We Ranked The 4 Best Outdoor TVs

In well-lit rooms, the brightness level of your Outdoor 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.

For standard viewing on the best Outdoor TV, you should look for at least 600 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 1100 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 >= 600 nits; HDR Brightness >= 1100 nits for the optimal experience.

Discover the top Outdoor TVs, ranked from brightest to least, all exceeding our brightness criteria.

Reflections handling on TVs is critical for sports fans, ensuring that glare from lights or windows doesn’t wash out the action. It’s about how well a TV can minimize the impact of ambient light on its screen, preserving the quality of the image during bright day games or well-lit room conditions.

Technically, this involves the TV’s screen surface and coatings designed to reduce the reflection of external light sources without affecting picture brightness and contrast. The effectiveness of reflections handling is often measured in percentage; the lower the percentage, the better the TV is at minimizing reflections.

Ideally, a TV reflects no more than 3% of light. TVs that boast advanced anti-reflective properties, such as matte screens, help to improve this capability.

Color gamut defines the range of colors an Outdoor 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 outdoor TV covering a higher percentage of this color space can display colors more accurately and vividly.

For those who prioritize vibrant and immersive visuals in a smaller package, aiming for a outdoor TV 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. Below is all the TVs on this guide sorted by best to least in Color Gamut.

Below are the top outdoor TVs, ordered by color gamut.

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 outdoor TVs on our list, ordered by EOTF, all exceeding our minimum requirement.

For outdoor 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 an outdoor 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.” For more info on how TV display technologies differ from each other along with resolutions, give our comprehensive TV buying guide a read.

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