Update: We've recently reviewed the LG B7, which has replaced its previous version in our roundup of the best 4K TVs around.
Original article continues below...
Can you imagine how hard it was a decade ago to find the best TV? Like the technology of the era, finding anything was a nightmare. Thankfully, the 21st century not only brought us serious improvements like Wikipedia, but also a brand-new TV technology called 4K that revolutionized the visual world.
4K, also called Ultra-HD, is a term that describes how many pixels a TV can display at one time – typically referring to a resolution of 3840 × 2160.
But just because a TV supports a higher resolution, doesn't mean it performs well. In fact, there's a large amount of variation in the quality of their interfaces, their execution and support of High Dynamic Range (HDR) and physical design.
Our constantly updated list of the best 4K TVs is the best way to find a set that does what you need it to do without spending more money than you need to on extraneous features.
The world of TV buying can feel unapproachable when you're first getting into it, but give it some time and it will all make sense. Let's try and make your buying decision at least a bit easier with our picks for the best 4K TVs.
Here are nine of the best 4K TVs to help you make your buying decision:
- Samsung Q9F QLED
- LG E7 OLED
- Sony XBR-X900E
- Sony A1E OLED
- LG B7 OLED
- Sony XBR-X850E
- Samsung KS7000
- Sony XBR-X930E
- Samsung Q7F QLED
- Need to give your TV's sound a boost? Check out our guide to the best soundbars available.
- Ultra HD Blu-rays are a fantastic way of watching 4K content without worrying about buffering. Check out our guide to the best Ultra HD Blu-ray players for some suggestions.
Samsung was the first brand to introduce an HDR-compatible screen way back in 2015, but it's not been resting on its haunches ever since.
It's latest flagship, the Q9F, is a perfect example of this. It ups the brightness to 1500 nits, 50% higher than the level required for UHD Premium certification, and the brightest TV we've ever tested.
Outside of an impressive-sounding number this brightness has a real impact on the set's image quality. Detail is preserved in even the brightest areas of the image, and colors are exceptionally vivid and bright.
Even non-HDR content looks fantastic thanks to Samsung's SDR upscaling technology.
No television is perfect, and the Q9F can occasionally suffer from some backlight clouding around bright objects. Additionally some settings cause color striping in HDR colors, but in all other respects this is the best television around at the moment.
Read the full review: Samsung Q9F
Thanks to the thinness the technology affords, OLED televisions often look striking, but LG's OLEDE7's 'picture on glass' design looks especially fantastic.
However beyond its aesthetic appearance, the set delivers the same great picture quality we've come to expect from OLED, with blacks that are far darker than any you'll see from an LCD TV.
It's black levels were already impressive, but LG's development this year has been to boost the maximum brightness level that the set is capable of, resulting in images that really pop.
LG's flagship this year is the crazy-expensive OLED W7, but frankly the E7 offers a very similar level of quality at a much lower price. It still looks great, it's still packing Dolby Atmos, and although it can't boast the wallpaper thinness of the W7, it's not far off.
For all those reasons and more, the E7 OLED is a worthwhile addition to any home theater.
Read the full review: LG OLED E7
Although LCDs haven't quite achieved the same black levels as their OLED rivals like the LG E7 above, the Sony X900E's HDR performance comes tantalizingly close.
This is achieved through the set's direct LED backlight, which allows it to achieve a brightness uniformity that edge-lit displays often fall short of.
Add in fantastic detail and motion handling, and you've got yourself a set that strikes an excellent balance between price and performance, and is well worth a look, even if its Android TV interface can feel a little cluttered, and its remote a little cheap.
Read the full review: Sony BRAVIA XBR-X900E
The 55A1 – and the A1 OLED series overall – are crowd pleasers in just about every way. Their ‘picture only’ design has been beautifully realized, managing to be simultaneously subtle and dramatic. Their vibrating screen delivers a far more powerful and effective sound performance than I’d thought possible, too.
The real stars of the show here, though, are the A1’s exquisitely detailed, contrast-rich and colorful pictures. These prove emphatically what we’ve long suspected: More brands using OLED technology can only lead to good things.
Read the full review: Sony A1E OLED
LG's 'B' line of OLEDs has consistently offered a great entry point into the display technology without compromising on what makes it so exciting.
The B7 series is no different. Contained within the TVs is exactly the same panel that's powering the more expensive C7, E7 and yes even the W7 LG televisions, which means an exceptional bump over last year's OLED panels at a much lower price.
So where has LG saved the money? In a word, sound. The B7's downward firing speakers are the worst all the company's OLED TVs. Not only that, but the set is also currently unable to pass Dolby Atmos to an external sound system over HDMI (although a firmware update to fix this is on the way).
If however, you're content to put up with a standard surround sound experience, then the B7 is a fantastic entryway into a piece of TV tech that still feels futuristic in 2017.
Read the full review: LG OLED B7
By introducing its exceptional X1 video processor further down its TV range than ever before and being brave enough to dial down the brightness a bit to deliver a more even, immersive backlight experience, Sony's struck mid-range gold with the X850E Series. While it's not the brightest or most colorful TV on the list, the simple fact is that few TVs we’ve seen in recent times have balanced price, contrast, brightness and color quite so all-round effectively as the 65X850E.
If you're looking for a great TV that doesn't destroy the bank account, Sony's X850E series is the clear winner.
Read the full review: Sony XBR-65X850E
Despite being much cheaper than the more premium KS9500 range, Samsung's KS7000 series meets the demanding specifications set out by the Ultra HD Premium standard. Which means, essentially, that it's got enough brightness, contrast, color and resolution to produce an uncompromising HDR picture.
In more or less words, HDR sources look unprecedentedly dynamic and rich for the KS7000 range's segment of the market. The sets also do an emphatic job of getting the maximum impact from their native 4K pixel counts.
The TVs look brilliant with standard dynamic range sources, too - though a recent firmware update means that all Samsung's 2016 SUHD TVs offer a surprisingly effective processing system for upscaling SDR to HDR.
There's no 3D support, and very high contrast HDR images can suffer with fairly obvious signs of backlight striping and clouding. Neither of these issues, though, stop the KS7000 from being a great value way of finding out what all the HDR fuss is about.
Read the full review: Samsung KS7000 series
The Sony X930E range is the more premium range that sits alongside the XE90 above and it's certainly a more ambitious set.
The X930E features a Sony innovation known as 'slim backlight drive' which attempts to deliver areas of concentrated light in the screen while maintaining a slim form-factor.
For the most part this system performs admirably, and creates fantastically bright images that have real punch and intensity to them.
But the system does have it's issues with keeping this brightness to the bright areas of the image, where it can occasionally see this light 'bleed' out into darker parts of the image.
Thankfully this set is also no slouch in the sound department; it's happily one of the better sounding TVs out there.
So the X930Eis a great looking set, but while it may be much more premium than the X900E listed above, it doesn't quite go all the way in justifying its increased cost.
Read the full review: Sony X930E
QLED is delivering on Samsung’s promise of better, brighter screens at a more affordable price, with the Samsung Q7F leading the charge as the manufacturer’s entry-level set.
Unfortunately, though, the Samsung Q7F QLED is an extraordinary TV hindered by ordinary issues. It’s one of the brightest, most colorful and we daresay one of the most enjoyable TVs to watch from Samsung in 2017. And while it would be nice to unequivocally recommend it, some damning black level performance, issues with off-axis viewing, audio and operating system performance keep on the most beautiful TVs from being one of this year’s best.
Read the full review: Samsung Q7F QLED TV
from TechRadar - All the latest technology news http://www.techradar.com/news/television/10-best-ultra-hd-4k-tvs-in-the-world-today-1326405
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