Best TVs of 2023 Tested: Holiday top picks
We’ve found the best TVs for you, with the best budget options along with 4K and 8K TVs
1. The list in brief
2. Best TV (for most people)
3. Best OLED TV
4. Best value TV
5. Best QLED TV
6. Best cheap TV
7. Best QD-OLED TV
8. Best gaming TV
9. Best mid-range TV
10. Best 8K TV
11. TV lab test data
12. How to choose
13. How we test
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.
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
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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 best TV (for most people)
This TV brings high-end features to a mid-level price bracket. Its peak brightness exceeds almost any TV, and its color reproduction is phenomenal as well.
The best OLED is also the brightest
The LG G3 is one of the brightest OLED TVs on the market, and its visuals are eye-catching no matter what you want to watch. Only a few tiny flaws, including its sound and less-than-cutting-edge HDR color, keep it from perfection.
The best value TV
As a spiritual successor to the award-winning TCL 6-Series line, the QM8 accomplishes a great deal and thanks to some recent discounts, is a great value for under $1,000.
The 4K QLED TV to beat in 2023
The Samsung QN90C Neo QLED TV brings the best-in-class HDR brightness, ample viewing options and strong picture performance into a single package.
Best TV under $500
For its starting price of $499, the Roku Plus TVs offers surprisingly good picture quality and sound, two things that are usually the first to go with budget sets.
The best QD-OLED
The Sony Bravia XR A95L is a fully tricked-out QD-OLED unit that serves as both the top-tier offering in Sony’s Master Series and the most advanced set the company produces.
The best gaming TV
The Samsung S90C OLED offers HDMI 2.1 allowing for VRR, ALLM, and up to 144Hz rates giving you just about everything you would ever possibly need from a gaming TV.
The best mid-range OLED
If spending more than $1,500 on a new OLED TV wasn't what you had planned on, check out the LG C3 OLED that offers a great performance at a reasonable price.
The best 8K TV
Samsung's top 8K TV is the most premium to date, reaching new heights in terms of design and performance, making it one of the best 8K TVs you can buy right now.
Best TV
Specifications
Reasons to buy
Reasons to avoid
✅ You want a Mini-LED TV for its performance: Its peak brightness exceeds any TV around that price, and its color reproduction is as good as some of this year’s best TVs.
✅ You use Google devices and services: Google TV is smart and well-rounded, especially for those in Google’s ecosystem, and who already use services like Google Assistant.
✅ You want a TV with good sound: Audio performance is a lot like the HDR performance — it’s great. The U8K's 2.1.2 speaker system is plenty powerful for most medium-sized living rooms.
❌ You care about color accuracy: Colors, while vibrant, aren’t going to look all that natural.
❌ You want a super-fast gaming TV: 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.
❌ You have a big family that gather around the TV: Colors will desaturate as you shift off-axis. This is relatively common for Mini-LED TVs so it’s not anything surprising, but it’s an area that companies like Hisense will have to improve upon
📺 The Hisense U8K ULED is one of the most colorful TVs we’ve tested and puts out above average light for its price point. There’s room for improvement here — especially when it comes to input lag and color accuracy — but the U8K vastly improves on the Hisense U8H from 2022. ★★★★
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
Attributes | Notes | Rating |
---|---|---|
Price | Strong performance for the price. | ★★★★☆ |
Design | A great-looking TV but not OLED-levels of thin. | ★★★★☆ |
Performance | Shows and movies give off a serious ‘wow’ factor. | ★★★★★ |
Smart TV | The best smart TV operating system on the market. | ★★★★★ |