The Best TV

Television buying has a structural problem: the thing you are choosing between looks identical in the shop, because the shop is lit like an operating theatre and every set is running in a torch-mode preset designed to survive it. The differences that matter appear in your living room, at night, three weeks later.

The LG C5 wins because it is the least compromised set at a price a normal household might actually pay. OLED gives it per-pixel light control, which means black is black rather than dark grey, and that single property does more for how a film looks than any amount of brightness or any number of processing acronyms.

What is new this year is not the panel. It is the price of the 77-inch. Large OLED has spent five years as a thing you talk yourself into. At roughly $2,200 it becomes a thing you simply buy.

Television marketing is a numbers arms race in which most of the numbers have stopped corresponding to anything you can see. Here is the short version of which ones survive contact with a sofa.

Two numbers you can ignore entirely: contrast ratios quoted with a colon and six zeros, which are meaningless on any set with a backlight, and 'motion rate' figures, which are invented per-manufacturer and comparable to nothing.

This is the correct television for the household that watches films and series in the evening, plays some games, has one main viewing room, and does not want to think about televisions again for six years.

• ▸You watch mostly after dark, or you own curtains and are willing to use them.
• ▸You want one set that handles a Champions League match, a Denis Villeneuve film, and a Tuesday night procedural without a settings tour.
• ▸You have or will have a current console or a gaming PC.
• ▸You care about the picture more than about having the largest possible diagonal.

There are three households for whom this is the wrong purchase, and pretending otherwise would be the sort of thing that makes buying guides useless.

• ▸Bright-room households. If the television faces a south window and the curtains are decorative, buy the Samsung S90F or a good mini-LED and be happier.
• ▸Static-image households. Eight hours a day of a news channel with a fixed ticker is the remaining genuine burn-in risk. It is rare. It is not zero.
• ▸Size-first households. If the requirement is 85 inches for under $1,200, OLED is not the category you are shopping in. The Hisense is not an insult; it is an answer.

Brightness is the real one. In a genuinely sunlit room the C5 does not embarrass itself, but a QD-OLED or a good mini-LED will look more alive at 3pm, and no amount of enthusiasm changes that.

Second: the built-in speakers are, as ever, a formality. Budget for a soundbar in the same purchase or accept dialogue you have to lean toward. Third: webOS has begun putting sponsored content on the home screen, which is a small indignity that is getting slowly larger across the whole industry.

Nine sets made the shortlist. Four are worth naming, and three of those are better than the winner at exactly one thing.

If the C4 is still in stock at your size when you read this, it is arguably the better buy: the delta in picture quality is small enough that most people would fail to identify it in a blind comparison, and the delta in price is roughly the cost of a very good soundbar.

We are not sniffy about this set. Size genuinely matters to the experience of watching something, and a 75-inch television you can afford beats a 55-inch television you cannot. Just do not expect the black levels to survive a dark scene.

We started with every 2025 and 2026 model-year set between 65 and 85 inches available in the US at under $4,000, which produced a list of forty-one. We cut anything without published independent measurements, anything discontinued, and anything where the panel varies enough by size that a review of the 55-inch tells you nothing about the 77.

That left nine. For each we collected measured peak brightness, colour volume, near-black handling, input lag and viewing angle from independent labs; read at least a year of owner reports for failure patterns; and priced the actual sizes people buy rather than the review size.

1. 01Dark-room picture quality, weighted highest, because that is when most people watch.
2. 02Bright-room usability, weighted second.
3. 03Gaming feature completeness across all HDMI ports, not just one.
4. 04Software: how obnoxious the television is to live with over five years.
5. 05Price at the size that actually sells, checked against three retailers.

No manufacturer supplied a unit for this guide, and no manufacturer saw it before publication.

Buy the LG C5 at 77 inches. If the C4 is still available at a meaningful discount, buy that instead and spend the difference on sound. If your room is bright and you cannot fix that, buy the Samsung and accept a slightly worse interface for a noticeably better afternoon.

And if none of those numbers work for your budget: the Hisense is fine. Buy the Hisense, put it in a room where you can control the light, and stop reading about televisions.