Top TVs 2023

The Sony X85K is good overall. It performs well for watching SDR or HDR movies in dark rooms as it displays deep blacks and has impressive black uniformity, but it doesn't have a local dimming feature to further improve the contrast. It also makes some highlights pop in HDR, but the tone mapping is off with brighter colors. It's great for watching TV shows and good for watching sports in bright rooms as it gets bright enough to fight glare from a few lights around and has good reflection handling, but it has a narrow viewing angle if you want to use it in a wide seating arrangement. Lastly, it's good for gaming as it has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth and variable refresh rate (VRR) support for console gamers, but it doesn't support FreeSync, which is disappointing for PC gamers.

The Sony X85J is a good TV for most uses. The outstanding contrast and excellent black uniformity are great for watching movies in the dark, but it lacks a local dimming feature, which is a bit disappointing. It's a good TV for watching sports or TV shows during the day, and its low input lag and fast response time make it a good choice for playing games.

Samsung’s M8 Smart Monitor is both a USB-C monitor and smart TV in one package, plus a lot more. It’s a great value at $700, particularly for people who don’t have a lot of space, but it’s not fantastic at everything it tries to do.

The Hisense U7H is great for mixed usage. It's best for watching movies in SDR or HDR in a dark room thanks to its excellent contrast ratio and good local dimming feature. It's also good for watching shows or sports in a bright room, as it can easily overcome glare thanks to its high SDR peak brightness and good reflection handling, but it's limited a bit by its sub-par viewing angle. It delivers a very good gaming experience, with low input lag and some great gaming features. Sadly, it has a slow response time and can't display 4k @ 120Hz signals properly, which also limits its usefulness as a PC monitor.

The Vizio MQ6 is decent for most uses. It's decent for watching movies in dark rooms because it has an outstanding native contrast and fantastic black uniformity, but there's no local dimming. It has a few gaming features like FreeSync support and low input lag, but motion looks blurry due to the slow response time. It's okay for watching sports as it has good reflection handling, but it has a narrow viewing angle, so it's not ideal for a wide seating arrangement as the image degrades from the side. Although it displays a wide color gamut, it's just okay for watching HDR content because it doesn't get bright enough to make highlights pop.

The Samsung QN90C feels so similar to last year’s QN90B in a number of ways: it is a beautiful TV with excellent picture quality but the same list of cons along with its identically awkward pricing among the competition. That makes it hard to recommend for basically anyone: it’s priced too high to be a good alternative to OLED panels and lags behind cheaper televisions when it comes to customization and dimming performance. It’s still a great TV, Samsung just has placed it in an unwinnable pricing tier.

Although the Samsung QN900C is a fine TV with plenty of gaming appeal, the lack of widespread 8K content makes it a hard sell compared with more affordable 4K models.

Although the Samsung QN900C is a fine TV with plenty of gaming appeal, the lack of widespread 8K content makes it a hard sell compared with more affordable 4K models.

The Samsung Q60B gives us a bright, colorful reminder of just how effective QLED can be for elevating relatively simple TV tech into something that looks appealing. It also reveals, though, that doing Quantum Dots on the cheap can come with some awkward compromises to the overall image quality.

Samsung's The Serif lifestyle TV is eye-catching and unique, even if its screen isn't that special.