Club Benefits
The best 8K TV is the Samsung Neo QN990F, and not just because it's one of the only 8K TVs you can buy right now. The picture quality is genuinely incredible and the display is glare-free so you can put it in any room, even one bathed in sunshine.
Normally, I'd also recommend a cheaper option, but you're kind of limited at this resolution. There was a time when 8K was going to take over the world, but now Samsung is one of the only brands even producing an 8K TV.
And since there are very few 8K TVs in the wild, producers don't go to the expense of filming 8K. The QN990F side-steps this problem, as the TV can upscale 4K content to 8K, so you can get impressively crisp and mesmerisingly detailed pictures.
If that's what you need from your new TV, then the Samsung Neo QN990F really is the best 8K TV you can get. For everyone else, one of the best TVs (in 4K) will be a better option, and get you more for your money.
The best 8K TV available right now
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The Samsung QN990F isn't just the best 8K TV, it's one of the most striking TVs too. It's incredibly thin and has barely visible bezels that make it look as though the screen extends right to the edge of the display. Combined with the impressively high resolution visuals, it's one of the most immersive experiences you can have at home.
But this isn't an 8K TV for watching 8K films, TV shows and sport. You won't find media natively in 8K, so the real skill of the QN990F is the way it handles upscaling 4K content to 8K resolution. Usually I'd tell you to avoid AI features (as they're not very good) but my exception would be here, as the upscaling is AI-powered and tremendous.
The only thing to be wary of is using the upscaling on HD movies and TV shows. With the lower resolution, there's less information for the TV to work with, and it ends up filling the gaps with detail that looks artificial and draws your attention away from the scene. So it's best to reserve the upscaling for 4K content.
But even without that, there's an almost absurd amount of customization you can do to the image with Samsung's Vision AI software. You can tweak pretty much every metric imaginable, and this can have mixed results if you experiment too much. We found it best to use the presets and let it do its job without too much interference.
Curiously, we found that this model, released in 2025, is significantly less bright than the 2024 QN9000D. Given the levels we're talking about here, towards the upper end, you're not going to have a catastrophic issue with the brightness, but it's odd to find that a newer model has lower performance.
Speculating here, it could be because Samsung believes the newly-bolstered Vision AI means that you don't always need a brighter image. It could be that you need better contrast, improved dimming, or better detail in dark blacks, and that's where the AI can jump in. And we found that it worked well when watching 2006's "Miami Vice."
Plus, the QN990F has inherited the same glare-free display tech as the Samsung S90F. We put the TV in a bright room, positioned near a ceiling-mounted chandelier to increase the likelihood of reflections. Yet, the QN990F had no problem with that setup at all, and dispersed all the ambient light almost entirely.
My main criticism of the QN990F is its price. At several thousand dollars, it's a lot to invest in a TV. It handles 4K and 8K content brilliantly, and the glare-free screen is exceptional. But it has a 120Hz refresh rate (lower than the 144Hz or 165Hz found on many premium sets), and good, but not fantastic audio performance.
Ordinarily, these aren't things to write home about, but at this price, you'd expect the top-of-the-range performance. If you need a TV capable of upscaling to immaculate 8K, then this is absolutely the best 8K TV out there. But I suspect you'd get more for your money choosing one of the best TVs or one of the best OLED TVs instead.
- Read our full Samsung QN990F review
How we test the best 8K TVs
We test 8K TVs the same way we test other TVs; we watch them. Okay, fine, how we test TVs is more involved in that, but you get the gist.
Before we sit down to watch movies, TV shows and play games, each model is delivered to our lab for specialized benchmark testing. We use industry-grade equipment to do this, including a colorimeter, pattern generator, spectroradiometer and calibration software.
We do this because it helps us compare between each TV's performance, but also because it means we can check our measurements against what the manufacturer claims, just like we do when testing a phone's battery life. Plus, the data is useful when seeing what's changed in the latest version of a TV.
When we've captured all the brightness, color accuracy and contrast data in our spreadsheets, it's time to put the TV through it's real world test; what's it like to actually use and watch the TV?
We watch movies, TV shows, and sports, with colorful, cartoonish films to see how it handles these vibrant worlds, the dark and shadowy realms of TV shows like "Stranger Things" (or any Christopher Nolan movie) and live sports (which needs the TV to handle contrast well at a good refresh rate).
Combining these real world experience with our testing data means we can more readily recommend a TV for a particular use case. Brightness results are one thing, but it's not until you get it in a real, sunlight-bathed room where you can see how it actually handles brightness, and whether any anti-glare coating helps.
FAQs
Which brands make 8K TVs?
As you may have noticed from our roundup, there's only one pick — a Samsung TV. The company is pretty much the only brand now with 8K TVs you can buy in North America, following the departure of LG and Sony from this resolution in 2025.
Why aren't there more 8K TVs?
The short answer to why there aren't more 8K TVs is because no media is available in 8K.
Of course, this is kind of true whenever a new technology rolls out, where bleeding edge tech (i.e. the newest and most expensive models) pushes producers to film in that resolution, leading to greater demand for the TVs.
We saw this over the past two decades with the expansion of HD and then 4K TVs and content. But 8K TVs have been a bit different. Partly, it's the cost; making an 8K TV is expensive, so it'll set you back a lot.
But also the equipment and processes to actually film anything in 8K barely exist. We're at the point now where 4K is becoming the standard resolution, but most streaming services don't even offer everything in that, and it's usually the most expensive subscription tier.
4K began rollout in 2012, but didn't become common until the late 2010s, so we've had less than a decade with this resolution. Many films and TV shows from decades past have been (or can be) remastered in 4K, but the lower resolution of older media means it's missing the information needed to bump up to 8K.
As I mentioned about the Samsung QN990F, it also struggles with lower resolution upscaling for the same reasons. So the vast majority of recorded media won't look good upscaled to 8K, and no one wants to (or can) film in 8K. With so little demand for 8K content, most manufacturers have dropped their 8K TV ranges as a result.
