What Are The Top 6 TVs for Bright Rooms?

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Reviewed By

Evan Shephard
Updated Feb 15, 2024 11:03 AM
best tv bright room guide that shows the top best tv model

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Choosing the best TV for bright rooms boils down to one essential capability: overcoming light, be it direct or indirect. This becomes particularly crucial in settings where controlling lighting is a challenge, such as rooms with TVs placed next to windows or under skylights. In these scenarios, the glare from direct sunlight or the brightness from ambient indoor lighting demands a great TV that excels in both HDR and SDR performance, coupled with superior reflection handling.

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The choice of technology plays a significant role here. OLEDs, for instance, are less suitable for such brightly lit environments due to their lower brightness levels. Instead, LED and QLED TVs emerge as the ideal options. Keep reading to learn what test criteria and specifications help us determine the best bright room TVs.

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Minimum Specifications for the Best Bright Room TV

  • Panel Technology: LED or QLED, as OLED is not suitable for bright room conditions.

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“Nice To Haves” for the Best Bright Room TV

  • Refresh Rate: A high refresh rate, like 120Hz, is crucial. It ensures smooth motion and clear visuals, particularly in dynamic scenes, which is a significant advantage in bright rooms.
  • HDR Format Support: HDR is about bringing depth to your picture with enhanced contrast and richer colors. It’s key to making every scene pop, especially in rooms filled with natural or artificial light.

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Test Criteria for the Best Bright Room TV

  • SDR Brightness: SDR brightness evaluates the TV’s performance in standard settings. The ability to display higher brightness is essential for combating ambient light in bright rooms.
  • HDR Brightness: HDR brightness assesses the TV’s peak brightness capabilities, which are crucial for maintaining contrast and detail in well-lit areas.
  • EOTF (Electro-Optical Transfer Function): The EOTF is crucial for ensuring the TV accurately reproduces a range of brightness levels, contributing to a balanced and realistic picture in various lighting conditions.
  • Reflectivity: While not a test criterion that was make or break for the TVs on the list, reflections are still an important aspect of any television that’s going to be in a brightly lit room. Highly reflective screens introduce tons of glare that ruins picture quality or even makes your TV outright unwatchable.

Our selection process is thorough and data-driven, ensuring that the TVs we recommend can meet the demands of bright environments. We scrutinize and validate our choices, aiming to help you find a TV that not only suits your space but also enhances your viewing experience, no matter the lighting challenges you face. It’s these specifications and test criteria that led us to the Samsung QN95B Neo QLED, where it sits at the top of our list for the best TVs for bright rooms.

Latest Updates

  • 01/30/2024: Completely and thoroughly overhauled the guide to include the best and latest bright room TVs.
  • 11/21/2023: Republished the list to include TVs based on our True Score system.

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Top Bright Room TVs For 2024

Prices accurate at the time of publishing

See how we test the testers

You won’t find any OLEDs on this list (not yet – OLEDs are getting brighter every year) but that’s the only spec that really matters when it comes to beating back the sun shining through a window onto your TV.

  • Runner Up

    Best Value

    Best Budget

    gr recommended award

    Best Mid-Range

    Samsung QN95B Neo QLED TV

    • Best For Gaming

    The Samsung QN95B excels in bright rooms with its class-leading HDR brightness and vibrant QLED display, ideal for sports and action content.

    Samsung QN95B Neo QLED TV Review →

    True Score

    89
    97
    8

    Experts

    88
    529

    Customers

    SAVE $1,311
    $2,999.99
    $1,688.57
  • Runner Up

    Best Value

    Best Budget

    gr recommended award

    Best Mid-Range

    Samsung QN900B Neo QLED TV

    Samsung’s QN900B offers stunning contrast and 8K resolution, making it a strong contender for brightly lit environments and home theaters but at a premium price.

    Samsung QN900B Neo QLED TV Review →

    True Score

    86
    91
    10

    Experts

    90
    155

    Customers

  • Runner Up

    Best Value

    Best Budget

    gr recommended award

    Best Mid-Range

    Samsung QN90C NEO QLED Series

    • Best For 50-inch

    The Samsung QN90C, with excellent EOTF and good reflection handling, is perfect for home theaters in bright rooms, balancing between SDR content, casual gaming and movie watching.

    Samsung QN90C NEO QLED Series Review →

    True Score

    85
    86
    9

    Experts

    92
    4k

    Customers

    SAVE $100
    $1,397.98
    $1,297.99
  • Runner Up

    Best Value

    Best Budget

    gr recommended award

    Best Mid-Range

    Samsung The Terrace Full Sun Outdoor TV

    • Best For Outdoor

    The Terrace is uniquely tailored for outdoor viewing with its weatherproof design and comes with an eye-watering price tag to match, but it provides decent all-around performance in bright conditions.

    Samsung The Terrace Full Sun Outdoor TV Review →

    True Score

    82
    83
    3

    Experts

    90
    3k

    Customers

    SAVE $2,011
    $4,999.99
    $2,989.00
  • Runner Up

    Best Value

    Best Budget

    gr recommended award

    Best Mid-Range

    TCL QM8/QM850G QLED TV

    • Best For 65-inch

    The TCL QM8, a budget-friendly option, shines in bright rooms with high brightness and low reflectivity, suited for sports but limited by narrow viewing angles.

    TCL QM8/QM850G QLED TV Review →

    True Score

    82
    83
    7

    Experts

    89
    816

    Customers

    SAVE $138
    $1,135.99
    $998.00
  • Runner Up

    Best Value

    Best Budget

    gr recommended award

    Best Mid-Range

    Hisense U8K TV

    • Best For 75-inch

    The Hisense U8K, with its exceptional color gamut and solid EOTF performance, stands out as both versatile and is our best value-for-money TV, offering an immersive experience in bright environments.

    Hisense U8K TV Review →

    True Score

    79
    81
    6

    Experts

    86
    2k

    Customers

    SAVE $148
    $997.99
    $849.99

Our Approach to Testing Bright Room TVs

Evan Shepard/Gadget Review

Our approach to “testing” is vastly different than any other website on the Internet today. While we do some in-house testing to verify reviews, our bright room TV data set is constructed from other trusted sites testing and running benchmarks on HDR, SDR, reflections and more.

We collect this data so you don’t have to, simple as that. We then average that testing data to represent that product’s capabilities accurately. Subsequently, we then leverage that data, filter and sort our buying guides, ensuring that all the products on our guides meet the strict requirements for your use case, such as watching a TV in a brightly lit living room or kitchen.

You may notice some of our graphs contain “Source: RTings”. This is to indicate that the data we’re showing off in a graph has come from a single source – because it’s the only source that actually tested the criteria and had data for it! Normally, our data is an average out of all of the various publications that test and provide data to give you a good idea of how a product is going to perform on average.

Which Criteria Matter for Testing Bright Room TVs?

By focusing on these criteria (3 required, 1 nice to have), anyone can quickly and easily compare TVs and how they perform in bright rooms. This helps you make an informed decision and pick a TV that delivers the brightness levels you need to overcome even the brightest rooms in the house.

CRITERIARANGEREQUIREDDEFINITION
SDR Brightness700+ nitsYesMeasure how luminous your screen is in SDR mode
HDR Brightness1300+ nitsYesMeasure of how luminous your screen is in HDR mode
Reflections<= 3%YesMeasures what percent of light is reflected off the screen when subjected to light
EOTF<= 0.06 (600 nit Δ)No (nice to have)Standard that governs how your display interprets and renders brightness and color

Our Trusted Data Sources

(Publication category Score is 80%+)

We looked at 210+ TV reviewers and while 24 are trustworthy (60%+ Trust Rating), we only use data from the testers that are “very trusted” which means a Trust Rating above 70%. The three we have listed below are our most trusted for TVs, along with our own in-house TV expert.

  1. Evan Shepard – Gadget Review
  2. Matthew Lopes – RTings, MuckRack
  3. Will Greenwald – PCMag, MuckRack, Twitter
  4. David Katzmaier – CNET, MuckRack, Twitter

Interested in a comprehensive analysis of our data sources? We’ve got you covered. Below, you’ll find a detailed list of every TV review website we’ve identified, organized by their respective Trust Ratings from highest to lowest. But we didn’t stop there. We’ve meticulously reviewed each publication and verified the data by checking whether the authors have bio links to MuckRack or LinkedIn. We’re committed to not only checking the facts but ensuring their veracity.

TV Test Data & Results

1. SDR & HDR Brightness TV Test Results

Poor brightness in rooms that have lots of ambient light leads to multiple problems. Not only can the picture be completely lost in the light and reflections off the screen, what picture does manage to shine through will likely be washed out, suffering bad contrast and poor details. 

Unlike other use cases, where brightness is welcomed but not mandatory, the more nits your TV can pump out, the better in a bright room scenario. For SDR content, 700 nits is the minimum but more is always welcome, and some of the brightest sets can reach north of 1500. With HDR content, at least 1300 nits is necessary, but some of the TVs sitting at the top end reach past 2000!

SDR Brightness (in nits, higher is better)

HDR Brightness (in nits, higher is better)

2. Reflections Test Results

TVs designed with good reflections handling feature anti-reflective coatings or panel technologies that minimize the impact of ambient light. This ensures that the image remains clear and vibrant, preserving detail and color accuracy even when faced with direct light sources. It’s a key consideration for anyone looking to place their TV in a sunlit living room or a well-lit space where control over lighting conditions might be limited.

Choosing a TV with superior reflections handling translates to a more versatile viewing experience, allowing you to enjoy sports, movies, and other content without having to draw the curtains or adjust room lighting. It’s an essential feature for ensuring that your TV can deliver optimal performance across a wide range of lighting environments, enhancing overall viewing pleasure.

Reflections Handling (lower is better)

Data Source: rtings.com

3. EOTF Test Results

EOTF (electro-optical transfer function) ensures that content is displayed as intended when it was originally mastered.

In bright environments, maintaining consistent and true-to-source brightness levels is vital. A well-calibrated EOTF ensures that the TV displays a balanced range of brightness, from deep blacks to bright whites, without losing detail. This accuracy is especially important in brightly lit rooms, where ambient light can wash out images.

A TV that precisely handles EOTF (Electro-Optical Transfer Function) can provide a more realistic and immersive viewing experience. It accurately represents the content as intended by its creators, even under challenging lighting conditions. From landscapes to the most explosive action scenes, everything is displayed with the correct luminance and contrast.

EOTF (lower is better)

Data Source: rtings.com

Bright Room TV: Mistakes To Avoid

  1. Ignoring Room Layout: When you’re placing your television, be it on a stand or mounted up on a wall, it’s important to keep in mind exactly where it’s going. Some walls may sit opposite of windows where the sun shines right through, which makes it all the harder for you to see your TV. While a TV that’s suited for bright rooms is intended to help counter bright light, it’s important to give the set the best chance it has at taking advantage of its brightness.

  2. Blindly Choosing OLEDs over LEDs (or QLEDs): There’s nothing wrong with OLED TVs. They’re on the cutting edge of TV panel technology and have the best contrast, picture quality and blacks of any TV panel on the market. OLEDs are also still universally dimmer than the brightest LEDs and QLEDs 4K TVs (read: 4k vs 1080p), which makes them less than ideal for bright rooms (though this will likely change in the very near future). Stick with the brighter panels if you’re fighting ambient light, even if it means losing out on some picture quality and contrast.

  3. Ignoring Reflectivity: TV screens reflect light, just like phones and computer monitors. Part of fighting reflections starts with putting a TV in the right spot – which means not putting it in direct sunlight. You can further position a TV to help reduce glare, but sometimes no matter where the TV goes there’s going to be glare and low reflectivity helps counter it.

  4. Overlooking Other Use Cases: A TV is used for more than just bright rooms. Consider how well the TV performs when viewing different types of content like video games, movies, live sports, and regular TV shows. Check for good color accuracy, viewing angles, smart features, and sound quality, therefore ensuring a well-rounded performance.

The Best Bright Room TV Tests Compared

Product
True Score
SDR Brightness
HDR Brightness
Reflections
EOTF (600 nit)
89
  • 1,934 nits

  • 2,318 nits

  • 2.4%

  • 0.0438

$1,688.57
$3,000
$1,311
86
  • 1,478 nits

  • 2,058 nits

  • 2.6%

  • 0.0277

85
  • 1,289 nits

  • 1,923 nits

  • 1.5%

  • 0.0046

$1,297.99
$1,398
$100
82
  • 962 nits

  • 1,494 nits

  • 2.1%

  • 0.0336

$2,989.00
$5,000
$2,011
82
  • 2,076 nits

  • 2,005 nits

  • 1.8%

  • 0.037

$998.00
$1,136
$138

Hisense U8K TV Review

  • Best for 75-inch

79
  • 1,549 nits

  • 1,792 nits

  • 1.8%

  • 0.0105

$849.99
$998
$148

Bright Room TV FAQs

Is OLED worth it in a bright room?

OLED televisions offer incredible contrast ratio and image quality. They are vastly superior to traditional LCD televisions in nearly every way. However, they cannot outperform an LCD television in bright rooms. OLED TVs typically aren’t bright enough for bright rooms, meaning you won’t be able to enjoy the superior picture quality.

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