We Ranked The 4 Best Small TVs

In brightly lit rooms, the brightness of your TV, measured in nits, is crucial for a good viewing experience. If your TV isn’t bright enough, ambient light can overpower the screen, making images hard to see, washed out, and lacking in detail. Think of nits as the strength of your TV’s display against sunlight or room lights. The higher the nits, the clearer and more vibrant the picture.

For everyday viewing of standard dynamic range (SDR) content, aiming for a TV with at least 300 nits, providing a decent balance between visibility and picture quality. However, when stepping up to high dynamic range (HDR) content, which enhances picture quality with more depth and vibrant colors, a brightness of at least 700 nits offers a significantly better experience. While these numbers aren’t mandatory, they serve as a solid guideline for ensuring your TV can deliver a vivid, detailed picture even in well-lit spaces. Remember, the brighter, the better for overcoming ambient light and enjoying your favorite content without compromise.

Among the best Samsung TVs, models like you’ll find in our Samsung QN9DA review stand out for their brightness, making it ideal for well-lit rooms.

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

Color gamut defines the range of colors a small 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 small 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 small 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, bringing a big viewing experience to a smaller screen.

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

For small 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 small 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 an infinite contrast ratio, indicated by “0.”

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