I tested Vizio’s first new Mini-LED TV in 2026 — for just $400, I’m impressed

Having covered flat-panel TVs from nearly their inception, I'm stunned that I can buy a good-looking 65-inch screen for under $400. But that is the world we live in now, and the Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K Smart TV is a prime example of big-screen value on a shoestring budget.

Aside from its sometimes-infuriating OS and an atrocious default image mode (the latter is easy to remedy), I was generally pleased with the Dolby Vision-enabled Vizio TV, and I suspect most people would be, too.

If you can spend a bit more for the Hisense QD7, that’s something I’d suggest — but if your budget is a firm $400, this Vizio delivers rock-solid performance that won’t disappoint budget buyers.

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Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K Review: Pricing and availability

The Vizio VQM65C-1004 is the 65-inch model of Vizio's new 2026 Mini LED Quantum lineup, priced at $398 at Walmart and Sam's Club. The line ranges from 43-inch to 85-inch options.

The VQM sits a tier above Vizio's standard Quantum (QLED-only) sets like the VQD65M-08 (around $378 at Walmart) and well below its older Quantum Pro line, like the VQP65C-84 (around $500).

At under $400 for a 65-inch Mini-LED, the VQM65C-1004 competes with some of the best TVs under $500. To get better performance at this size, you'd have to spend another $100-$200 (or more) for models such as the Hisense QD7 I recently reviewed and the TCL QM6K, which we reviewed last year.

Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K Review: Design

The VQM65C is a bit chunky at 2.91 inches thick. That's the reasonable tradeoff for the benefits of a full-array LED backlight (which we'll talk about later), although Vizio might have utilized that extra space for a beefier sound system, as the Hisense QD7 does.

The bezel is of negligible thickness and is adorned with just a tiny "VIZIO" at the bottom-right corner. Screwholes under the panel allow easy mounting of Vizio's QuickFit soundbars (on 55-inch and larger models).

Typical of a budget TV, the VQM65C stands on two plastic feet, one near each end of the set. You'll need a table that's at least about four feet wide, unless you wall mount it (using its 300 x 300 mm VESA standard mounting screw holes). One bonus: You can thread cables through a channel in each foot so they don't visibly dangle down from the screen.

Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K Review: Ports

When it's viewed from behind, the TV features a power-cable connector on the left and all input and output ports on the right. Those include three HDMI 2.1 ports, supporting 120Hz refresh for video sources; however, the panel's full-resolution refresh rate is just 60Hz. It can, however, show video games at 120fps at one-quarter the panel's resolution—1080p HD. With a relatively low input lag of 9.9 milliseconds, this TV has some gaming potential.

TVs of this size typically have four HDMI ports, so consider what you'll want to plug into the set to determine if this is enough. One of those HDMI ports supports eARC to output lossless Dolby Atmos audio to a soundbar (such as a QuickFit model) or home theater system. An optical digital audio SPDIF output is also provided.

There's a USB 2.0 port to load images from a USB stick or power a streaming stick if you don't care for the Vizio OS interface. (I do that at home with an older Vizio model and a Roku stick.) There's no LAN port, which has become rather vestigial by now, but the set has up-to-date dual-band Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax and Bluetooth headphone capability. An RF-in port connects to a built-in ATSC 1.0 tuner, which doesn't support the latest resolution and dynamic range broadcast standards (so it's limited to 1080i resolution and standard dynamic range).

How we test TVs at Tom’s Guide

We follow a standard testing protocol for every TV we review at Tom's Guide. Our benchmarks include a series of technical and subjective tests designed to rate the set's performance. For our technical tests, we set the TV to its most accurate out-of-the-box mode — for the Vizio VQM, that's Calibrated Dark mode, since the set doesn't offer a Filmmaker mode — and take measurements using a Jeti spectraval 1501-HiRes spectroradiometer, a Klein K10-A colorimeter, a Murideo 8K-SIX-G Metal pattern generator, and Portrait Displays's Calman TV-calibration software. We also use a Leo Bodnar 4K Video Signal Lag Tester for determining the TV's gaming prowess.

Subjective tests vary based on the reviewer but usually include anecdotes from a diverse selection of movies, TV shows, and other content reflecting the types of things you may actually want to watch on the TV. For a more detailed look at what we do and how we do it, check out our "How we test TVs" page.

Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K Review: Performance

My one liner-advice for this TV: Use Sports mode for most content, especially in a bright room, and Calibrated Dark mode for darker films viewed in a dark room.

Yes, Sports mode.

By chance, I started my testing with sports content: Amazon Prime's "NBA Nightcap 4/10: MIN v. HOU." I was mainly looking for how the screen handled rather-fast motion in HD. The TV's 60Hz refresh rate couldn't do much to help sharpen it. Turning on the set's Clear Action feature didn't have a noticeable effect, other than to darken images and add a slight, persistent flicker. (The Hisense QD7, also limited to 60Hz, has more effective motion smoothing.)

Switching to the Sports picture mode also had no effect on motion handling, but it made nearly all material look better — not just sports.

Take, for instance, Netflix's "Bridgerton." Season 1, Ep 3 (17:00-19:00 in) is a torture test, encompassing a full range of skintones and lighting condisions and a riot of colors. The VQM65C preserved detail and color in the light hair of a man standing in direct sunshine, as well as darker-toned women in shadow at an indoor reception. Dresses in pale summer shades of orange, blue, green, and pink appear vibrant without being oversaturated.

For darker films in a darker room, Calibrated Dark is often the right mode. It allowed the VQM65C to reproduce the dynamic range that's essential in “Dune” on Blu-ray. I could clearly see Duke Leto's face as he awakened in a dark bedroom. Afterwards, the screen retained detail in dark and bright areas as the night was pierced by brilliant orange and blue explosions of the Harkonnen invasion.

"Spider-Man: No Way Home" on Blu-ray looked equally good. Faces were clear in the firelight conversation between Peter Parker and Steven Strange, and the Doctor's fiery spell of forgetting glistened against the dark of a basement room.

Out of the box, the VQM65C defaults to Bright mode, which can appear remarkably over-saturated. I saw this in the normally gorgeous video for the Bruno Mars song "Risk It All" on YouTube. The creme-colored walls of the church interior turned orange, as did the face of his bride. This picture mode is rough on all skin tones, but anything darker than pale white really suffers. (I also saw motion stuttering regardless of mode: jerkiness in a scene in which the camera moves in towards Mars, and stuttering as it rotates 90 degrees to show him from the side.)

To get a better sense of color performance, I turned to material I know well — test photos I shot while reviewing cameras for Tom's Guide. Here the conclusion was clear: Sports mode generally provides the best color quality and detail for everyday viewing. In a sun-drenched photo of women by a fountain, Sports mode rendered pleasing skintones in both lighter and darker complexion.

In a softer-lit photo of a woman sitting on a bench, switching to Sports mode brought out detail in her face that had been washed out in Bright and Calibrated modes. Images in Bright mode looked overexposed and oversaturated (sometimes too orange, sometimes too blue). Calibrated mode continued to make things sallow.

Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K Review: Performance and test results

*As measured in Filmmaker mode ("Calibrated Dark" for the VQM65C)

Instrument tests back up much of what I saw, especially a measurement called Delta-E. It calculates how far off colors are from what they should be (based on the test signal we send to the TV). In Bright mode, the Vizio's Delta-E is 13.7, above (thus worse than) the average of 10.3 in the default mode for over 100 TVs we've tested going back to 2022. (They range from 5.52 — quite good — to 26.18.)

Delta-E is 4.6 in Calibrated Dark mode (the most accurate), well above the average of 2.48 for all TVs tested in their best mode — and at the point where even people who aren't color obsessed might notice. (The range for all models is 0.84 to 6.98; the Hisense QD7 comes in at 1.75.) We measured the simple Calibrated mode at 5. We do not usually test TVs in Sports mode, however, so we don’t have that data to report.

In terms of brightness, you’re looking at a mediocre peak HDR luminance of 781 nits in Calibrated Dark mode in our lab tests (based on the 10% window method). The average of comparable measures for other TVs we've tested is 1,472 nits, all-time, and 1,637 for models from 2025 and 2026. (It's not out of step for models in this price range, though. The rival Hisense QD7 is at 659 nits.) This performance is a sign that the full-array Mini-LED backlight with local dimming is doing its job, even with a modest 180 dimming zones for the 65-inch model.

The brightness deficit shows up in non-HDR content, such as the digital restoration of "8½," Fellini's 1963 black-and-white surrealist film. Details are hard to make out during an early scene (about four minutes in) set in a darkened bedroom. We measured just 219 nits standard dynamic range (SDR) brightness in Calibrated Dark mode, vs. an average 419 nits for all 2025 and 2026 65-inch LCD TVs reviewed.

However, a subsequent outdoor scene in "8½" displays well, including just a bit of expected warmth in the white tones of an old film. The TV also smoothes out a difficult long panning shot of a garden party well, using frame doubling to take the 24fps film rate up to 48Hz playback.

Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K Review: Audio

The Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K has the bare minimum audio power for a TV today: two 10-Watt speakers. It performs pretty well given those constraints. In "Risk It All," the bright trumpet notes and resonant plucking of the guitar came through clearly, as did Mars's soft singing. (I didn't discern a difference between the standard Surround sound and Virtual:X settings.)

As is usually the case, it's bass-heavy content that strains small sound systems. Audio sounded muffled and flat in the roar of sounds in the final season, final episode of Netflix's "Stranger Things." I got some improvement by pushing the volume from the standard 25 of 100 setting I usually test in up to 35, and by turning up bass from the neutral 0 level to +6, on a scale that ranges from -12 to +12. This didn't do much to improve clarity, though, especially in voices.

It's pretty standard advice to say that, if you care about audio (especially bass), you should consider adding one of the best soundbars or home theater speakers to your TV. That's certainly the case here.

Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K Review: Interface and remote

There's a reason I added a Roku stick to my own (older) Vizio TV. Vizio OS is rather busy, very anxious to sell you stuff, and includes some annoying "features." This model is carried by Walmart and Sam's Club, and you need to set up a Walmart account to get it working. The last thing I want is another online account collecting data on me. (Vizio is not unique in this respect, however. I had to disable a bunch of settings on the TCL QM8L TV with Google TV.)

My colleagues and I were driven batty by Scenic Mode. Leave the TV alone long enough and it slips a full-screen reel of nature footage and ambient music that, true to Vizio's ad-supported instincts, eventually pipes in commercials you can't disable — unless you turn off the whole feature, which is on by default.

On the positive side, settings were pretty easy to navigate via a mini-menu that pops up on the upper left of the screen. You can toggle directly through key settings like picture mode, or click into more-detailed menus. Vizio OS comes with over 300+ built-in apps and features WatchFree+, a free, ad-support platform with 300+ live channels (local news, sports, movies, gaming, music) plus over 30,000 on-demand titles.

The remote includes handy shortcut buttons to services including Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video, Paramount+, and WatchFree+ … which I kept accidentally launching when I meant to tap the select button in the center of the four-way navigational pad. It also supports voice input. Vizio also provides an intuitive smartphone app that largely mimics the physical remote, which is helpful if you ever misplace it.

Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K Review: Verdict

Vizio mostly got it right on this TV: big screen, low price, respectable image quality. Quirks aside (annoying OS, bizarre picture settings), it provides a good budget viewing experience.

For a step up, I recommend the Hisense QD7 over the Mini-LED Quantum 4K despite its slightly lower brightness in HDR. It delivers a better visual experience with more accurate colors. If you’re shopping for a room with lots of ambient light, you might have to splurge on one of TCL’s more mid-range Mini-LED models like the TCL QM7K that offers significantly higher brightness above 1,000 nits. (To get this quality at a comparable price though, you may have to drop down to a 55-inch screen.)

If you hunger for a big screen but don't have the stomach for a higher price, the 65-inch Vizio VQM65C is a solid choice. However, during sales events like Black Friday, the Vizio Mini-LED Quantum 4K is a prime candidate for big price drops and will become an even better value. Keep an eye on its sticker price as we head into the latter half of the year — your wallet will thank you for your patience.