The 3 Best TVs Under $500 - Fall 2023 Reviews

The best TV under $500 we've tested is the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED. It's a great TV with a good selection of extra features and delivers surprisingly good picture quality for the price. This TV is a great choice for watching movies or shows at night in a dark room, thanks to its impressive contrast ratio. It's one of the only TVs on the market at this price point to offer a full array local dimming feature to improve the appearance of dark scenes, and this helps it deliver a great overall HDR experience, as small bright highlights stand out.

The TV has a wide color gamut, so content looks vibrant and colorful. It's also a very accurate TV overall, requiring little calibration to look its best. It runs the Roku OS interface, which is simple but very easy to use, and has a great selection of streaming channels. The TV has a great selection of gaming features, including low input lag, a fast response time, and variable refresh rate support to reduce tearing in games. You can find its 50-inch model for a similar price to its 55-inch size, so it's also the best 50-inch TV under $500.

If you want the biggest TV possible on a tight budget, you can find the Hisense 65A65K for under $500 and the 75-inch model for just a bit more. It delivers similar picture quality to the Samsung Q60C QLED but for a cheaper price, although it's not available in as many sizes as the Samsung. It's a decent TV overall, offering exceptional performance for the price. The built-in Google TV platform is easy to use, with a nice, polished interface that makes it easy to find your favorite content. It has one of the widest selections of streaming apps available, so you can easily find your favorite streaming services.

It has low input lag for a responsive gaming experience, and surprisingly, it even supports VRR to reduce screen tearing. 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 it doesn't get very bright, so it's best to avoid placing it in a bright room. Its predecessor, the Hisense A6H, is also available for a similarly low price, but it's much worse overall than the A65K, so stick with the newer model.

If you're looking for something smaller than 42 or 43 inches, the best very small TV under $500 we've tested is the Samsung QN32Q60CAFXZA or Samsung Q60C QLED. It's available in a wide range of sizes, and you can find its 32-inch model for just below $500. It isn't as good as the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED and is more expensive than the similar Hisense A65K, but it's one of the few TVs you can buy in a very small size without sacrificing performance. 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.