The TV has come a long way in recent years, with almost every living room in the country now sporting a wide, wafer-thin slab of entertainment on the wall or plonked on a media unit. Here’s our pick of the top TVs of the year.
Gone are the days of having to resort to bulky substandard sets, with budget brands now producing some great-looking and capably performing tellies. But even with this uptick in quality, not all TVs are equal, and it’s been our task and privilege to put dozens of sets through the reviews ringer this year in search of the very best.
And you can relax, for our search has been fruitful. Spread across two sub-categories (premium TV and affordable TV), here are the 2024 models that left us agog in visual wonder (or smirking at their sheer price-to-performance ratio). Plus we’ve got our best soundbar and streaming service category for you too!
Premium TV of the year: Samsung QE65S95D
The S95D proves it’s still possible for a television to make big strides in image quality. We’ve been banging on about the contrast and colour-richness of OLED screens for years, but Samsung has pushed things even further here, boosting brightness and saturation to levels not seen anywhere else.
That’s true of both Samsung’s own TV lineup and those of its competitors: aided by a genuinely revelatory glare-free screen filter, impeccable motion handling and superb AI-assisted upscaling for non-4K sources, the S95D delivers a uniquely delicious feast for the eyes no matter what you throw at it.
Factor in the surprisingly beefy speaker setup, excellent support for high-framerate gaming and
a solid smart TV platform, and you’ve got a telly that truly earns its crown – in a year that was hardly lacking in contenders.
Highly commended
LG OLED65G45LW
Coming in hot on the heels of the Samsung S95D is another OLED with excellent brightness (thanks to its Micro Lens Array technology), stellar support for next-gen gaming and a great smart TV platform. This LG model didn’t impress us quite so much with its speaker performance, however.
Philips 55OLED809
Despite technically sitting slap bang in the mid-range of Philips’ OLED TV offering, this all-rounder feels like a premium goggle box in most (if not all) aspects. Its picture performance is superb, with gorgeous HDR renditions and the always-enjoyable Ambilight rear LED setup to help punch up contrast.
Also shortlisted
Samsung QE55QN85D, Sony KD55X85L
Affordable TV of the year: Hisense U6N
Everything about this 50in 4K TV is so assured and slick that we often forgot it was a budget model at all. Yes, the 50U6N does have some nips and tucks to keep its price down – the lack of HDMI 2.1 and the rather weak built-in speakers being the most notable – but elsewhere it delivers a strong showing
across the board.
There’s support for Dolby Vision and HDR10+ plus a reliable smart TV platform, and most importantly, the Mini LED screen serves up a truly satisfying and engaging image to anyone sat directly in front of it: detail is pin-sharp and black levels are pleasingly deep for an affordable non-OLED model. It also offers both Game and Filmmaker modes, which should please fraggers and cinephiles respectively.
Highly commended
Metz 50MRD6000
A mainstay in its native Germany but relatively unknown elsewhere, Metz teamed up with Roku to create a wonderful bargain basement 4K TV that, as you’d expect, does a banging job with built-in video streaming services. We found its picture quality to be pretty impressive for the price too.
Also shortlisted
Veltech VR43UX230
Soundbar of the year: Samsung HW-Q990D
Perhaps the perfect solution for anyone tempted by the spatial audio promises of Dolby Atmos but unwilling to remodel their living room, Samsung’s flagship soundbar system – which teams up a main bar with a wireless subwoofer and two wireless satellite speakers – is a clear winner this year.
This is one of the few soundbars we’ve heard that can go toe-to-toe with a separates system, its total of 22 drivers serving up an all-enveloping hemisphere of 3D sound that will sprinkle your movie nights and gaming sessions with spatial stardust.
The subwoofer behaves itself too… and all this with only a handful of wires (because, yes, you’ll still need to plug those wireless speakers into power sockets).
Highly commended
Klipsch Flexus Core 200
We also adored this simple soundbar from Klipsch and Onkyo, which offers a straightforward and affordable solution to ‘rubbish TV speaker syndrome’ – something we’ve all suffered from at times. The 3.1.2-channel bar far outperforms any built-in telly speakers we’ve encountered – and its width perfectly matches that of a 50in screen. It has room to grow, too: if you want to build on it in future, Klipsch offers wireless add-ons in the form of rear satellites and a subwoofer.
Also shortlisted
Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar
Streaming service of the year: Amazon Prime Video
The days of one streaming service being head and shoulders above all others have long gone. Netflix’s price hike and quality dive have turned it into just another player in a big, saturated market. Now, you’re simply expected to subscribe to all the main services, picking and choose the best bits from each one to get your entertainment fix. Remind us again how cord-cutting was going to save us money and free us from the tyranny of the big broadcasters, please…
Still, if one service shone brightest in 2024 for us, it was Prime Video. Despite the bad vibes surrounding Amazon’s own ‘cheeky’ price hike (or the addition of ads for those who stuck to the base subscription level), its steady stream of notable original shows (Fallout, Fargo, The Boys, Reacher and, of course, The Rings of Power) and exclusive movies (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, Challengers) has kept us glued to its service. Even besides the Prime originals and exclusives though, the sheer weight of great films and TV series on the service makes it well worth the basic subscription – even if it does mean suffering through ads every so often.
Highly commended
Disney+
Forget Marvel, Star Wars and Mickey Mouse; the best stuff on Disney+ this year, and the stuff that made us strongly consider it as an award winner, has nothing at all to do with any of the entertainment behemoth’s primo IPs. Shogun, Only Murders in the Building, Poor Things and (to a lesser extent) the third season of The Bear were the main reasons to subscribe.
Apple TV+
Apple’s quality-over-quantity approach (basically the opposite of Netflix’s infuriating ‘firehose of content’) has yielded another vintage year of entertainment. From the deliciously compelling Slow Horses and the epic Masters of the Air to the gradual unfurling horror of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the platform gave a good showing.
Also shortlisted
Netflix, Now, Paramount+
