Home Theater
Building the home theater of your dreams doesn't necessarily mean assembling a massive surround-sound speaker system. Our experts have spent hundreds of hours to find the best home theater gear so you can enjoy your next Netflix binge the way you want to, whether your speakers are over your ears, on your bookshelf, or all around your room.
The Best OLED TV
If you want the best-looking TV image that money can buy, choose an OLED TV. With perfect blacks, superior viewing angles, infinite contrast ratios, and fewer image artifacts than other TVs, OLED displays outperform even the best LCD options—but they cost hundreds more. We recommend the LG C9 because it offers the same excellent video performance as 4K OLED TVs that cost a lot more. The LG C9 4K OLED TV offers superb image quality with both HD and 4K sources, and it supports the leading HDR standards so you’ll get the best picture possible from HDR sources. The WebOS smart-TV platform is easy to use and provides all the major video and audio streaming services, including 4K video streaming from Netflix and Amazon. The C9 has an extremely thin and attractive design, and it’s one of the few TVs in 2019 to offer full HDMI 2.1 support, which makes it as future-proof as a TV can be today. Videophiles will like that the C9 gives them more control over the image than competing Sony OLED TVs. Paying more for one of LG’s higher-end OLED TVs, such as the E9 or W9, doesn’t buy you better image quality at all, which makes the C9 an excellent value. (But if you like the design upgrades and can afford the premium, the E9 and W9 are solid upgrade options.) The LG B9 4K OLED TV’s video performance is very similar to that of the C9, and it costs a little less. The B9’s peak brightness is a bit lower than that of the C9 (which matters only with HDR video), and it lacks some of the C9’s advanced video-processing functions, though most people would be hard-pressed to see the C9’s improvements in motion and image noise without doing a direct side-by-side comparison. Plus, the image-calibration options aren’t quite as precise, which we think is an important consideration for the performance-minded shopper. But if you want to save a little money and you don’t plan to have the TV professionally calibrated, the B9 is a great option.
The Best 4K TV on a Budget
Not everyone can sacrifice a mortgage payment to buy a high-performance 4K TV. Many shoppers are content to find a TV that looks good, is easy to use, has a variety of streaming features built in, and—most importantly—doesn’t cost a lot. For those people, we recommend the TCL 5-Series. It delivers a great-looking 4K picture with good contrast and accurate colors, integrates our favorite smart-TV system from Roku, and is also good for gaming. The TCL 5-Series produces a bright, punchy image, and it has a wonderful contrast ratio for an LCD/LED TV that lacks local dimming to more precisely adjust the backlight. The integrated Roku OS makes it one of the easiest TVs to use, and it supports every major streaming service. Gamers will appreciate the 5-Series’s low input lag, which means less time between when something happens in the game and when you see it on your screen. This year, TCL added support for automatic low-latency mode, so the Xbox One X and future gaming consoles can switch into game mode automatically. And if you watch over-the-air TV, you can even pause a program with the use of a basic USB flash drive. The 5-Series also works with the Roku TV Wireless Speakers, making it easy to upgrade the audio without having to add any wires. This TV supports the HDR10 and Dolby Vision high dynamic range formats, but its lack of local dimming means that we don’t consider it a true HDR TV.
The Best LCD/LED TV
Almost any 4K TV can make 4K video look good, but the best TVs make even poor-quality sources look better. The Sony X950G is the best LCD/LED TV because it produces fantastic-looking 4K HDR content, cleans up lower-quality streaming shows better than the competition, has a good user interface with all the streaming apps you need, and comes in a variety of sizes to suit every room. The Sony X950G 4K TV is our favorite LCD performer to date. It offers a great contrast ratio thanks to its full-array local-dimming backlight that allows the TV to produce deep blacks, along with a 120 Hz refresh rate for cleaner, smoother motion. It supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision high dynamic range content with bright peak highlights, as well as a wider color gamut that lets you see more (and richer) colors in Ultra HD content. Its superb video processing makes your streaming content look better, with fewer artifacts than we saw on competing TVs. The X950G comes in 55-, 65-, 75-, and 85-inch screen sizes. The two smaller sizes offer better contrast ratios, while the larger ones offer better viewing angles, but we recommend all of them. The Android smart-TV interface is better than on past Sony TVs, but the X950G doesn’t include some of the newer HDMI 2.1 features that are good for gaming. If the Sony X950G isn’t available, or if you have a large room with lots of natural sunlight, the Samsung Q80R is a great choice. This 4K TV offers full-array local dimming, and the screen’s anti-reflective filter works wonders at reducing reflections from sunlight or light fixtures, which keeps the image from looking washed out in a bright room. It also features Samsung’s wide viewing angle technology to better preserve image contrast when you’re sitting off to the sides. The Q80R is available in 55-, 65-, 75-, and 82-inch sizes, and it supports HDMI 2.1 features that make it great for gaming. It doesn’t do as well cleaning up image flaws as the Sony does, and its Tizen smart-TV platform lacks the wide app support that Android TV offers, but it’s still a great LCD.
TV Buying Guide
We’ve spent hundreds of hours researching and testing TVs to find the best for any room and budget. If you have no idea where to start, this guide will help you parse the important questions.
TV technology has advanced to the point where even cheap TVs can look really good. Most new TVs can display all the latest content types—skip to the relevant sections below for a full explanation of what 4K/Ultra HD (UHD) and high dynamic range (HDR) mean, and why they might matter to you. Whether your space is small or large, or whether you’re looking for the most performance for the money, something that fits into your decor, or the best possible picture, we’ve got picks for you.A high-end LCD/LED TV is meant for the person who wants better TV performance than the average budget TV delivers, but who doesn’t feel the need to spend a premium to get the absolute best: an OLED TV. A high-end LCD/LED TV can deliver a picture that looks almost as good for less money and in a wider variety of screen sizes. LCD/LED TVs can also get much brighter than OLED TVs, so they’re a better fit for a very bright viewing environment, such as a living room with lots of windows. If you just want good TV performance at an affordable price, get a midrange LCD TV (commonly referred to as an LED TV) like our budget 4K TV pick. You can find many mediocre TVs at this price, but after rigorous testing, we’ve discovered that the best among them produce image quality directly comparable to that of TVs costing hundreds of dollars more. Although these TVs sometimes lack local dimming, which makes blacks onscreen appear darker and whites appear brighter, our picks have a high native contrast ratio that’s better than that of many budget sets.
