5 Smart TV Brands That Offer The Best Picture Quality

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Back in 1926, Scottish engineer John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first ever working television when his mechanical technology transmitted flickering shadows from just 30 lines of resolution. The images were tiny and blurry, but the TV worked, and it's just one of the many inventions from Scotland that have shaped the modern world. Soon after, picture quality started to take its first major steps when better cathode-ray tubes and electronic cameras replaced those mechanical systems. By 1954, NBC gave the world its first color television broadcast, and by the '60s, shows like "Star Trek" and "Bonanza" were bringing vibrant images to living rooms everywhere.

Toward the end of the last century, the digital revolution took picture quality to a significant new level. By then, the Japanese were leading the way in television technology, with flat-screen plasmas and LCDs replacing furniture-sized CRT sets. LCD won the market battle and became the dominant tech. Soon after, OLED arrived with its perfect blacks and superior contrast, while people at home were adding soundbars and surround speakers, and screens were getting bigger and bigger. With this revolution came high definition with its 2 million pixels. 4K then quadrupled that and dramatically sharpened things up. Quantum Dot enhanced color vibrancy and gave us better brightness than OLED, and its significantly lower cost opened up premium picture quality to the budget market.

Nowadays, 8K, Mini LED, and advanced Quantum Dot displays deliver cinema-like images. Manufacturers from the Far East continue to push boundaries as we consume movies, shows, sports, and everything else from our smart TVs. Relentless competition has created a picture quality battleground among leading brands — and here are the top five that offer the best.

Once upon a time, buying a budget television meant accepting a considerable gulf in picture quality with pricier sets. That's no longer the case, with brands like TCL gaining real traction against more-established brands. In 2025, the Chinese company flipped the expectations of a budget TV when it finally perfected Mini LED picture quality. Previously, TCL prioritized extreme brightness over balance — but a new approach saw a shift in focus to light control. The result was displays delivering rich contrast with deep blacks sitting beautifully alongside bright highlights, while colors were vibrant and saturated and detail remained consistent — which prompted What Hi-Fi to bestow TCL with multiple awards in 2025 for bringing genuine premium picture quality to the budget market.

One of those award-winning sets was the TCL C7K, also known as the TCL QM7K in the U.S. With its extreme brightness, genuine black depth, minimal haloing around bright objects, and vivid and smoothly blending colors, it easily outperforms its price. Other TVs in the 2025 Mini LED lineup include the lower-tier budget model, the QM6K, and the higher-tier flagship, the QM8K. The former offers remarkable value, with even the 85-inch model available for under $1,000. 

Digital Trends noted in its testing that color precision was exceptional and mentioned that skin tones were even better than the 115-inch monster QM89, which costs 15 times as much. The top-tier QM8K was positioned as a competitor to OLED TVs, and in CNET's testing, it achieved comparable contrast thanks to its excellent anti-halo technology and high number of dimming zones that TCL says is 35% more than the previous model. Shadow detail also proves to be superior, and blacks stay genuinely black during transitions.

Hisense is another brand from China that is helping to redefine budget TV picture quality expectations. But just how are they doing it? Massive investment in Mini LED technology, that's how. Hisense packages this as ULED, AKA Ultra LED. It combines thousands of tiny Mini-LEDs for precise backlight control with Quantum Dot technology for vibrant, accurate colors and advanced local dimming zones for deep blacks and lifelike HDR. Together, these features boost brightness, contrast, and color performance, while high refresh rates ensure smooth motion for movies and fast-paced gaming and sports.

This complete approach helps Hisense deliver picture quality as notable as that on the Hisense U8QG. Like most Hisense TVs, there are settings you should change immediately on this model. But once you've done that, you'll be more than satisfied with what you're seeing. The brightness goes way beyond what typical LEDs can. Wired even called it a "brightness bonanza ... not for the timid," while Tom's Guide measured an astonishing 3,916 nits in HDR. Those Mini-LED zones produce genuine darkness approaching OLED depth and colors that are so accurate that nature documentaries look like you could actually be there. Reds are rich, blues are true, and the whites are never off-tint.

While most TV brands are chasing peak brightness numbers and the most saturated colors to win the hearts of consumers, Sony takes the opposite approach. The Japanese company puts a heavy emphasis on accuracy over impact. It doesn't artificially inflate colors — what you get is the tonal balance and authenticity that filmmakers intended for you to see. On the Sony Bravia 8 II, the company opted to use Samsung's renowned QD-OLED panel over LG's standard panel, but the difference is what Sony did with it through processing. The colors appeared so rich and vibrant, yet balanced and cinematically accurate, that What Hi-Fi decided to upgrade the TV to their top overall recommendation for 2025, while SlashGear consulted gamers and found it to be one of the best TVs for playing Xbox or PlayStation.

However, Tom's Guide proclaimed in 2025 that its predecessor, the Sony A95L, remains one of the most visually stunning displays available. And that is despite being launched in 2023. At the time, it set a new standard for OLED picture quality with unmatched color volume and Sony's cinematic image tuning. Yet even with recent technological advancements, it still holds high regard. However, when panel technology allows, Sony can also deliver extreme brightness. It's pricey, but the Sony Bravia 9, released in 2024, delivers an impressive 3,000 nits without overwhelming unless the content demands, and its backlighting system controls zones precisely enough to avoid the blooming issues that plague many LED TVs. Bright highlights remain clean against dark backgrounds, and it handles extreme contrast well, with the signature color accuracy remaining intact.

When you buy an OLED TV from Sony, Panasonic, or most other brands (including certain models from their Korean rival Samsung), you're actually getting an LG panel inside. LG Display manufactures the WOLED panels that power almost the entire OLED TV market. Controlling the tech from the ground up gives LG a significant advantage over everyone else, with their newest panels delivering significant peak brightness with vibrant, punchy colors. But it isn't just their flagships that perform well in picture quality; LG's mid-range models are renowned for their almost-flagship performance.

One of those that has performed across the board with professional testers is the LG C5. At just $1,200 for a standard 55-inch model, it costs significantly less than LG's top models while delivering comparable picture quality. It isn't class-leading in brightness, but HDR still looks convincing with rich yet natural color and sharp detail, while it also delivers striking OLED contrast with true blacks. In later years, MLA technology increased peak brightness in LG's high-end G-series, but it still didn't close the color gap on Samsung's QD-OLED panels. That was until the RGB tandem panel pushed both luminance and color range much further. 

It first appeared on the LG G5 in 2025, a TV that The Verge said took "OLED performance to another level." It gets extremely bright, with small sparks and reflections hitting 2,400 nits, allowing HDR details to really pop. Bright scenes stay bright — a rarity in an OLED — and even RTINGS, which is known for its rigorous standards, was full of praise for this television. However, to get the best out of the display on any LG TV, there are settings you should immediately change before you start watching.

OLED TVs have always looked amazing in darkened rooms, but they have always faced a crucial limitation — they could never achieve the luminance needed to compete under bright lights. Rather than sitting back and accepting this, Samsung got busy solving the problem by developing their own OLED panels using Quantum Dot technology. Samsung's first QD-OLED television was the S95B. Released in 2022, it created colors more efficiently than standard OLED and allowed the screen to maintain rich, saturated colors in bright scenes.

However, there was no significant increase in peak brightness. But when the next generation arrived, highlights on the S95C display were hitting as high as 1,400 nits in HDR while covering 99% of the color gamut. It was the brightest OLED that Reviewed had tested at that time. But the Samsung S95D took things further, with Tom's Guide reporting a 30% increase while adding an impressive anti-glare coating. In fact, the Glare Free tech was a game changer, while the QD-OLED panel was now pushing brightness levels toward that of LED televisions.

The newest generation, the Samsung S95F, was tested at hitting 2,132 nits in Filmmaker Mode by TechRadar on a standard 55-inch model. It also achieved the first-ever 100% DCI-P3 coverage on a TV, while Glare Free 2.0 continued its predecessor's excellent work. However, Samsung's QLED models also excel at picture quality. The QN90F is one of the best Samsung TVs, with its local dimming performing at a level What Hi-Fi had "simply never seen before on a Samsung LCD TV." It removes haloing around bright objects without dimming them down, which had been a previous trend. It's also kitted out with the same Glare Free 2.0 tech found in the S95F to round off some incredible picture quality.

We analyzed authoritative sources, including RTINGS, Tom's Guide, What Hi-Fi, TechRadar, Digital Trends, and Consumer Reports. We then ranked brands based on the picture quality scores of their flagship models, brightness measurements, HDR performance, color accuracy, and overall expert ratings. We also considered whether these brands maintain high picture quality across their entire lineup, and not just their premium models.