Best 4K TV: The very best Ultra HD TVs rated

Our pick of the best 4K TVs you can buy today, from premium sets to budget buys.

Buying a TV is one of the biggest tech purchases you will make, and one you'd hope is going to last you a fair few years - so choosing the best TV for your needs is no quick or easy decision.

If you're struggling to know where to start, you've come to the right place. This buying guide has our pick of the very best 4K TVs on the market right now - from OLEDs to QLEDs, big budgets to more humble ones. We've searched high and low and tested them too, to bring you a veritable selection of great televisions that will bring your home cinema to life.

The LG G3 is the flagship 4K OLED from the brand in 2023, and is one of the best OLEDs we've ever seen.

The LG G3 is, so far, the very best TV we've seen in 2023. It's not cheap, but for those who are looking for the best of the best, this is it.

It's an OLED TV, which most people know by now offers some fantastic benefits - a super-slim design, superb contrast and excellent viewing angles to name a few. However, the chief complaint of OLEDs is also addressed here, with the use of Micro Lens Array technology. This delivers the kind of brightness we thought impossible from an OLED panel, so even rooms with high ambient lighting can enjoy the benefits OLED can bring.

Of course, the picture performance is top-notch with incredible colour reproduction, the new webOS platform is well-equipped, and its gaming prowess is something to behold, too - thanks for four HDMI port supporting 4K/120Hz. Just be aware its Zero Gap design does mean it's meant to be wall mounted - and that's what comes in the box. If you want to stand it up you'll have to buy the pedestal separately.

The sequel to Samsung's debut QD-OLED TV is all we could have hoped for and more. Anyone who thought QD-OLED was a flash in the TV tech pan needs to think again, and fast.

The Samsung QE65S95C is another incredible 2023 TV, and pushes QD-OLED tech on further than we might have expected possible in just a year.

In many ways, Samsung's approach to OLED keeps pace with its MLA-powered LG G3 rival almost every step of the way - even, arguably, stealing LG's crown as the most exciting gaming display in town. There's a little more punch here that makes games look glorious, but movies fare well too.

In a perfect world Samsung would finally have moved past its Dolby Vision blind spot and would provide a better out of the box motion experience - but when that's all we have to grumble about from a technology only entering its second year - we'd say that's a very accomplished TV indeed.

Our favourite TV of last year, the LG C2 OLED offers an outstanding picture alongisde the latest technologies, like Dolby Vision IQ, and 4K/120Hz support for gamers.

The LG C2 was our favourite TV in 2022 and it remains a top TV pick in 2023. That's because the newer LG C3 - while fantastic in its own right - actually doesn't move its performance on much from what we loved so much here. Considering the discounts the LG C2 is now on the receiving end of, it's now a better buy than ever.

While it's not as bright a panel as the LG G3, you do get a brighter panel than the LG C1, fantastic picture processing, outstanding gaming features and a wonderful smart TV system with all the apps you could need. The audio isn't all that great though, so you'll probably want to put aside some cash for a soundbar.

Considering the price difference the C2 and the C3, though, you'll have money for to buy one. While the stocks of our favourite TV of 2022 last, your money is arguably better spent here if you're considering a C Series purchase.

Marvellous Mini LED performance on a budget.

The TCL 65C845K is easily the best value TV of 2023 to date - and it's hard to imagine any other TV coming along in the coming six months that might knock it off that perch.

While its pictures might lack some of the naturalism, balance and refinement of the TV world’s most premium models, it delivers levels of brightness and colour we've simply never seen before at its price point - and thanks to its Mini LED and local dimming technologies, it's able to combine those brightness and colour strengths with startlingly convincing contrast.

It seals its fantastic deal with a built-in sound system good enough to make adding an external sound system for movie nights a luxury rather than a necessity.

There are clearly some compromises to make here - and you should be aware of them if you choose to buy this set - but the fact is, this TV feels like it's pushing new boundaries for affordable TVs. In the US? Take a look at the TCL QM8 for a similarly specced set.

If you can afford it, TVs don't come much better than the Sony A95K. You can read our in-depth review on why this made our best 4K TVs list and made our top picks for an OLED TV.

If you're looking for the finest picture quality that money can buy, you'll definitely want to take a look at Sony's A95K. Even a year on, it still produces some of the best pictures we've seen.

It uses QD-OLED panel technology to combine the inky blacks of OLED with the bright highlights of an LCD. The panel might not be quite as bright as the 2023 Samsung S95C manages to be, but best-in-class image processing still makes this one of the most cinematic TVs we've ever seen.

Motion handling is another strength here, plus it packs an impressive sound system too. It's not cheap - even a year on - but the picture performance is incredible. Those that value a subtle and natural picture will be very impressed indeed.

Ambilight makes the difference, with Philips offering something unique, while also pushing superb picture quality from its OLED TV.

Philips has impressed with its OLED televisions, boosted by its unique feature - in this case offering four-sided Ambilight, for illumination that extends beyond the screen.

This is the successor to our Pocket-lint Awards 2021 winner and it supports all the latest standards - Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+ and Dolby Atmos for sound. It even offers a 120Hz display with support for gamers too with VRR, ALLM and FreeSync/G-Sync.

That results in excellent picture quality, bolstered by pretty good sound quality too, with a 70W output that surprised us with how detailed and weighty it is. It offers a good chunk of everything we loved in the OLED907 but at a cheaper price.

The only real downside is that it's a little challenging to get around the menus and the interface, so it takes some patience to get used to.

Panasonic's flagship 2022 OLED offers a high-brightness panel, novel beam-steering audio technology and an advanced gaming feature set.

Panasonic's flagship LZ2000 OLED panel from 2022 offers up truly wonderful picture quality. We've always appreciated the accuracy and cinematic presentation of Panasonic's HCX processing, and here we see it at its zenith, coupled with a startling dynamic OLED panel.

There are also some impressive speakers onboard, with full Dolby Atmos support, so it works very well as an all-in-one solution. Our only real gripe is the lack of HDMI ports that support high frame rates, and it's hard to find if you live in the States.

All of the TVs above have been seen and tested by the knowledgeable Pocket-lint team of reviewers. As reviews editor and home cinema expert, I have seen the majority of these sets myself, but where I haven't, I have spoken at length with our reviewers to understand how each of these sets sit in their market. We don't disregard 2022 TVs just because 2023 TVs are now on the shelves - if you can still buy them and we think they are the best buy when it comes to performance per pound (or dollar), they will feature here.

This is the biggest battle in televisions right now and it's here that you'll have to make the biggest decision. What display technology are you after? Here's the current state of play.

OLED produces the light from each pixel rather than having illumination from the sides or rear like LED. This means that OLED can achieve better absolute blacks, because the TV can just turn off that pixel's illumination. Having greater contrast and better viewing angles often leads to richer colours and greater accuracy, but the brightness levels traditionally haven't been as high.

That's beginning to change with new technology from LG, and in the LG C2 Evo OLED recommended above, we're seeing brighter panels that can compete with the likes of LED for the first time. This is in some part down to the use of heat sinks, which allows the panels to be run harder than before - without an impact on the panel's lifespan.

OLED's evolution is bolstered further by the development of QD-OLED panels by Samsung, which are also used in Sony's flagship OLED sets. This hybrid technology combines the best bits of OLED and QLED displays, and uses a layer of quantum dots on top of the OLED material to boost brightness and improve colour saturation.

Traditional LED is still generally brighter, and often used at lower price points, with some TVs capable of outputting well o

|ver 2000 nits. QLED from Samsung is a form of LED, and while once their premium technology, is now the tech behind some of their more affordable panels now.

In its place is Samsung's premium Neo QLED brand, which uses Mini LED technology. This rivals OLED levels of light control and accuracy, alongside incredible LED brightness, and that's all because the LEDs in the backlight not only stretch across the whole of the screen but are also much smaller. This means there is much more control over the brightness levels in the different areas of the television, and reduces the blooming some standard LED TVs can experience.

Ultimately, if you're buying a premium LED TV in 2023, you're probably looking at choosing between OLED (or QD-OLED) or Mini LED. With both technologies pulling out the stops to fill in the gaps that they were lacking, it's unlikely you'll find much issue with picture quality in either. Instead, you may want to look deeper - to consider smart systems and included apps, HDR compatibility and gaming functionality, depending on your priorities.

When it comes to buying a new television there's a lot to consider. The most important thing is size - you need to make sure that it's going to fit into the room that you put it in. Despite changes in technology, it needs to be comfortable to watch, so so you can't watch it without moving your head, then you might want to go smaller.

One of the big considerations at the moment is around resolution. With 4K now being fairly common and affordable, we have 8K waiting in the wings. But 8K is only really for larger TV sizes, those over 70 inches, where you'll need that resolution to keep the picture sharp. There's currently no real 8K source of content with everything based around upscaling instead, so for many, 8K isn't really part of the equation right now.

The other biggest change is HDR. Every TV you buy from the premium manufacturers covers a number of HDR standards, which we've detailed below. The only real consideration is that if you're buying a Samsung TV, you won't get Dolby Vision support - and if you've got access to a lot of Dolby Vision content, you might want to look elsewhere. If you're a keen gamer with the Xbox Series X or S or a PS5 - or you want to connect a PC - you'll want that 120Hz support and technologies like VRR, ALLM and FreeSync/G-Sync.

We've discussed the panel type above and the battle between OLED and LED continues, with Mini LED putting up a valiant fight against OLED too. OLED is getting more affordable and is now available in a much wider range of sizes and is the choice for many - but top LED televisions can still offer a better HDR effect because of that higher peak brightness.

Ultimately, much might come down to what sort of deal you can get. TVs can drop in price fairly rapidly with a yearly refresh cycle, so checking out a slightly older TV, as long as it does what you want, might save you a lot of cash.

One of the confusing things about televisions is the jargon that goes along with them. Here's a very brief run-down of the important things to look out for:

Verity has been a technology journalist for more than 15 years, first joining Pocket-lint in 2008 as a staff writer, before taking on staff roles at Stuff, MSN and What Hi-Fi?, and embarking on a five-year stint as a freelancer.In that time, she has covered the highs and lows across the breadth of consumer tech, and tested everything from smartphones and stereo speakers to robot lawnmowers and electric cars. She has a particular interest in audio and TV, however, which means she has spent a lot of time watching movies and listening to music and passing it off as work.In 2022, Verity rejoined Pocket-lint as reviews editor, and is in charge of the site's entire reviews programme, ensuring she and the site's team are getting their hands on all the products that matter, to help Pocket-lint readers make informed buying decisions.You'll occasionally catch her on BBC Radio commenting on the latest tech news stories, and always find her in the living room, recalibrating terrible TV settings at parties.