Black Friday was a tempting time to pull the trigger on buying a new 4K TV, but often sales are limited to the cheapest, poorest performing TVs. If you want the best 4K TVs at the best prices, you really want to wait until the Super Bowl Sunday deals in 2019. That said, if you can't stand your old 1080p TV another day and need a new one ASAP, don't miss our Cyber Monday TV deals page. There you'll find the best deals still available from the biggest shopping day of the year, with many of the TVs you'll find here available at a steep discount.
If you're just looking for expert advice, however, we've got that, too. Over the last 12 months, we've been hard at work evaluating which TVs are worth the money and which ones ... well, are better left on the shelf.
To narrow down a year's worth of high-caliber screens to just eight is a tough job – and has meant that a lot of really good screens didn't make the cut. If you recently bought something in the 40-inch TV range that was great and you don't see it on this list, it doesn't mean we've intentionally snubbed it. Unfortunately best-of lists are tiny and we can only squeeze so many screens on here.
What's so great about 4K TVs?
Not only do 4K UHD screens have four times the amount of pixels as their 1080p predecessors, these 4K TVs also usually pack in screen technology like High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wide Color Gamut (WCG) that really make the most of those extra pixels.The other reason 4K TVs have taken off is that game consoles, like the PS4 Proand Xbox One X, have totally embraced the 4K future, as have the Blu-ray industry and streaming video player market. Pretty much everyone is on board the 4K Ultra HD train these days, so what better time to get a set?
If all of this sounds weird or archaic or tough to understand, don't worry. We're here to help decipher the wild, wonderful world of Ultra HD. Give us a few minutes of your time and we'll help you take home the best 4K TV on the market.
LG C8 OLED
There are other OLEDs worth considering this year (see: Sony's A1E and A8F OLED or LG's own E8 and W8 OLED models) but we think the OLED C8 offers the best price-to-performance ratio of any TV under the sun in the year 2018.
Sony Bravia A9F OLED
Sony’s second-generation OLED flagship, the A9F, is coming at a good time – just as Samsung and LG have stepped up their games with the Samsung Q9FN QLEDand LG E8 OLED, Sony has fired back with a phenomenal OLED of its own.
Much better than last year's A1E, the A9F is unquestionably Sony’s best OLED offering to date, and would've been the best OLED of the year if the C8 didn't exist.
While we experienced some minor issues (notably Black level crushing on Dolby Vision, and that Netflix Calibrated mode), niggles are to be expected on a set as ambitious as this. If you can live with the slightly idiosyncratic design, and afford the asking price, it’s a glorious UHD display.
LG E8 OLED
Having potentially pushed the hardware capabilities of its current OLED screen technology as far as they can go, LG has for 2018 turned its attention to the software that drives these screens – and this shift in focus has yielded surprisingly impressive results, improving and even removing many of the residual niggles associated with 2017’s already in truth outstanding 4K OLED sets.
The E8 OLED loses a bit of ground sonically from its predecessor, and it can be hard to justify the cost when stacked against the almost identical C8 OLED - but, if none of that stops, you rest assured that the E8 is still one of the best 4K TVs of 2018.
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