There is a slightly cloudy look that can sometimes appear with shots and scenes that contain a bold mixture of very bright and very dark content, as the local light controls wrestle with achieving the best balance of local contrast and HDR brightness, but this is fairly rare and subtle enough to not be a major distraction. With all this and excellent gaming performance, why isn't top of the list? That title goes to the S95C's more budget sibling, the Samsung S90C. The S90C doesn't offer quite the same brightness levels as the S95C, but it's cheaper and still offers fantastic all around performance so the S90C sits atop the list. Don't get us wrong though; the S95C feels every bit as premium as it should. Like other Sony TVs, the X90J uses Sony’s new X-Balanced Speaker to deliver clearer sound with less distortion at high volumes and the tweeters help broaden the soundstage of the TV—although it does make some compromises on the bass response. You want well-balanced audio out of the box: Sound here is on the ‘edgy’ side. But with most TVs, we really would recommend a soundbar anyway.

You want the brightest OLED available: Both the Samsung S95C and the LG G3 offer higher brightness levels than the S90C. You want an 80-inch TV: The 83-inch model uses a different screen type that's far less bright – we wouldn't recommend it. Get the 83-inch LG C3 instead, which has Dolby Vision. Again, there's no one answer to this question, particularly in terms of which brand to go for. But one thing worth considering in regards to longevity is the kind of TV tech that's being used. In our full review, we were "surprised at how clear dialogue was and how loud the speakers could get without sounding strained. Switching to the Dolby Atmos sound mode, we also noted distinct vertical and overhead effects coming from the TV." It's good enough to mean you don't need a separate soundbar, assuming you don't want full surround sound.You'll watch in bright rooms: The middling brightness means it can struggle with sunlight or reflections – the Samsung S90C at #1 in this guide is brighter at the same price, or the Samsung S95C ( #4 in the guide) is nearly twice as bright. The seemingly effortless way that the A80L combines the spectacular with the subtle is quite extraordinary. The neon lights and holographic billboards of Blade Runner 2049’s downtown LA pop from the overall gloom of the city in brilliant fashion, but skin tones are handled with realism-boosting nuance and the seemingly hundreds of slightly different shades of grey that make up the bark of the tree at Sapper Morton’s farm are made clear to see. Chat Widget offers out-of-the-box cookie consent management, see here: Enabling cookie consent for the Chat widget & Web SDK The Samsung S95C is not just beautiful in picture but also in design. A sleek, stylish frame and ultra-slim trim means the S95C looks fantastic, especially when hung on the wall thanks to its razor thin depth. It also comes with a separate box called the One Connect for connections so there's one cable running to the TV. These days, it's all about HDMI, which is used to connect everything from set-top boxes to video streamers, Blu-ray players to games consoles. Thanks to ARC/eARC (Audio Return Channel / Enhanced Audio Return Channel), a single HDMI connection can even be used to output sound to an AV receiver or soundbar at the same time as it receives a video signal.

Indeed, in our five-star review, we said “The JZ2000’s speakers are truly incredible for built-in audio, being capable of recreating both the delicate footstep on a stairway and roaring explosion of a car crash in equal measure. You’re getting precise audio detail as well as a strong bass response.” We also wanted to see impressive brightness. Bright images aren't the be all and end all of a great TV, but you need to know your new display will perform well in a variety of lighting environments. Used to throttle request rate. If Google Analytics is deployed via Google Tag Manager, this cookie will be named _dc_gtm_.

Testing a TV is a long and complex process because a modern TV simply does so much. Not only does it need to handle a variety of content resolutions – standard-def, 1080p, 4K and sometimes 8K – and both standard dynamic range and high dynamic range (the latter in a number of formats), all of which need to be specifically tested, it also has a sound system with various advanced settings and a full smart platform. A TV is an all-in-one device in the best sense, but that also makes it a challenging review proposition. Its pictures really do jump off the screen with an intensity far beyond anything else we have seen at anything like the same price. In fact, they leave the vast majority of much more expensive mid-range and even a few really premium TVs looking dull by comparison. Including, as TCL would want it to, OLED models, with even the latestMLAandQD-OLEDsets falling some way short of the sort of brightness the C845K can achieve.