A $500 TV Is Usually Good Enough. But What Makes a $2,000 TV Worth It?

Why would anyone spend $2,000 on a TV? Our readers (and even fellow Wirecutter writers) ask this question often—especially once we’ve crowned the best budget 4K TV for the year. Though the right $500 TV may indeed be good enough for the lion's share of buyers, spending more on a premium TV secures considerable improvements in picture performance, feature set, and/or build quality.

But understanding what makes one TV worth more than another can be confusing because a higher-end TV and an affordable TV may appear identical on paper. Take, for example, our current upgrade pick for the best LCD/LED TV, the Samsung QN90B, and our pick for the best budget 4K TV, the TCL 5-Series. Both TVs are equipped with 4K resolution, so their screens have the same amount of pixels. Both are high dynamic range TVs. Both are smart TVs, which means they connect to the internet directly and have some form of built-in media streaming. Both utilize the latest picture technologies, such as full-array LED backlights with local dimming and quantum dot technology, to enhance the vividness of their colors. Yet in their 55-inch screen sizes, one TV is selling for $1,300 and the other for less than $500 right now. What's up with that?

When you spend two, three, or even four times what you would for a good $500 TV, you should be investing in real, physical improvements in a TV's hardware that produce robust, visible improvements in picture quality. In other words, it shouldn't be a mystery why you’re paying more.

That's why we believe that OLED TVs are the best-looking screens you can buy. They operate in a fundamentally different way than the LCD/LED TVs that dominate the market, offering huge improvements in specific, key areas of picture quality—namely contrast and black level—that are easy to see (even if they aren't always easy to explain). That said, OLED TVs are also more difficult to manufacture, and their makers often position them as premium, almost-luxury items, so even the most affordable 65-inch OLEDs tend to start at something closer to $1,500.

When it comes to LCD TVs that use the same core technologies, the reasons to pay more can be harder to quantify. Let's use our previous examples—the identical-sounding Samsung and TCL TVs—to illustrate the difference in value.

Though you can find a lot of variables in the final product, every LCD TV has two basic ingredients: an LCD panel and LEDs mounted behind it. While the pricey Samsung QN90B TV and the affordable TCL 5-Series TV use the same kind of LCD panel, they don't use the same kind of LEDs, as the Samsung TV uses mini-LEDs, which are around 40% smaller than the traditional LEDs that the TCL TV employs.

That might not sound like it would make a radical difference in terms of picture quality, but in reality it ends up affecting almost every aspect of performance. First and foremost, the mini-LEDs allow the Samsung TV to achieve much higher brightness, which we can express in terms of nits (a common shorthand for candelas per square meter). During HDR playback, the Samsung TV can reach roughly 2,000 nits of brightness, while the TCL TV is limited to just under 700 nits. (For reference, the most recent iPhone models can achieve 1,200 nits in HDR.) This means the Samsung TV is better able to portray the brightest highlights in 4K Ultra HD video as they are supposed to look, while the TCL TV has to tone down those highlights to fit them within its brightness capabilities.

The size of the LEDs also impacts dynamic range, which is the difference between the darkest and brightest elements on screen. Although both TVs use full-array local dimming—that is, each model has LEDs embedded behind the entirety of the screen (a "full array"), and those LEDs can "locally" dim or brighten in zones—the Samsung TV's mini-LEDs afford it greater control over the zones.

This means the Samsung TV can maintain both better black levels and brighter highlights while achieving a much higher average dynamic range. No matter what kind of screen you’re viewing—a TV, a laptop, a smartphone, an e-reader, a baby monitor, or a screen at the movies—dynamic range has the highest impact on perceptibility, realism, and immersion, and achieving high brightness and deep darkness simultaneously is the most crucial aspect of picture quality.

The Samsung TV's superior luminance also affects how colorful its colors are. Although the two TVs employ the same quantum dot color technology, the brighter TV is capable of creating more highly saturated colors. Digital displays utilize a form of additive color, adding red, green, and blue together to create every other color, including white. So the more light a TV can produce, the more it can saturate colors (within the limitations of the color technology).

What's more, due to the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect (a perceptual phenomenon wherein brighter colors are seen as more colorful), brighter TVs are capable of producing what appear to be rich, super-vivid reds and greens in comparison with dimmer TVs. The end result is that, even if the Samsung TV is technically only 20% to 30% more colorful than the TCL TV, it looks a lot more colorful to anyone watching.

Another area in which the Samsung TV justifies its higher price tag is motion performance. Save for some occasional outliers, all TVs have either a 60 Hz or 120 Hz refresh rate. Because the Samsung TV has a 120 Hz refresh rate, its screen refreshes twice as fast as that of the 60 Hz TCL TV, which allows it to produce smoother motion overall and better detail in fast-moving scenes. This result is especially beneficial when the TV is displaying sports and video games.

Both TVs have a 4K resolution, so you can expect true 4K content to look similarly detailed between the two. But the pricier Samsung TV is equipped with a more powerful video processor and a better onboard upscaler, so it does a better job of showing lower-resolution DVD and TV content on its 4K screen—creating more detail and fewer digital artifacts such as banding.

The pricier Samsung TV is equipped with an anti-reflective coating on its screen, which helps it to diffuse and diminish ambient light, such as from lights and windows, to preserve image contrast. Its higher brightness and more reliable black levels (thanks, again, to its mini-LEDs) also give it superior horizontal and vertical off-angle viewing compared with the TCL TV, so its picture looks good when viewed from more places in the room.

If you were to set up the two TVs together in a room, you would immediately notice a difference in their build quality and craftsmanship. Though that isn't always the case with pricier TVs, there's no denying that this Samsung TV's heavier ballast-style stand, beveled edges, and high-quality plastic chassis give it much better overall survivability in comparison with the more affordable TCL TV.

However, a more crucial difference arises when you get around behind the TVs to look at their connectivity options. While both TVs have four HDMI inputs, the pricier TV's HDMI inputs are HDMI 2.1 (whereas the TCL's inputs are limited to HDMI 2.0), which confers considerable benefits, especially with the latest video game consoles. The Samsung TV also boasts additional connectivity, including an extra USB port and a direct ethernet/LAN input. The latter can be especially important when you’re trying to stream high-bit-rate 4K/HDR content, especially if your Wi-Fi infrastructure isn't terribly robust (which is the case in much of the US).

Though the above specifics don't directly apply to every premium or budget TV, it should be clear that you aren't just paying a "sticker price" for the more expensive model. Superior dynamic range, color saturation, and overall image fidelity are par-for-the-course improvements when you buy an OLED TV or a premium LCD TV over a budget option. But only you can decide whether those improvements are worth the added expense.

The good news is, a third option exists. If you want to step up from a budget TV's picture quality but don't want to pay for huge upgrades in performance and design, there is a "just right" middle range where you can still get improvements in brightness and color performance for roughly half the cost of a premium TV. Our current pick for the best LCD/LED TV, the Hisense U8H, lands in that space. The 65-inch model costs less than $1,000 and matches the Samsung TV's picture-quality perks in enough respects to be close enough for most people.

This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell and Grant Clauser.

Lee Neikirk

Lee Neikirk is a senior staff writer reporting on TVs at Wirecutter. He has been testing and reviewing AV gear since 2012 and is an ISF-certified TV calibrator. When he's not fussing over pixels, Lee is either jamming on a guitar, playing video games, or driving around endlessly trying to find beach parking.

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