What Are The Top 5 OLED TVs?

In well-lit rooms, the brightness level of your OLED TV, quantified in nits, is key to a great viewing experience. A TV that doesn’t meet the brightness requirement will struggle against natural and artificial light, resulting in a dim, lackluster image. Essentially, nits measure how well your TV can stand up to light interference, with higher values ensuring a sharper, more vivid display. This is especially important when selecting the best outdoor TVs, as they deal with direct sunlight.

For standard viewing on the best OLED TV, you should look for at least 300 nits to strike the right balance between clarity and color quality in standard dynamic range (SDR) content. For high dynamic range (HDR) content, which offers richer colors and greater contrast, a minimum of 1000 nits is ideal to truly appreciate the enhanced visuals. These brightness levels are recommended to ensure your TV performs well in bright settings, allowing you to enjoy your shows and movies without any loss in detail or quality. Aim for these minimums: SDR Brightness >= 300 nits; HDR Brightness >= 1000 nits for the optimal experience.

If you want to prioritize detailed picture quality, keep resolution in mind as well, because the best 4K TVs provide four times the resolution of standard 1080p HD TVs and in effect, more detailed displays.

Discover the top OLED TVs, ranked from brightest to least.

Color gamut defines the range of colors a OLED TV can reproduce, directly affecting how vibrant and true-to-life the images look. A wide color gamut in a compact TV brings out richer, more vivid colors – from the lush greens of a garden to the bright colors of animated characters, enhancing your viewing experience to closely mimic real life.

This concept is technically measured against standards like the DCI P3 xy, a benchmark for high-quality visuals. A OLED TV covering a higher percentage of this color space can display colors more accurately and vividly.

For those who prioritize vibrant and immersive visuals, aiming for a OLTV with a color gamut of 90% or higher on the DCI P3 xy scale is ideal. This ensures that the content you watch is as vibrant and lifelike as possible. OLED models are superb at reproducing this color space, thanks to their superior contrast and black levels which enhance color accuracy and vibrancy. Comparing OLED to other display technologies like LED, although they’re capable of high brightness, the best LED TVs tend to not deliver the same depth of color and contrast as OLEDs.

Below are the top OLED TVs, ordered by color gamut, all exceeding our testing criteria.

The Electro-Optical Transfer Function (EOTF) plays a critical role in ensuring the content on your TV looks exactly as the creator intended. This technical feature adjusts your screen’s brightness levels, ensuring every scene, from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights, is displayed with true-to-life accuracy.

In rooms flooded with light, a TV that nails EOTF calibration shines by preserving the intended contrast and detail in the picture despite the challenging conditions. It balances the brightness so that images remain vibrant and full of detail, unaffected by the glare of ambient light.

A TV that excels in managing EOTF offers an immersive and authentic viewing experience. It brings creators’ visions to life, accurately rendering every scene with the proper light and dark levels, no matter the lighting in your room. This means you get a consistent, realistic picture that captures the full spectrum of colors and contrasts, from the subtlest hues to the most intense explosions. Below is all the TVs on this guide sorted from best to worst in EOTF.

Below are all the OLED TVs on our list, ordered by EOTF, all exceeding our minimum requirement.

For OLED TV enthusiasts, a solid contrast ratio is crucial for enjoying your favorite TV shows or movies, especially in darker settings. This feature directly impacts how lifelike and dynamic the picture appears on your screen, ensuring that dark scenes are displayed with clear, crisp blacks instead of murky grays and bright scenes retain their detail without appearing washed out.

Put simply, the contrast ratio is all about the range of luminance a TV can produce, from the deepest blacks to the brightest whites. It’s what brings depth to the image, enhancing the realism of every scene. Watching a movie in the dark, for example, the difference between a TV with a poor contrast ratio and one with a high ratio is stark: the former struggles, blending shadows into a flat gray, while the latter delivers true black, making night scenes more immersive and detailed.

Ideally, a contrast ratio of 10,000:1 is what you should aim for in a OLED TV. This level of luminance variance ensures that you’re getting a picture quality that can handle the nuances of lighting in any scene, providing a viewing experience that’s both rich and engaging. Note: OLED TVs have infinite contrast ratio, indicated by “0.”

Below are the top OLED TVs, ordered by contrast ratio, all exceeding our testing criteria.