Credit:
Reviewed / Timothy Renzi
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Credit:
Reviewed / Timothy Renzi
Reviewed's mission is to help you buy the best stuff and get the most out of what you already own. Our team of product experts thoroughly vet every product we recommend to help you cut through the clutter and find what you need.
Learn more about our product testing
With an exquisite picture and exhaustive features, the LG C3 OLED is an incredible TV for movies, gaming, and everything in between. Read More
The Sony A95L doesn’t come cheap, but it’s got the best picture quality money can buy, plus an exhaustive list of extra features. Read More
The Hisense U8K is a bright, colorful, competitively priced TV overflowing with value. Read More
With its incredible picture and extensive list of features, the Samsung QN90C is one of the best-performing mini-LED TVs you can buy. Read More
The Samsung S95C improves on a winning formula, offering an elevated OLED experience with the features to back it up. Read More
If 65-inch TVs aren't big enough for your needs, your next best choice is 75 inches—a size bracket with plenty of great options, as long as you're willing to spend a bit more.
Right now, the best 75-inch TV money can buy is actually 77 inches: the LG C3 (available at Amazon) . Although it’s a bit bigger than 75 inches, we love its near picture-perfect performance and its wide array of features. However, if you're operating on a tighter budget, we've reviewed several other 75-inch TVs, and we're sure that at least one of them will suit your needs.
The LG C3 combines the unbelievable performance of an OLED with an array of exciting features.
The A95L offers an incredible experience.
World-class contrast and color
Excellent software and features
Sleek, accommodating design
Fewer gaming features than competitors
The Hisense U8K offers great performance for a price most people can justify.
The Samsung QN90C is one of the brightest LED TVs we’ve reviewed this year.
Incredibly bright and colorful
Impressive local dimming
Perfect for dedicated gamers
Off-axis viewing isn’t as sharp
Cluttered smart platform
No Dolby Vision
Incredible contrast
Dazzling color
Fantastic gaming support
Sluggish, cluttered software
Raised black levels in ambient light
No Dolby Vision support
Excellent contrast and out-of-the-box accuracy
A gaming powerhouse
Attractive wall-mounted design
Lackluster tabletop configuration
Lags behind QD-OLED in some ways
So-so streaming platform
Brighter than most OLEDs
Fantastic color
Wealth of gaming features
So-so software experience
No Dolby Vision
Incredible contrast
Vivid, accurate color
All the gaming features you’ll need
So-so smart platform
Not as bright as competitive OLEDs
Excellent color and contrast
Elegant design
Not as bright as other OLEDs
Only two HDMI 2.1 ports
Spectacular for HDR
A terrific gaming TV
Posh design
Difficult-to-use software
Less refined SDR year over year
No Dolby Vision
Bright and Colorful
Exceptional local dimming
Great for gamers
Design lacks polish
Picture quality drops off-axis
Bright picture
Impressive backlight control
Great gaming features for the price
HDR content often looks washed out
Minor motion-related color fringing
Bright enough for daytime viewing
Great smart platform
Accommodating design
Moderate light bloom
Narrow viewing angle
Offers mini-LEDs for less
Bright enough for daytime viewing
Excellent quantum-dot color
Motion-related color fringing
Narrow viewing angle
Lackluster design
Excellent color
Great for casual gamers
Reliable smart platform
Not very bright
No local dimming
Lackluster design
Our lab is outfitted with much of the same equipment you would find at a factory that manufactures and calibrates televisions.
Reviewed has been testing TVs for over a decade. Our current Home Theater expert, Michael Desjardin, is a Senior Staff Writer who’s been with Reviewed since 2014. A film enthusiast and TV expert, he takes picture quality seriously, but also understands that not every TV is a good fit for everyone.
John Higgins is Reviewed’s A/V and Electronics Senior Editor. In his A/V career that has spanned two decades he has written about TVs, speakers, headphones, AVRs, gaming, and all manner of technology. He is also an ISF Level III-certified calibrator.
We measure things like peak brightness, black level, hue, and so on.
We're serious about TV testing, so much so that our Cambridge, Massachusetts laboratory has much of the same equipment factories use to manufacture and calibrate televisions.
Our hardware includes a SpectraCal C6 colorimeter and a LS-100 luminance meter. We have a Leo Bodnar input lag tester, and a Murideo Seven 8K signal generator for testing 8K TV features. We also have more Blu-rays than we can keep track of.
For software, we use Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate color calibration software. It’s the industry standard for display measurement and screen calibration.
Our testing process has been honed over many years. We gather enough esoteric data to satisfy curious video engineers, while also focusing on the average person's viewing experience.
We measure factors like peak brightness and black level. We test hue and saturation for primary and secondary digital colors. We check the accuracy of the TV's electro-optical transfer function—you get the idea.
We weigh our performance tests based on how the human eye prioritizes vision. Since human visual systems process brightness better than color, we weigh brightness first, then move on to colorimetry, and so on.
Beyond the technical tests, we also spend a lot of time just using each TV. We stream video, connect a Blu-ray player to watch movies, and use the smart features. We also check out the ports, remote, and on-set buttons. We evaluate anything and everything that might be relevant to the daily experience of using the TV.
The first consideration is picture quality, and while everyone’s vision and taste differs, everyone’s vision prioritizes dynamic information and bright, compelling colors over subtler hues and resolution (sharpness). A good TV is vibrant enough that instead of seeing pixels creating mixes of red, green, and blue to simulate colors; we see the real world, lit and colored as it is, in fluid motion.
For us, that means we look for TVs that can get very bright and dark without obscuring details. We want accurate colors (compared to various color standards designated by the International Telecommunication Union). We want to see proper bit-mapping, the right codecs and decoders for video processing, and the ability to play any type of content without judder, blurring, and so on.
Just like there’s more to a car than its top speed, there’s more to a TV than pixel count and measured brightness. That’s why we measure the comprehensive experience of using the TV instead of just capturing specs.
Of course, just because there’s more to a TV than specs doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know what those specs mean. Here are some basic TV terms to keep in mind as you browse:
LED/LCD: both refer to the same type of display. A liquid crystal display (LCD) morphs in reaction to tiny electrical volts, letting light pass through it. Its lit from behind by a wall of light emitting diodes “LEDs). These screens are bright, but can’t control dimming as accurately as a screen made of pure pixels.
OLED: This means Organic Light Emitting Diode. While LCD/LED screens combine a picture element and a lighting element, OLEDs only have one panel of tiny dots that create the light and the image together. Pixels can turn off completely, giving pure black levels, and they’re easy to see from wider angles. However, they don’t get as bright.
4K: Usually 4K refers to resolution—specifically, 3,840 x 2,160 pixels. This is the current standard resolution for most TVs. The more resolution/pixels, the sharper the image quality.
UHD*: This stands for Ultra High Definition, and refers to a suite of picture improvements. This includes 4K resolution, but also Wide Color Gamut, which can display many more shades than regular HD TVs. Not every 4K TV supports UHD, but UHD does require 4K.
High Dynamic Range: High Dynamic Range (or HDR) refers to both a type of TV and a type of content. HDR expands on the typical range of brightness many times over, and can boost color production by 30%. Current top HDR formats include HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision.
60Hz/120Hz: These numbers refer to a TV’s "refresh rate," the number of times per second in Hertz (Hz) that the screen scans and refreshes the picture, typically 60 or 120 times per second/Hz. Higher refresh rates are always better, but not always necessary.
Smart TV: Today, "smart TV" simply means that the TV connects to the internet, usually for streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video. Some smart TVs may also have browsers, calendars, or smart home connectivity/voice control.
Quantum Dots: Quantum dots are microscopic nanocrystals that produce intensely colored light when illuminated. Quantum dots can be used to vastly improve the red and green saturation of a TV, and can help LED/LCD TVs compete with the color spectrum of OLED.
Local Dimming: OLED panels look great because each pixel can operate independently. LED/LCD TVs can imitate this functioning via a process called local dimming, where localized clusters of LEDs dim or boost depending on whether the screen needs to be darker or brighter, sometimes vastly improving their performance and worth.
Your ideal TV size depends on the room you’re watching in. The TV’s diagonal length (aka, its size) tells you your ideal viewing range. For a 4K HD TV, your distance should be about 1-1.5 the TV’s diagonal length to minimize eye strain and maximize picture quality. You want a TV whose viewing range fits the distance you plan to sit from it.
Using the viewing range numbers, you should sit between 75” to 112.5” away from a 75” 4K TV. (That’s 6.25’ to 9.375’.) That’s a pretty wide viewing range, as long as you have the space to accommodate it.
Michael Desjardin graduated from Emerson College after having studied media production and screenwriting. He specializes in tech for Reviewed, but also loves film criticism, weird ambient music, cooking, and food in general.
John is Reviewed's Managing Editor of Tech. He is an ISF Level III-certified calibrator with bylines at ProjectorCentral, Wirecutter, IGN, Home Theater Review, T3, Sound & Vision, and Home Theater Magazine. When away from the Reviewed office, he is a sound editor for film, a musician, and loves to play games with his son.
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