The 5 Best LED LCD TVs - Fall 2023 Reviews

The Samsung QN90C/QN90CD QLED is the best LED TV that we've tested. It's an impressive TV with amazing picture quality and a great selection of gaming features. It uses a Mini LED backlight, with way more dimming zones than most LED TVs, allowing for greater control over the local dimming feature for better dark room performance, with less distracting blooming around bright objects. It also gets exceptionally bright, meaning it can handle lots of glare in a bright room.

It's excellent for gaming, especially on the most recent consoles, as it supports 4k @ 120Hz or 4k @ 144Hz on its 43 and 50-inch models. It also includes variable refresh rate (VRR) to reduce tearing. This TV's predecessor, the Samsung QN90B QLED, is very similar overall but is getting hard to find. The QN90C is widely available, but ultimately, get the cheapest one of the two that you can get.

The best LCD TV for a home theater is the Sony X93L/X93CL. In North America, it's the unofficial successor to 2022's Sony X95K. For 2023, the Sony X95L is only available in an 85-inch format in that region. The X93L is an amazing TV that is just a tad better than the X95K, with excellent contrast, fantastic HDR brightness, and a wide color gamut resulting in bright, vibrant images. This Sony looks great in both dark and bright rooms, with its great contrast, fantastic brightness, and excellent reflection handling.

The Samsung QN90C/QN90CD QLED does get a bit brighter, although its Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL) is more aggressive than the Sony. The Samsung also has a slightly better viewing angle and reflection handling. But what makes the Sony good for a home theater setup is its vaunted image processing. It also supports Dolby Vision HDR and DTS audio formats, which is great if you prefer to watch your movies on physical media. Ultimately, this is the best LED TV you can get if your primary use case is watching movies. We are currently testing the 85-inch X95L, so stay tuned to see how it compares.

The best mid-range TV we've tested with an LED panel is the Hisense U8H. It's an excellent TV overall, with fantastic contrast and an impressive Mini LED local dimming feature, delivering deep blacks in a dark room with very little distracting blooming around bright objects. It has exceptional peak brightness and reflection handling, ensuring it can easily overcome glare in a bright room. It has worse processing overall than the Sony X93L/X93CL and even the Samsung QN90C/QN90CD QLED, so it's a bit of a step down. There's also more noticeable banding in areas of similar color on this TV when compared to the others, and it has slightly worse motion processing.

Still, it's a great TV for gaming, with many of the same great features found on the Samsung, including 4k @ 120Hz support from the Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles. It has a fast response time and incredibly low input lag, ensuring a smooth and responsive gaming experience, which is great for competitive gamers. We're currently testing this TV's successor, the Hisense U8K, so we'll know how it compares to its predecessor soon.

The best LED TV we've tested in the budget category is the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED. It's a great TV, with superb contrast and fantastic black uniformity, making it a great choice for a dark room. It has a decent full array local dimming feature, but there's a bit more blooming than on the Hisense U8H, and it's not as bright. It has a wide color gamut, so colors look vibrant and realistic, and it displays HDR content the way the creator intended.

It delivers an impressive gaming experience thanks to its low input lag and very good response time, ensuring a smooth gaming experience with little blur. It even supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing, but since it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate, VRR only works over a much smaller range than it does on the Hisense.

If you're shopping on a tight budget, the best cheap LED TV we've tested is the Hisense A65K. It's a decent TV and isn't as well suited for dark room viewing as the other TVs on this list due to its only satisfactory contrast. Still, it's decent in a dark room and gets bright enough to handle a moderately lit room. It's also surprisingly colorful for a cheap TV due to its PFS-phosphor coating, so you're not sacrificing color vibrancy by stepping down to this price point.

It runs the Google TV interface, with a massive selection of streaming apps available, so you can easily find your favorite shows or movies. It's also a decent TV for gamers thanks to its superb low input lag, ensuring a responsive gaming experience. It even supports a variable refresh rate feature to help reduce tearing in games, but unlike more expensive models on this list, it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate, so motion isn't as smooth. While you're losing out on many features compared to the other models on the list, you're also saving a lot of money.