Choosing a new television in 2026 feels like a minefield of confusing acronyms. From OLED and RGB to QD Mini LED, it’s tough to know which television is best for your lounge room.
Beyond how much screen real estate you can get for your buck, there’s a lot to consider when buying a new television. The right size and display technology for your room, along with the best smart TV apps for your household, can make all the difference.
Which size TV should you get?
Big screens are breathtaking, but it’s possible to go overboard, so think twice before going beyond 65 inches. Vast screens can dominate a small room, although that’s become less objectionable these days.
Opting for a super-slim television to hang on the wall lets you go larger without making the room feel cramped.
Price-wise, the sweet spot for new televisions is 55 to 65 inches, beyond which you’re paying a premium for those extra inches. If you have an eye for detail but are on a tight budget, consider dropping a screen size so you can afford a better screen technology.
When it comes to resolution, at 55 inches and beyond you definitely want a 4K (3840 × 2160-pixel) panel. It’s tough to justify stepping up to 8K at this point. Also look for High Dynamic Range (HDR) to support the best colour and contrast from streaming services, preferably Dolby Vision or HDR 10+.
Opinions vary as to how close you should sit for the perfect viewing experience. The sharper the picture, the closer you might get: you want to be close enough to see the fine detail, but not so close you can see the individual pixels.
Aiming for the screen to fill 30 per cent of your field of view is a good rule of thumb, according to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. That puts your couch 3.1 metres away from a 75-inch television.
You might aim for 40 per cent (2.28m) for a more cinema-like experience, although the suggestion of 62 per cent (1.38m) for truly immersive IMAX-style viewing seems like overkill.
TV technologies explained
All modern television screens are made up of millions of pixels, which quickly change colour to create a moving picture. While there are plenty of acronyms to choose from, they are divided into two main camps: those with a backlight and those without.
The various kinds of Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) televisions feature a white backlight. This light shines through a grid of tiny LCD pixels to create an image.
These days, most LCD televisions have a bright but energy-efficient Light-Emitting Diode (LED) backlight, which is why they’re often called LED televisions.
Each LCD pixel is actually made up of a red, green and blue sub-pixel. These coloured sub-pixels filter the white backlight, so adjusting their transparency changes the brightness of their colour.
Combining the light from the three sub-pixels allows the pixel to appear as any colour.
Of course, every sub-pixel needs to completely block the backlight in order to create deep black. This is a big challenge for LCD screens and, if any light leaks through, the blacks look washed out.
Meanwhile, Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) televisions don’t rely on a backlight. Instead, every individual self-illuminating OLED pixel produces its own white light.
This is why traditional OLEDs, from the likes of LG, are technically known as WOLEDs (we’ll get to Samsung’s rival “QD-OLED” in a minute).
Each OLED pixel shines its white light through red, green and blue filters to create colours, plus some OLEDs add a fourth white filter to boost the brightness.
Turn off an OLED pixel, and it’s perfectly black, even if the pixel beside it is brightly lit. This is why OLED produces such deep blacks.
OLED
OLED is considered the gold standard by many television aficionados. The downside is that it’s typically more expensive than all but the very best LED televisions.
OLED’s lack of a backlight lets it produce really deep blacks to deliver great contrast, plenty of detail in the shadows and accurate colours. It is also less prone to motion blur than the budget end of LED.
All of this makes OLED perfect for making the most of HDR content like Dolby Vision, which is often used with blockbuster 4K content. OLED also offers excellent viewing angles, so the picture doesn’t look washed out for people sitting off to the side.
The downside is that OLED tends to be dimmer than the best LED televisions, meaning it can struggle in daylight or with glare. That’s why OLED is considered best for movie nights, while LED is considered better for an afternoon matinée.
To be fair, newer screens like LG’s OLED evo and Samsung’s S90 range are brighter and feature anti-glare technology. Today’s OLEDs are also more resistant to the burn-in issues that plagued earlier models.
Current OLED TV examples include:
- Sony Bravia 8 (from $2,499 for 55-inch model)
- LG OLED evo C6 (from $1,999 for 42-inch model)
- Samsung S90H (from $1,999 for 42-inch model)
LED
Basic LED screens are typically used in entry-level televisions. Budget options rely on a 50Hz refresh rate, but stepping up to 100 or 200Hz smooths out fast-moving action, like live sport.
The price and picture quality of an LED television mostly depend on the backlighting configuration that shines through the grid of LCD pixels.
Many thin LED televisions are “Edge-lit”, meaning the backlights shine in from the sides. Thicker LED televisions tend to be “Matrix-lit” or “Full-array backlit”, with an array of independent backlights sitting directly behind the pixels.
Full-array backlit LED breaks the backlight into independently controlled zones, which is known as “local dimming”. The ability to vary the backlight across the screen provides much better picture quality with greater contrast. The more zones, the better the picture.
Imagine a zombie movie set in a graveyard, with a bright full moon above. A single-zone backlight is forced to strike a compromise when setting the brightness.
As a result, everything looks a bit grey: the moon isn’t super bright, while details are lost in the shadows. You might also notice an unwanted halo around the moon, as the backlight bleeds through into the dark sky.
Meanwhile, a full-array backlit LED screen can boost the brightness behind the moon but remain dim elsewhere. This ensures the moon looks brilliant while the shadows retain a deep black with plenty of detail, so you can still see stars in the sky and zombies lurking in wait.
These are some of the LED TVs you can get in Australia currently:
- Hisense A4SAU HD Smart TV (from $299 for 32-inch model)
- LG NANO NU85 (from $3,999 for 98-inch model)
- Samsung Crystal UHD U8000H (from $749 for 43-inch model)
- Sony Bravia 3 II (from $1,099 for 43-inch model)
Mini LED
As the name suggests, a Mini-LED television improves the picture by breaking the full-array backlight into hundreds or even thousands of miniature LED lights.
This more granular backlighting allows Mini-LED to be super-precise when varying the brightness across the screen. Mini-LED also provides higher peak brightness, which improves contrast for HDR content.
The result is a very bright, vivid image without compromising too much on the blacks. You retain plenty of contrast and detail in the shadows, while the picture still looks good in a brightly lit room.
Keep in mind, those tiny LED backlights aren’t completely independent; they’re still grouped into zones. The number of zones varies considerably between brands and models, having a big impact on price and picture quality, so shop with care.
Standard Mini LEDs include:
QLED
There’s more to a great LED television than a great backlight, with Quantum Dot technology taking colours to the next level.
Placing a Quantum Dot filter in front of the LCD pixels boosts brightness, while producing more accurate and vibrant colours. This allows the screen to display finer colour shades which would be lost on some televisions.
The technology is often referred to as QLED, while LG’s QNED televisions add a NanoCell filter in front of the Quantum Dots to absorb unwanted light wavelengths and purify colours.
Quantum Dots can be applied to LCD panels with all kinds of backlight technologies. It has even been applied to basic “edge-lit” LED televisions, which is why you’ll see a lot of variation in Quantum Dot prices and quality.
- LG QNED81 (2025 model)
- Hisense Q7S ($4,999 for 100-inch model)
- Samsung Q7F QLED 4K TV ($4,999 for 98-inch model)
QD Mini LED
As the name suggests, a QD Mini LED television combines the benefits of a Mini LED backlight behind the pixels with a Quantum Dot layer in front.
As Mini LED becomes more commonplace, it’s becoming rare to find Quantum Dot televisions without it.
TCL’s SQD Mini LED takes things up a notch by using smaller “Super” Quantum Dots and advanced micro-lenses to deliver purer colours, while also boosting the number of local dimming zones in the backlight. It’s the brand’s alternative to RGB LED technology, which we’ll get to soon.
- Hisense U7SAU 4K ULED Mini LED (from $1,599 for 55-inch model)
- LG QNED86 evo Mini LED (from $1,699 for 55-inch model)
- Samsung QN80H (from $1,599 for 50-inch model)
- TCL C8L SQD-Mini LED (from $2,999 for 65-inch model)
QD-OLED
Aiming to offer the best of both worlds, television makers like Samsung and Sony add a Quantum Dot layer to their high-end OLED panels.
LG’s WOLED panels shine a white light through red, green, blue and white filters. Meanwhile, QD-OLED shines a blue light through red, green and blue filters with a Quantum Dot layer on top.
The difference allows QD-OLED to boost brightness and increase the range of vibrant colours compared to traditional WOLED. To be fair, the very best WOLEDs have also improved when it comes to brightness and colours.
Samsung’s use of QD-OLED varies even within models. For example, the 55, 65 and 77-inch Samsung S95H use Samsung’s QD-OLED panels, while the 83-inch model actually uses LG’s advanced RGB Tandem WOLED panels.
RGB LED
One of the newest TV technologies, RGB LED televisions go one step beyond Mini-LED by swapping out the small white LED backlights for tiny clusters of red, green and blue LED lights.
This allows the backlight to produce any colour, not just white. This coloured light is still shone through a grid of LCD pixels, each with their own coloured sub-pixels. Together, this allows RGB LEDs to produce 95 to 100 per cent of the BT.2020 colour spectrum used with HDR content, to create a more vivid and lifelike picture.
In comparison, most traditional LED and OLED televisions can only produce around 80 to 85 per cent of the BT.2020 colour spectrum.
The upside is that RGB LED doesn’t require a Quantum Dot layer to boost the colours. The downside is that some RGB LED televisions can experience colour bleed, when different coloured backlights spill into adjacent areas of the screen, but the best models retain clear colour separation and precision.
- Hisense URS9 RGB MiniLED (from $3,999 for 65-inch model)
- LG MRGB96B Micro RGB evo (from $9,995 for 86-inch model)
- Samsung R85H Micro RGB (from $2,199 for 55-inch model)
- Sony Bravia 7 II (from $2,299 for 50-inch model)
Micro-LED
Combining the best of OLED and LED in one display, up-and-coming Micro-LED screens are considered by some the holy grail of televisions.
Micro-LED does away with the traditional LED backlight and the LCD pixels. Instead of filtering the backlight to create colours, Micro-LED relies on individual self-illuminating red, green and blue sub-pixels to create colour.
All of this allows Micro-LED to produce the very bright, vibrant and varied colours of LED, while still displaying the perfect blacks of OLED.
So far, only a handful of Micro-LED televisions have emerged, from the likes of Samsung, Sony and Hisense. As you’d expect, they’re painfully expensive, not for mainstream sale and are still out of reach for most lounge rooms.
Software and connectivity
Check out the smart TV features for streaming content
In the early days of streaming video, the best strategy was to focus on a television’s picture quality and then let your set-top boxes do the heavy lifting in terms of content.
These days, a premium Smart TV experience with all the streaming usual suspects is pretty standard if you stick with a premium brand television running Google TV, Android TV or Web OS. It’s a bit more hit-and-miss with budget models and lesser-known brands, so make sure you read the fine print.
Along with subscription and catch-up streaming services, Smart TV apps often include DLNA and Plex for streaming video around your home. This is more convenient than playing files from a USB stick.
Many televisions also support Apple AirPlay, Google Cast and Wi-Fi Direct for flinging content directly from your computer, smartphone or tablet. This is useful if your smart TV’s app library doesn’t support some of your niche tastes.
It’s worth checking how many years of software updates a television will receive. Samsung and LG recently started promising multiple years of updates, similar to phones, which means you’re more likely to get support for new apps, services and standards over time.
Keep in mind, many modern smart televisions collect a lot of data about your viewing habits, such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR). Like Shazam for video, ACR monitors everything on your screen – even coming from external devices – in order to deliver more targeted advertising.
To disable this kind of tracking, dive into the advanced settings and look for features like Viewing Information Services, Live Plus, Home Promotion and Content Recommendation.
Consider what you want to plug into the TV
While smart TVs have become a one-stop shop for home entertainment, it’s still important to check the HDMI digital video inputs. Especially if you wish to plug in disc players, game consoles, streaming dongles or other set-top boxes.
If you don’t want to rely on AirPlay and/or Google Cast to stream from your handheld devices, you might want to plug a Google TV Streamer 4K, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV or Fetch TV recorder into the television’s HDMI port, so you can access a wider range of services.
Meanwhile, gamers should look for HDMI 2.1 ports that support 4K resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. Also look for “Game Mode” Variable Refresh Rate (VVR) and AMD FreeSync, which can adjust the refresh rate on the fly to optimise the picture, plus Auto Low-Latency Mode (ALLM) to reduce input lag.
You only need to worry about old analogue video inputs on your new television, such as composite and component video, if you’re looking to connect older devices like a classic Nintendo Wii. Alternatively, you could buy an analogue-to-HDMI adapter.
Of course, a great picture needs to be supported by great sound. If you want to hook up a soundbar or home cinema surround sound, look for a television which matches the capabilities of your audio gear.
HDMI ARC (Audio Return Channel) eliminates the need for a separate audio cable when sending sound and video between devices. HDMI eARC is a more “enhanced” HDMI 2.1 feature which can handle the high-resolution uncompressed audio used by some high-end audio standards.
Once again, you only need to worry about older audio ports, like coax and optical digital, if you’re looking to connect older audio gear that doesn’t support HDMI.
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