How bright is your TV screen? And can you answer that, beyond “yes, I can see the moving pictures”?
Brightness is crucial for a good viewing experience on the best TVs. It ensures visibility, illuminating detail and infusing colors with depth and vibrancy, and you’ll need a decently bright screen to counteract ambient light for daytime viewing or a brightly-lit room in your home.
But while the impact of brightness is very tangible – my eyes! – it can be hard to quantify for everyday shoppers. What is a nit (the most common unit of measurement for TV brightness), or a lumen for that matter? And is 2,000 nits really that much better than, say, 500?
A nit is defined as the amount of light that a single candle emits in a square meter – roughly the size of a 40-inch TV – and is usually measured in terms of ‘peak brightness’, or the maximum light within a certain area, rather than the average brightness across a TV screen. For every thousand nits, you get the equivalent of one thousand candles, and so on.
TVs tend to get incremental improvements each year, but there’s no doubt that 2024 was the brightest year for TVs yet. One of the best mini-LED TVs, the TCL QM851G, has a peak brightness of over 3,500 nits – double that of most screens in that list – while the new Hisense U8N and TCL C855 are both close to hitting 3,000 nits despite being sub-$1,000 TVs. (More entry-level Mini LEDs, such as the Hisense U7N, might be around 1,000 nits.)
A mini-LED screen, which features a dedicated backlight with countless minute diodes, has a natural brightness advantage over OLED, a self-emissive display technology that’s better for putting brightness where it’s needed (lighting up individual pixels) than delivering a high number of nits – the reason why OLEDs faced years of criticism for being ‘too dim’ for the average home.
But OLED TVs have also made incredible brightness gains over recent years. Not too long ago, it was unusual for an OLED screen to hit 1,000 nits, and now, it’s a regular occurrence. But what difference do these heightened brightness figures really make?
Nit-picking
As we’ve said, brightness aids visibility, helping to ensure on-screen images are clearly illuminated, and that you can make out plenty of detail. It’s also crucial for color; just as colors fade into a vague gray in darkness, so too does increased brightness allow colors to stand out more clearly from each other. HDR content, which calibrates your TV’s brightness output to improve tonal contrast, also requires a decent level of nits (1,000) to work as intended.
However, brightness can be a red herring without proper brightness control. You can have plenty of nits, but if your TV can’t precisely allocate that light where it’s needed, without bleeding into other pixels, the extra light can flatten contrast instead of increasing it. One of OLED’s great strengths is its ability to switch pixels entirely off, meaning that bright areas of the screen are contrasted by a true black rather than a half-lit gray.
I’ve had an OLED TV – the LG C1 – for the past three years, without any of the latest brightness enhancements that LG has been cooing ever since its release (its peak brightness is around 750 nits). While it’s not ideal for daytime viewing – even indirect light from my living room window tends to ruin the image – it’s still an incredible screen for the way I largely use it, for an evening film in a dimly lit room.
Notably, our pick of the best TV in 2024 is the Samsung S95D, an OLED model that achieves a maximum 1,868 nits peak brightness. While it’s not the brightest screen this year, it’s still the most impressive. And Sony managed to chip away at OLED’s supremacy in 2024 with the introduction of the Sony Bravia 9, a mini-LED model that uses the company’s new XR Backlight Master Drive with High Peak Luminance tech to deliver both high peak brightness and deep, well-defined blacks.
A brighter future for TVs
While 2024 was the best year for TV brightness yet, that crown is inevitably going to 2025 when it comes. Universal Display, a developer and manufacturer of OLED, has figured out how to make more power-efficient displays, which could reduce manufacturing costs at the same time as increasing brightness – counteracting how expensive high-end, high-brightness OLED TVs can be.
This innovation works by increasing the power efficiency of blue pixels specifically, which have proved harder to optimise compared to their red or green counterparts. This means that a TV screen can deploy fewer layers of blue pixels for the same brightness output as existing screens. Less layering, less cost, more light – and we may start seeing gains from this technology as soon as next year.
TCL also has plans to bring out a 2025 mini-LED TV – an update to this year’s QM851G – reportedly with a 6,500-nit brightness that’s approaching direct daylight and would knock even our brightest 2024 screens to the curb.
Of course, brightness isn’t everything for a new TV: you also need to consider its processor, resolution, audio, format support, smart platform, and naturally the price you’re getting all that for. And there are benefits to a TV with a limited light output, especially when excess blue light is known to impact sleep quality.
But for sheer impact, and the improvement of contrast on our TV screens, the steady march of brightness is something to be celebrated.
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