Tom's Guide Awards 2025: Our favorite TVs for design, size, picture quality and more

Tom's Guide

30-07-2025

Whether you're looking for an OLED for deeper blacks, a QLED for a brighter picture or even Mini LED for improved local dimming, the right TV can bring your favorite movies and shows to life and we've tried the best ones out there.
From massive big-screen TVs, to incredibly thin ones that mount completely flush on your wall to projectors bright enough to use during the day, there's no shortage of options when it comes to finding the right display for your home and budget.
Our team of experts has tested and reviewed all of the latest TVs and projectors for the Tom's Guide Awards 2025. Below, we highlight our favorite OLEDs, QLEDs, Mini LEDs and the rest of the best TVs from the last 12 months that managed to breathe new life into our favorite films, TV shows, documentaries and even games.
To be named Tom's Guide's best TV in any given year is a massive achievement. It requires a careful blend of price and performance. And that's exactly what the LG C5 delivers.
See, the LG G5 OLED can deliver better brightness and higher color accuracy out of the box, but it's a TV that costs $1,000 more in most sizes. The unassuming C5 delivers 95% of that same performance for around two-thirds the price.
To make a TV this good for such a reasonable price was difficult for LG, and for that reason, it's walking away with the title of best TV in 2025.
While LG has mastered WOLED technology with the new LG G5 OLED, the Samsung S95F proves that its QD-OLED technology is just as powerful.
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The latest flagship QD-OLED from Samsung offers enhanced brightness (2,286 nits this year versus 1,777 last year) for better specular highlights and covers a groundbreaking 90.47% of the Rec.2020 color gamut — more than any other TV we tested.
Its AI-powered upscaling may not be to everyone's liking nor will its matte screen with anti-glare coating, but these controversial design decisions aside, this is still the best OLED TV we'll see in 2025.
Hisense has always been the go-to brand for value-packed TVs with excellent performance, but the new U8QG elevates the brand to another level.
The Hisense U8QG takes what made its predecessor — the 2024 Tom's Guide TV of the Year Hisense U8N — and upgrades it. It's brighter. Its contrast is better. Upscaling and motion processing look better now than they did last year. Color accuracy and volume are better and higher than last year, too. And the U8QG is just as cheap as the U8N was.
If the LG C5 didn't deliver such a pristine picture, the Hisense U8QG would've stolen the crown but, not for nothing, the U8QG is the best QLED TV in 2025.
While Samsung The Frame Pro puts up a tough fight in the design department, the LG G5 OLED is beautiful both inside and out. You'll spend all of your time looking at the 1-inch thick display, but you'll know that, under the hood, it's driven by LG's most powerful processor yet.
Thanks to the Alpha 11 AI Processor Gen 2 — and the new four-stack OLED design from LG Display — the G5 is capable of a higher peak brightness than its peers. In our labs, we measured it to be 1,879 nits in a 10% window, which is 200 nits more than the brand-new Sony Bravia 8 II OLED. Motion processing and HD upscaling also got a boost with the new processor, so any and all content looks as good as it possibly can.
To quote Indiana Jones, 'It belongs in a museum.'
Innovating in the TV space isn't easy — unless you've got billions to spend upgrading the panel factory, you've got to be really creative. The Panasonic Z95B OLED is exactly that.
The new game-changing technology on the Z95B is its proprietary cooling system. Like GPUs, CPUs and all other electronics, really, TVs get hot with extended use. With LED TVs extended use might lead to some uneven backlighting, but on OLED TVs it can cause extreme pixel degradation. Panasonic has developed a new way to combat this with a chimney-like design that pushes air through to more effectively cool the internal components.
In layman's terms, the novel cooling tech enables improved picture quality and a longer lifespan for OLEDs — and for that, it deserves a spot on this list.
These days, new 8K TVs are few and far between. LG makes between one and two models a year, but otherwise it's only Samsung who's still in the running. Despite the lack of competition, however, the QN990F is still a fantastic TV.
In our review, we heralded the QN990F as one of the most technically advanced TVs the company's ever made. Not only does it have the 8K resolution going for it, but it also comes with that anti-glare coating we loved on the S95F OLED and an all-new wireless version of the OneConnect Box.
That new wireless OneConnect Box did introduce a bit of latency — hence why this is the best 8K TV and not the best TV for gaming — but the convenience outweighed the issues.
When looking at 8K screens 85 inches or higher, the QN990F is at the top of its class.
When you think about buying a new 4K TV, one of the first questions that comes to mind is, 'Well, how expensive is it going to be?' For most TVs on this list, the answer to that question ranges from $1,200 to $8,000 in the case of the 85-inch Samsung QN990F Neo QLED TV.
But the TCL QM6K? You can buy one brand-new for just over $500 — and it's one of the best TVs for gaming on the market.
While its input latency is slightly higher than we'd like (we measured it at 13.1ms) it comes with multiple HDMI 2.1 ports with support up to 144Hz with VRR. It can handle Dolby Vision content with aplomb, and can even reach 240Hz if you don't mind downgrading to 1080p. If the purchase of a PS5 or Xbox Series X drained your bank account, the TCL QM6K delivers great gaming performance without tacking on an extra $1,200 to your tab.
Any TV on this list could earn a spot as the best big-screen TV of 2025 — however, the Samsung S90D from the tail-end of last year is probably the only big-screen OLED with a reasonable sticker price. The 77-inch model is often available for under $2,000.
That's no drop in the bucket, but compared to the 77-inch S95F and LG G5 that retail for $4,500 and $4,400, respectively, it's one heck of a deal.
Why didn't we opt for a cheaper Mini-LED TV in this spot? OLED TVs offer significantly better off-axis viewing. At 77 inches, it's going to be hard to sit directly in front, so having it be an OLED instead of a Mini-LED means that colors won't desaturate for the person sitting off to the side of the room.
If you've got the $4,500 to pony up for the more expensive OLEDs on this list, that's great, but folks looking to get big-screen OLED performance at Mini-LED prices will find lots to love about the Samsung S90D.
There's a lot of noise in the projector space, but the Hisense C2 Ultra expertly cuts through by offering fantastic performance that stands up to the increasing competition from the myriad newcomers springing out of China. (Hisense, too, is Chinese, but it's existed in the market for more than a decade at this point.)
It's as expensive as some OLED TVs, but the Hisense C2 Ultra can deliver a 300-inch picture that will, according to our reviewer, 'blow your mind.'
In terms of pure performance metrics, the C2 Ultra delivered 3,231 lumens (a big upgrade over the original) and covered 93% of the BT.2020 color space. There's support for Dolby Vision and HLG here, but it would've been nice to see support for HDR10+, too.
Even without the latter, however, this is the strongest-performing projector we saw in 2025, and so far nothing else has come along to unseat it.
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