The best 4K TVs for next-level movie nights
Stop trying to watch blockbuster movies on your laptop and get involved in the best 4K TVs on the market, offering crisp visuals, unfaltering audio and smart controls
The best 4K TVs are armed with all the power you need to rival your local theatre for visual and audio grandeur in your living room. You might be tempted to flirt with the idea of an at-home cinema projector to snuggle down for an early-spring movie marathon, but those high-powered machines are pricey and will need replacing at some point down the line, so it’s often best to stick with a serious good telly instead, of which there are many.
And with the marvellous ubiquity of next-gen gaming consoles like the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, you’ll need to ensure your TV can maintain the sought of visual gymnastics needed to give your eyeballs a feast while you play. It’s not a simple task though, as there are a myriad of different specs, size options and makers to sift through to make sure you’re getting the right bang for your considerable buck, and the last thing you want is to invest a few grand on something you’re going to return a few years down the line because it doesn’t cut it for you any more.
It’s worth swatting up on all the technical jargon to make sure you’re not overpaying on something you’re not sure about, so check out our complete guide to our favourite 4K TVs that should definitely be on your radar in 2024.
What are the best 4K TVs of 2024?
An outstanding OLED telly, Sony’s effortlessly deep blacks and bright, vibrant imagery lend themselves to creating one of the most comprehensive home cinema systems available. Plenty of HDMI ports, a rock-steady user interface and lots of settings to tweak make this one of the best around.
An often underappreciated aspect of some of the best 4K TVs is their sound quality, which can often be... lacking. With Philips’ top-spec TVs, this isn’t the case, with hair-raising volume and sonic reproduction, high-quality cinema and game modes and perfectly recreated black levels, this is one of our favourite models of the year so far.
- Best big-screen 4K TV: Philips OLED+986, £3,599 at spatialonline.co.uk
- Best 4K TV for gaming: Sony XR-55A95K, £1,799 at johnlewis.com
- Best OLED 4K TV: LG OLED55G2 OLED, £1,299 at johnlewis.com
- Best 4K TV for Sky subscribers: Sky Glass, from £14 a month at sky.com
Are 4K TVs any good?
First off, let’s all agree that you should buy a 4K TV. If you’re paying a subscription to a streaming service, you know an awful lot of the content there is made for 4K resolution – and you want to see where your subscription money has gone, don’t you? Given that even the BBC is trialling 4K broadcasts via iPlayer, considering a TV of lower than 4K resolution in 2024 is a big no-no.
It’s four times as clear as the old yardstick of Full HD tellys, and we really can attest to how much better 4K is if you’re into basking in the glory of extremely detailed shots of whatever you happen to be watching. There are quite a few different ways these TVs upgrade your viewing, but one of the most important outside the resolution is whether a TV can display HDR content (high dynamic range) and to what degree.
There are plenty of acronyms to figure out and each TV will do things differently, but so long as you see some form of HDR in the specs your movies, games and shows will pop with vibrance and colour in ways you might not have noticed before.
After that, it’s simply a question of setting a budget and deciding on the screen size that’s most appropriate. Please note ‘most appropriate’ – some people buy the largest TV they can afford, but quite often it can turn out to be too big for their viewing setup. We’ve all found ourselves sitting too close to the screen at the cinema, and the last thing you want is that sensation every time you switch your TV on. Make sure your favoured screen size is appropriate for the room in which the TV is going to be situated, and for the distance from which you’ll be viewing it.
As a rule of thumb, you want your TV to be roughly 1.2 times the distance you’ll be sitting from said TV. So if your TV is 75 inches, you should be sitting roughly 90 inches away (or 2.3 metres if that’s easier to work out).
Which is the best 4K TV for gaming?
Once that’s decided, it becomes about the niceties. Are you a gamer with a shiny new next-gen console? If so, you need to make sure your new Ultra HD TV has the connectivity to support all of its impressive features like variable refresh rates (VRR), ALLM (auto low-latency mode, which dictates your input lag)and enough HDMI ports for the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5. Is your new TV going to be part of a whole ‘home cinema’ system? If not, it’s worth considering the sound quality, as well as the picture quality. Even some great-looking screens can sound sub-par. And, if you want to hang your shiny new 4K TV on the wall, it's probably best to choose the slimmest model possible., with a minimal bezel to sink right into the wall.
OLED vs QLED
Spend any amount of time rifling through TV forums and you’ll find hotly contested debates on the merits of OLEDs and QLEDs. Apart from looking like someone vomited out letter spaghetti, these acronyms denounce how your TV is backlit. QLEDs, or quantum LEDs, are Samsung TVs domain and use advanced tech specs to illuminate the TV’s pixels all at once for peak brightness. OLEDs are found pretty much everywhere else (even Samsung is increasingly branching out to experiment away from its NEO QLED models) and use electric signals to light up individual pixels as they are needed on-screen.
Both are on the cutting edge of modern TV tech and will give you the clearest pictures without there being much difference to the untrained eye. If you’re unsure, we recommend you ignore this spec altogether and go for whatever TV gets you weak at the knees, as the differences are marginal and not worth fretting over. At this price range, we’ve ignored basic LCDs, LED and mini LED backlights in favour of the latest tech, but if you’re looking for more affordable options, check out our favourite 4K TVs under £500 here.
How we test 4K TVs
Of course, you want to buy a TV that we’ve actually used, right? Our favourite models below have been selected based on their ability to produce incredible visuals because we’ve actually seen them, watched them, and played around with the menus. It’s a tough job, but we’re ready for the task. In all cases, we’ve either been to review them in person or have taken them on in our homes to play next-gen console games, watch hi-fidelity sports throughout the weekends, and spent more than enough time engaging in Netflix’s growing list of top-spec shows to watch. In most cases, we spent roughly two weeks watching as much content as our eyes could handle, selecting the very best that your money has to offer.
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