The 6 Best Small TVs - Fall 2023 Reviews

The best small TV that we've tested is the LG C3 OLED. It's a fantastic TV with incredible picture quality, deep inky blacks, and high peak brightness. It's available in a few different sizes, down to a 42-inch size that's great for an office or guest bedroom. It has a fantastic selection of extra features, including gaming features like HDMI 2.1 bandwidth for 4k @ 120Hz gaming. It has very good image processing, handling low-quality and low-resolution content well. It also supports advanced audio and video formats, making it an excellent choice for a small home entertainment setup.

It's a great choice if you plan on using it in a wide seating area, as its wide viewing angle means the image remains consistent as you move or sit off to the side. It has incredible reflection handling, meaning visibility won't be an issue in bright rooms. You could also opt for its predecessor, the LG C2 OLED, but it's getting harder to find and isn't as good as the C3 due to its worse image processing and lack of DTS audio format support.

If you're mostly going to be watching content in a bright room, then an LED TV like the Samsung QN90C/QN90CD QLED is a better choice than the LG C3 OLED. It's an impressive TV with amazing picture quality and a great selection of gaming features. It's an excellent TV with impressive picture quality, and its incredible peak brightness helps it overcome glare in very bright rooms. It still looks good in a dark room thanks to its high contrast ratio and Mini LED local dimming feature, but there's more distracting blooming around bright highlights in darker scenes when compared to the LG.

It's available in small 43 and 50-inch sizes, and these two models are especially good for gaming, as they support up to 4k @ 144Hz on all four of their HDMI 2.1 bandwidth ports. The TV also includes variable refresh rate (VRR) to reduce tearing and has very low input lag, making it a fantastic choice for a small gaming room. 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.

If you're looking for something smaller than 42 inches, the best very small TV we've tested is the Samsung Q60C QLED. It's available in a wide range of sizes, down to a very small 32-inch model. Although it isn't nearly as good as the LG C3 OLED, Samsung QN90C/QN90CD QLED, and Sony X85K, it's one of the few TVs you can buy in a very small size without sacrificing performance or reducing the native resolution. It delivers decent picture quality, with an adequate contrast ratio, fantastic black uniformity for deep blacks in a dark room, and very good peak brightness in SDR. It handles glare well thanks to its decent reflection handling, making it a good choice for an office or bedroom with lots of light, especially when watching SDR content.

It has a built-in smart interface with a great selection of streaming apps, so you don't have to worry about buying a separate streaming stick to watch your favorite shows. It lacks advanced gaming features like variable refresh rate technology to reduce tearing. Although it supports HDR, it lacks a local dimming feature and can't get bright enough for HDR content to stand out.

If you want a more feature-rich experience than the budget models provide but don't want to pay much, the Sony X85K is the best mid-range small TV we've tested. Like the LG C3 OLED and Samsung QN90C/QN90CD QLED, it delivers more premium picture quality than the cheaper models on this list and is available down to a 43-inch size. Thanks to its great SDR peak brightness and good reflection handling, it's a much better choice for a bright living room than the budget and cheap picks. Even in a dark room, it displays deep blacks thanks to its high native contrast ratio, but it lacks a local dimming feature to improve its contrast.

Unlike many mid-range TVs available in a small size, it has gaming features like HDMI 2.1 bandwidth and variable refresh rate (VRR) support. These make it fully compatible with the Xbox Series X and PS5. Even if you don't game and just want to stream your favorite content, the Google TV interface has a ton of apps to download.

The best budget small TV that we've tested is the Hisense A65K. It's a decent TV, and while you're losing out on features and performance compared to the higher-end models, it still provides good value for a low-cost model. Still, it's just as good as the Samsung Q60C QLED and is cheaper, although it comes in a more narrow range of sizes. It comes with the Google TV operating system built-in, which has a user-friendly interface that's easy to learn, and there are many apps you can download through the Google Play Store.

It upscales lower-resolution content well, which is great for watching cable TV or DVDs, and it uses a flicker-free backlight at most backlight settings, which helps reduce eye strain during long viewing sessions. It looks best in dark rooms as it displays deep blacks with remarkable black uniformity, but as expected for an entry-level TV, it doesn't get very bright, so it's best to avoid placing it in a bright room.

If you want a cheap TV or need something small for a bedroom or kitchen with limited space, check out the TCL 3 Series 2019. Although it delivers just basic picture quality, it's still a great choice as the best small smart TV because it comes with Roku TV built-in, which is a user-friendly platform with a great selection of streaming apps. It means you can watch your favorite content without needing an external streaming device or cable box, so you can easily hook up your TV and start playing content.

The 32S327 variant has a 1080p resolution like the 40-inch model we tested, so if you find the 32-inch size too small, you can get something bigger. Regarding picture quality, it has excellent pre-calibration accuracy, which is great because you can't calibrate the TV, and images look realistic right out of the box. It doesn't get bright enough to fight a ton of glare, so it's not a good choice for a bright room, but it displays deep, uniform blacks, so it's a good choice for a dark to moderately lit room.