The 5 Best TVs For Watching Sports - Black Friday 2023 Reviews

The best TV for sports that we've tested is the Samsung S90C OLED. It has an incredibly wide viewing angle, making it a perfect choice for watching the big game with a large group of friends in a wide seating arrangement, as everyone will have a good experience; no more fighting over the best spot on the couch, as the image remains consistent even at a very wide angle. In addition to the wide viewing angle, the TV has a near-instantaneous response time, so fast-moving players and balls are crystal-clear, with no distracting motion blur behind them. It has superb reflection handling, so you don't have to worry too much about glare on a sunny day. However, it's still not that bright in SDR, so glare can be distracting in a bright living room. It upscales lower-resolution content well, which is great as most sporting events are broadcast at a lower resolution. If you don't have cable, the Tizen OS interface has a great selection of streaming apps, and you can easily find your favorite sports channels.

This TV has a higher-end model, the Samsung S95C OLED. It's brighter in SDR, so it's an interesting option for people who want an OLED and like to watch sports in extremely bright rooms. However, the S90C is significantly cheaper and easily bright enough for almost everyone, so it's the best overall value.

If you're not in a dark room, a premium TV with an LED backlight like the Sony X93L/X93CL is a better choice than the Samsung S90C OLED, making it the best TV for watching sports in a bright room. It gets significantly brighter than the other Samsung, so it's a better choice in a bright living room or outdoors. It also has an acceptable viewing angle, making it a good choice for watching the big game with friends, although it's not nearly as good as the OLED. It also doesn't have the OLED's super deep blacks, but they're still quite good on this TV. The user-friendly Google TV platform has a large selection of streaming apps, including the most popular sports apps, so you can stream the big game without an external streaming box. It also upscales lower-resolution content, like from cable boxes, extremely well, with no noticeable issues. It has an excellent response time, ensuring you can clearly see the action, and it has good gray uniformity, with just a bit of dirty screen effect in the center.

For those with deep pockets, the Sony X95L is the best LED TV on the market and is especially enticing if you have access to its smaller sizes. Still, as amazing as it is for sports, it's not worth the price increase over the X93L for most people. You could also save some money by going with the step-down Sony X90L/X90CL, although it has a narrower viewing angle, much worse reflection handling, and slightly slower response time than the more expensive Sony TVs.

If you want something cheaper than the Sony X93L/X93CL but still want great picture quality, a mid-range TV like the Hisense U8/U8K is a great choice for sports fans. It gets exceptionally bright and, combined with its fantastic reflection handling, can easily overcome glare in a bright room. It has good motion handling, so it's easy to make out the fine details in the game, and it has decent gray uniformity, ensuring the playing field looks uniform. An improvement over 2022's Hisense U8/U8H, the newer Hisense has much better image processing than its predecessor, as it upscales lower-resolution cable sports channels well, with fluid motion, so you won't have any issues if you're watching from a high-quality source.

It has a satisfactory frequency response and gets decently loud, so you don't necessarily need an external sound system if you're throwing a party. On the other hand, it has a narrow viewing angle, so it's best to sit directly in front of it as those watching from the sides will see a faded and washed-out image. Note that its 75-inch model has a different panel than the other sizes, with a wider viewing angle. Its built-in Google TV platform is easy to use and has a ton of apps you can download, including many apps for sports, so you won't feel the need to buy an external streaming device to watch your favorite athletes. You could also go with the very good and cheaper Hisense U7K instead. It's dimmer than the U8K, so it doesn't look as good in a bright living room, and its local dimming solution isn't quite as fast or able, but it has a faster response time for even better motion performance than its more expensive sibling.

The best budget TV for watching sports is the Hisense U6/U6K. It's a decent TV for watching sports, with good picture quality and high peak brightness in SDR. It can handle moderate glare in a bright room but has worse reflection handling than the Hisense U8/U8K, so it's not as good in that context. Uniform areas like the playing field look good thanks to its decent gray uniformity, and it has a quick response time, so fast-moving objects (like the players) are clear and easy to make out. While a good product overall, it's a significant step down from the more expensive models, and it doesn't upscale lower-resolution content nearly as well as the TVs above it, and it struggles with smoothing out digital artifacts from streaming content.

Still, it's significantly cheaper, is very colorful for such a cheap TV, and even has a functional local dimming solution to make it look good in a dark room. It runs the same great Google TV interface, and it supports hands-free voice control through either Google Assistant or Alexa to quickly open your favorite apps or search for content. It's a great bang-for-the-buck option, but if you'd like something better, you'll want to jump to the much better Hisense U7K instead.

The Sony X80K/X80CK is the best budget TV for sports if you have a wide seating area. Outside of the OLED, it has the widest viewing angle on this list, as all of its sizes use an ADS panel, which has a wider viewing angle than the VA panels used in the other LED options. It makes it a better choice for watching the big game with a large group of people, as you don't have to fight over the best spot in the house. As is typical of Sony TVs, it has good low-resolution upscaling, so content from cable boxes looks fine, although it's not nearly as good at cleaning compression artifacts from streaming apps. It has decent reflection handling and gets bright enough for a pleasant viewing experience in a bright room, but it looks its best in a moderately lit room.

It once again comes with the easy-to-use Google TV interface, making it easy to watch your favorite sports in just a few seconds. It has decent motion handling thanks to the satisfactory response time and a motion interpolation feature to smooth out low-frame-rate content. As usual, motion interpolation doesn't work as well with fast-moving sports, as it creates artifacts. The cherry on top is the TV's flicker-free backlight at any brightness level, so it won't give you any headaches during a sports-watching marathon. You could also opt for the extremely similar Sony X75K; they're almost identical and equally good for sports, so get the cheapest one.