The Best Budget QLED TVs to Buy in 2025

The Samsung QN90C is the best QLED TV you can get for about $1,500. This same TV also happens to be the Best 65-inch TV for watching sports and doubles as a great gaming TV, making it a very well-rounded TV overall. The QN90C offers a 120Hz refresh rate, 1,787 nits of brightness (which is very bright), an anti-glare screen, 4K resolution, and compatibility with HDR10, HDR10+, HLG. If you’re a gamer, you can take advantage of the Gaming Hub which has many cloud-based gaming apps pre-installed. You can read more about this TV in IGN’s review.

The 65-inch Hisense U8QG was released in April of this year. It’s a solid, well-rounded TV that will work great in bright rooms and excels for watching sports and movies and playing video games. The brightness, black levels, and colors are its most impressive specs. PCMag considers it an “excellent” TV in its review for its bright picture, deep blacks, accurate colors, and Apple AirPlay and Google Cast. It usually hovers around $1,200 and $1,000 right now for the 65-inch.

If you want to spend about $1,000, this QLED option is especially great if you have a bright living room and like video games. The TCL 65QM851G Q Series is an extremely bright TV, reaching peaks of 3,308 nits with the right settings, the most I have seen on any TV. The colors are also powerful thanks to its excellent contrast. It has 4K resolution with a 120Hz native refresh rate, but it supports up to 144Hz variable refresh rate (VRR), which is perfect for gaming. You can access these settings conveniently with a quick menu in Game mode. Since it’s a smart TV, it also has Apple AirPlay, Google Cast, and hands-free Google Assistant included. You can read more about this TV in PCMag’s review.

The QM7K is the latest addition to the mid-range QLED TV lineup from TCL, with the 65-inch model hovering somewhere around $800 and $900 most of the time. The highlight of this TV is the bright panel, making it great for sunlit rooms. It has deep blacks and almost no light bloom, giving it that premium picture quality. Gamers will appreciate the 144 Hz native refresh rate and 288 Hz support panel with VRR and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, making it a smooth experience. Since it’s a Google TV, it has hands-free Google Assistant and Google Cast, which makes streaming almost anything from your phone or computer a breeze. It can also do the same for iPhones with AirPlay. If you’re a color stickler, you might notice that the colors run a little warmer out of the box, according to PCMag’s “excellent” review, but that’s something you can edit easily in the picture settings.

TCL’s QM lineup offers a solid value regardless of which size you pick. The QM6K is a big improvement compared to last year’s rendition, now with local dimming zones (500 of them, according to CNET’s review) and a mini LED panel, improving contrast dramatically. The color accuracy is also surprisingly accurate out of the box for HDR content, which is great for people who don’t like to mess with settings. You get a 144Hz native refresh rate, HDR formats like HDR ULTRA with Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+, HDR10, & HLG, Dolby Atmos Audio, an anti-glare screen, 4 HDMI Inputs (one of which is an eARC), and the Google TV Smart OS (my favorite OS) with Chromecast built in, meaning you can cast your phone to it. You also get Apple AirPlay 2 and Alexa built in, according to ZDNet’s review.

The Roku Plus Series TV is the cheapest QLED you can get on this roundup—I don’t recommend going any cheaper. The Roku Plus Series TV is Roku’s first TV (it would just slap its operating system on other TVs previously), and it did an excellent job with it. It’s a great value for your money with great colors, low input lag, and a Roku Voice Remote Pro that makes this TV feel premium. It has 4K resolution, a just-OK 650 nits of brightness, a decent contrast ratio of 65,000:1, and a low input lag of 3.1 ms in Game Mode. You can read more about this TV in PCMag’s review.