Best TVs of 2023 Tested: Holiday top picks

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 — close to four dozen of them — and these are the 4K TVs that we recommend. 

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 Hisense U8K was recently promoted to the top spot due to its on-going affordability and phenomenal performance. Other top models like the LG G3 OLED and Samsung QN90C still hold top spots on our list, but given the tough financial constraints on our readers, we wanted to place a higher emphasis on more affordable models.

Looking to save big on one of the best TVs? With deals season now in full swing, this is a great time to go shopping. Check out our guide to the best Cyber Week TV deals or keep scrolling to see the latest deals on the best TVs of 2023.

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 TVs you can buy today

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. 

Best 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

Best OLED TV

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