The 6 Best 4k HDR TVs - Spring 2023 Reviews

The best 4k HDR TV we've tested is the Sony A95K OLED. It's a remarkable TV for watching movies in HDR. Its near-infinite contrast ratio delivers perfect deep blacks with no distracting blooming or haloing around bright objects. Combined with its high peak brightness, this ensures that bright highlights stand out. It also has near-perfect tone mapping and tracks the PQ EOTF nearly perfectly, ensuring that most content is displayed the way the content creator intended and fine details are preserved in everything you watch. It has an incredibly wide color gamut and fantastic color volume, so bright colors look vivid and lifelike.

It supports Dolby Vision, which is the most widely supported advanced HDR format, ensuring you'll enjoy an impressive movie-watching experience from almost any source. It's also great for home theater setups, as it supports advanced audio formats like DTS:X via DTS-HD as well as Dolby Atmos via TrueHD, resulting in an incredibly immersive movie-watching experience. If you want something with similar picture quality and dark room performance for less, the Samsung S95B OLED is nearly as good, but it doesn't support Dolby Vision and has limited audio passthrough capabilities.

If you want something cheaper than the Sony A95K OLED, check out the Samsung QN90B QLED instead. This upper mid-range TV delivers an impressive HDR experience for different reasons. It gets exceptionally bright in HDR—much brighter than the A95K, so bright scenes and flashes of light are far more impressive. It has an excellent color gamut as well, and, combined with its high peak brightness, colors are just as bright and vibrant as they are on the Sony.

There are a few downsides to this TV, though. Instead of the OLED panel, which delivers perfect blacks on the A95K, this TV relies on a Mini LED backlight with local dimming to achieve greater dynamic range. This results in some blooming around bright highlights, so it's not as impressive in a completely dark room. It also doesn't support Dolby Vision, as Samsung TVs support the competing but less widely available HDR10+ format.

The best mid-range 4k HDR TV we've tested is the LG C2 OLED. Like the Samsung S95B OLED, it has a near-infinite contrast ratio, so bright highlights stand out incredibly well right next to deep inky blacks, with no distracting blooming around bright highlights. It uses an older type of OLED panel, though, so colors aren't as bright and vivid as the Samsung. It delivers an amazing HDR experience, with decent peak brightness in HDR and an excellent HDR color gamut, allowing it to display bright highlights and a wide range of colors, so HDR content looks vivid and lifelike.

When watching HDR movies, the C2 displays most content extremely close to the content creator's intent. It has great gradient handling, but there's a bit more banding in areas of similar color than the Samsung. Unlike the Samsung TV, which supports HDR10+, the C2 supports Dolby Vision, which is a more widely supported HDR format.

If you find OLED TVs like the LG C2 OLED too expensive and want to save a bit of money while still getting excellent HDR performance, the Hisense U8H is a great choice. It has incredible HDR peak brightness, enough to make small highlights stand out, and it has an excellent HDR color gamut. Although it doesn't offer the same near-infinite contrast as an OLED, it still has fantastic native contrast, and it displays deep blacks in movies thanks to the great local dimming feature, but there's a bit of blooming around bright objects.

The built-in Google TV interface makes it easy to stream your favorite HDR content, and unlike the OLEDs mentioned above, it supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ formats. It lets you take full advantage of whatever content you're streaming, which is great if you subscribe to multiple services that use different formats. It also removes 24p judder from any source, including streaming apps, helping with the appearance of motion in movies.

The best budget 4k HDR TV we've tested is the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED. Despite its entry-level price point, it delivers a great HDR experience. It has superb contrast and fantastic black uniformity, so dark scenes look great, but there's more blooming around bright objects than on the Hisense U8H. It has a wide color gamut, so colors overall look vibrant and realistic, and it tracks the PQ EOTF well, ensuring most scenes are displayed at the brightness level the content creator intended. It's not as bright as the U8H or the LG C2 OLED, so bright highlights don't pop out as well as they do on more expensive, brighter TVs.

Like the U8H, this TV supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10+, ensuring you get the best HDR experience possible, regardless of your streaming source. It removes judder from 24p sources, which is great for watching UHD Blu-ray discs, but it can't remove judder from 60p sources like a cable box. Finally, like the more expensive TVs on this list, it supports eARC for a better audio experience, but there are a few issues with it, and both Dolby Atmos via TrueHD and DTS:X via DTS-HD passthrough aren't working at the moment.

The best cheap 4k HDR TV we've tested is the TCL 4 Series/S455 2022. Unfortunately, as it's a cheap TV, it can't deliver a true HDR experience as it has low peak brightness in HDR, a limited color gamut, and no local dimming feature to bring out bright areas of the screen. Overall, don't expect HDR to look much different from SDR on any TV in this price range. That's not to say that HDR looks bad, though. It has a fantastic contrast ratio, so there's some difference between bright and dark areas of the screen, and it's bright enough that some highlights stand out if you're in a completely dark room.

On the other hand, it has surprisingly good processing for a cheap TV. Gradients are displayed well, so fine details in uniform shots, like sunsets, are displayed well, with very little banding. It also displays shadow details well, as most content is displayed close to the content creator's intent. It doesn't support advanced HDR formats like Dolby Vision or HDR10+, but since HDR adds little overall, it isn't an issue.