results would be an understatement. This TV goes toe-to-toe with the much more expensive Samsung QN90C and beats it in key categories like SDR brightness and color saturation. This is an almost David and Goliath type of tale with Hisense being the perennial underdog. The only areas that the Hisense U8K didn’t perform as strongly in were color accuracy (Delta-E) — which it scored the worst of all four TVs we tested — and input latency. The former means that colors, while vibrant, aren’t going to look all that natural. The latter, however, isn’t a huge deal as  anything lower than 20 milliseconds is considered nearly imperceptible, but it does mean that serious gamers will be better served with one of the other TVs on that table.

Smart TV: On-board the U8K is Google TV, the successor to Android TV — and arguably one of the better smart TV platforms on the market right now. What we like most about Google TV is its ability to surface content that you might like from any number of streaming services. Like Roku, Google TV is fairly agnostic — it doesn’t really care which streaming services you use and won’t refer you to one more than any others. 

Read the full review: Hisense U8K Mini-LED TV

The best Vizio TV

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What you need to know
In creating the Vizio M-Series Quantum X, Vizio was attempting to bring much of the same technology found in its popular — but expensive — Vizio P-Series Quantum X to a more affordable screen. By working in quantum dots with full array local dimming, a 120Hz native refresh rate and HDMI ports with the latest spec, the M-Series Quantum X checks all the boxes. That said, its bulky body and less-than-ideal peak brightness hold it back from beating other top-performing TVs at this price range.

But where does it stand against the competition? Similarly priced screens will be missing many of the M-Series Quantum X’s key gaming features: a native 120Hz refresh rate with HDMI 2.1 ports and support for Dolby Vision Gaming. On the flip side, though, other screens from TCL that cost around the same do have a bit better HDR performance and less bulky design, so there are trade-offs to be made here. Ultimately you’ll want the M-Series Quantum X if you’re looking for great gaming performance on a budget and a decent smart platform, and you don’t mind the bulkiness of the screen or the lackluster peak brightness.

Design: The Vizio M-Series Quantum X takes two steps forwards and one step back in the design department. It’s easy to love the incredibly thin bezel on the front of the TV and the solid metal strip along the bottom, but it’s a bit chunky compared to similarly sized TVs. The true saving grace for the TV’s design, however, is the integration of HDMI 2.1 ports with one that can hit 4K/120Hz gaming and up to 240Hz when paired with a PC. That said, the 240Hz mode is limited to the 50-inch model. If you choose something bigger, you’ll lose out there. One port with 4K/120Hz support is better than none, but we wish there were more ports with that spec.

Performance: The design might be a bit of a letdown, but the performance is every bit of what we’d expect from a mid-range 4K HDR TV and then some. In Bright SDR mode, basically what you’d see out of the box if you didn’t change any of the other settings besides the picture mode, you’ll get around 500 nits of peak brightness. That’s perfect for your basic cable TV. Upscaling is decent thanks to Vizio’s IQ Ultra+ Processor and motion really wasn’t an issue.

As far as gaming performance goes, the Vizio M-Series Quantum X performs as good or better than some of the best TVs this year. With 13.2ms of lag in game mode, the TV is well-under the 20ms we typically recommend for fast, responsive gameplay and with support for Dolby Vision, certain games in your collection are going to look brighter and more colorful than you’ve ever seen them.

Smart TV: When it's cooperating, Vizio’s SmartCast holds its own as one of the better — if not quite the best — smart TV platform. One of the reasons for that is because SmartCast has an interesting — and useful — layout. On the very top is a row of categories that include recommended movies and shows as well as free content (always with ads)  and Live TV provided by Vizio’s WatchFree+ service. Below that top row are the curated shows and movies, a recommended row of content and then, finally, a fixed number of apps in the center row that can be re-arranged depending on your preference. It’s clean and efficient.

Read the full review: Vizio M-Series Quantum X

The best budget OLED

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What you need to know
No matter their price range, OLED TVs promise near-perfect black levels and exquisite colors, and that's exactly what you're getting with the LG A2 OLED. To wit, the LG A2 OLED offers a decently sized OLED panel with top-notch color, surprisingly good sound, and low input lag. Its smart platform, webOS, is a clean, well-organized interface for navigating the TV and accessing its features and despite it being paired by only 20-watt, downward-firing speakers, there’s no lack of clarity even in hectic scenes where dialogue, action sounds, and music are all blazing at once.

Admittedly, you won’t get everything with the A2 that you will with pricier and tonier LG TVs. You’ll have to settle for a lower refresh rate, an older HDMI standard, and lower brightness. But considering that it wasn’t that long ago that OLEDs were unthinkable at the sub-$1,300 price point — to say nothing of the sub-$1,000 price point at which the smallest model can currently be found — those features might be small prices to pay if all you can pay is a small price.

Design: The A2 is sufficiently attractive, if unassuming in its design, befitting its status as a lower-tier offering. Like most OLED TVs, its screen is thin (in this case, a hair more than a quarter inch at its thinnest point) and its bezel around every edge is thinner (barely an eighth inch), leaving plenty of uninterrupted viewing space. But aside from a light, gray texture on the screen portion, the rear panel is unremarkable: The words “LG OLED” are emblazoned on the flat, black control box, just above the 300x200mm VESA mounting holes, and that’s it. Even the stand is bland: a two-piece foot design with sharp, rectangular corners, not at all like the more elegant, swooping, central stand of the C2.

Performance: No matter their price range, OLED TVs promise near-perfect black levels and exquisite colors. Where the A2 lapses, however, is with brightness. OLED sets tend to look darker overall, but the A2 couldn’t get as bright as the other LG sets at displaying SDR content. When the colors are the chief focus, it’s hard not to flip for the results: The Colombian-set Disney animated film Encanto, for example, was awash with luscious South American hues. Upscaling from 1080p also looked good, with nearly no visible details lost in Mission: Impossible—Fallout at standard viewing distances. 

Smart TV: All LG 2022 TVs ship with webOS 22, an interface that gathers content on a whole-screen home page. The interface feels mostly the same from the other best LG TVs from last year, but with added user profiles for curating recommendations and keeping each user’s relevant content in reach.

Read the full review: LG A2 OLED

The best outdoor TV

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What you need to know
The new SunBriteTV Veranda 3 didn’t need to do much to build on the line’s concrete foundation, as the previous model already had impressive-for-the-category 4K HDR picture and sound quality to accompany its sturdy construction aimed at outdoor use (in the shade). But in addition to adding smart features by way of Android TV, it also gained an even better display and good, caveat-free remote control as part of the bargain.

These improvements do not come cheap. Veranda 3 models start just shy of $2,900, which is hundreds of dollars more than the other Verandas. Is it worth it? If you want one of the best outdoor TVs you can buy… then, yeah, it is. It’s worth celebrating — and maybe even laying down the cash — when a good thing gets even better. Provided you have a place to put it, of course. 

Design: Like its predecessor, the SunBrite SB-V-55, the SunBriteTV Veranda 3 Outdoor TV is designed to be used outdoors, but in full-shade environments such as patios, porches, and sunrooms. Because of this, it looks a bit more like a conventional TV than the SunBriteTV Pro 2 series, which was ready for watching in the full sun and primed for any weather conditions thanks to the sheet of tempered glass over the screen. On the Veranda 3, the screen is exposed, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the TV isn’t seriously sealed up. Rated IP55, for extensive (if not total) protection against dust, solid objects, and water, and safe to use at temperatures ranging from -24 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, it has a cabinet of thick, black aluminum, with the front and back panels bolted together and its ports safely sealed behind a rear door that opens by way of three thumb screws. 

Performance: Thanks to its use of quantum dot technology, the Veranda 3 delivers better color reproduction, displaying as much as 99.82% of the sRGB gamut, compared with the previous Veranda’s 98.61% — again, in line with expectations of good TVs, not merely good outdoor TVs. Watching the Veranda 3 is best done from straight on, however. Slight color shifting is visible in the best of situations, but moving just a little off-center here results in significant color distortion. A full-screen violet test pattern looked practically pink before it even got to the corner, and other colors similarly lost their fidelity; skin tones in every movie we sampled grayed out, too. To the greatest extent possible, you may also want to stay on the same level as the screen, as the same effects manifested themselves when looking even slightly up at it.

Smart TV: For its inaugural foray into the world of smart TVs, SunBriteTV equipped the Veranda 3 with the trusty choice of Android TV. Though this is the older version of the operating system now known as Google TV, and that newer incarnation is both smoother to use and more feature-rich, Android TV still satisfies with its abundant functionality, ease of use, and some of the clearest and cleanest menus you’ll find in the TV market. Navigation is slick when using the new remote, and the menus moved and changed zippily; or you can perform searches and other tasks by holding the Google Assistant button on the remote (after pairing it via Bluetooth) and speaking into it. Signing in to your Google Account allows you to sync recommendations across all your Google apps and devices, but you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.

Read the full review: SunBriteTV Veranda 3 Outdoor TV

TV benchmarks: comparison

When testing TVs we use an X-Rite i1 Pro spectrophotometer, a SpectraCal VideoForge Pro pattern generator and Portrait Displays’ Calman calibration software.

How to choose the best TV for you

While the above list can tell which TV is the best based on empirical data, that TV might not be right for you because of the screen size, the screen brightness, the sound output, the resolution and/or the supported HDR formats. You might want a 50-inch TV that's ultra-bright to compensate for the amount of ambient light in the room, which means an OLED TV might not work for you. 

We have extensive shopping advice, like our TV buying guide and figuring out what size TV you should buy. And if you still have questions about smart TV features and capabilities, check out Smart TVs: Everything you need to know.

Need a quick tutorial on TV technology? Here's a short primer.

Screen sizes: This is probably the best place to start when buying a TV. If you plan on wall-mounting the TV, measure the dimensions of the wall space you want to fill. Having the length, width and diagonal measurement will quickly and easily eliminate 80% of the TVs on the market. If you plan on putting it in a cabinet or on a stand, measure the width of where the TV will sit, and use that to start shopping.  

Brightness: The common wisdom for buying a TV is that, the brighter the room is, the brighter of a TV you'll want to buy. Why? Well, ambient light can wash out color saturation or, worse, lead to glare on the screen. Ultimately the amount of glare will depend on what type of TV you buy (OLED TVs with a glass screen are more reflective than, say, QLED TVs with an anti-glare screen), but a good rule of thumb is that OLED TVs are usually better in light-controlled rooms while bright LED-LCD TVs work better in brighter rooms with more ambient light.

Refresh Rate: If you've ever looked at a TV box, you'll probably see some weird marketing terms like Motion Rate 240 or 480, or something ridiculous. These don't mean anything. Well, they do, sort of - but it's purposely obfuscated. All TVs available right now have one of two native panel refresh rates: 60Hz or 120Hz. These numbers tell you how quickly a TV scans and replaces each pixel in a second. 60Hz is 60 times in one second. 120Hz is 120 times in one second.  You want a higher number if you want smoother motion (i.e. you plan on watching sports or playing games).  

Ports: We generally recommend opting for more ports, so that you never have to manually unplug and re-plug HDMI cables to switch from your streaming device or Blu-ray player to your game console or other device. Three ports is common, but nicer TVs usually have 4 HDMI ports. You'll also want make sure at least one is HDMI 2.1; our guide to the best HDMI 2.1 TVs can help here. (Still confused? Check out TV ports explained: What all those HDMI, USB and other connections are for?)

Smart software: Almost all TVs are smart TVs these days. That means they come stocked with some sort of smart platform, whether it's Roku TV, Google TV, WebOS, Tizen or something else. Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses, so be sure to familiarize yourself with them before you buy. Some of the TVs are among the best Alexa compatible devices and best Google Home compatible devices you can own, so pay attention to which smart home platform the sets offer before choosing. 

Price: Lastly, you'll need to factor price into the equation. For the most part, unfortunately, better TVs do cost more. Just like PCs, TVs that are more expensive come with better specs and more features, so typically paying less for a TV means making some sort of sacrifice. The good news? You can find smaller 4K TVs (42-, 43- and 50-inch TVs) that sell for less than $500, which will spare you some cash for some of the best soundbars or best streaming devices to go with your set.

However, you'll want to pay more for features like HDR support and a decent number of HDMI ports. Generally speaking, premium 4K TVs can sell for thousands of dollars, but we find that the sweet spot for superior performance and value is right around the $2,000 mark. 8K TVs, on the other hand, run from pricey to mortgage-your-house levels of expensive, with new smaller models selling for as little as $2,000, but can cost upwards of tens of thousands.

How we test the best TVs

How we test TVs

Evaluating TVs is about more than just kicking back to watch a movie. We lab test every TV, measuring color gamut, color accuracy and brightness to objectively see which sets are the best for these key indicators. We also test for lag time – a key detail for gaming – measuring to the millisecond how long it takes for content to travel from the original source to the screen. We use these results to make numbers-based comparisons about color and display quality.

We also spend time with each set for real-world evaluation and see how our lab results translate into more subjective performance. We also compare sets side by side and view samples from the latest movies, specialized test patterns that highlight strengths and weaknesses of each display, and a range of content across several sources. With that information, we can tell you which TVs look best, sound best and offer the best viewing experience.

Finally, we evaluate the smart TV functions and apps for each TV, looking at everything from the remote control design to the voice interaction. 

We put all of that data together with our real-world testing and stack it against the price of the TV. The result is a score that we feel best represents the totality of that model, and how well it stands up against its contemporary rivals. A TV that scored highly five years ago may not score as highly against a newer model, but we do our best to update reviews when newer models become available.

Read more

Get a broader view of everything the best TV brands have to offer by checking out the full roster of 4K and 8K TVs from every major manufacturer.

If you've narrowed down your TV shopping by brand, price range or screen size, check out our picks for the best TVs in each.

Best 4K TVs | Best smart TVs for streaming | Best TVs for gaming

The best TVs under $1000 | The best TVs under $500

Best TV brands | Best Samsung TVs | Best TCL TVs | Best LG TVs | Best Roku TVs | Best Google TVs | Best OLED TVs | Best QLED TVs | Best 8K TVs | Best HDMI 2.1 TV | Best TVs with ATSC 3.0 | Best TVs with Chromecast

The smallest smart TVs | Best 43-inch TVs | Best 50-inch TVs | Best 55-inch TVs | Best 65-inch TVs | Best 70-inch TVs | Best 75-inch TVs | Best 85-inch TVs 

And don't forget to watch out for the latest TV reviews.