Looking for a reasonably-priced TV? We’ve reviewed all this year’s best TVs under £500, including 55-inch 4K TVs with QLED technology. Copy link. twitter. facebook. whatsapp. Rewind just a few years and the best TV under £500 would have been a 32-inch ‘bedroom telly’ with fairly pedestrian features. But thanks to the trickle-down effect of tech, high-end features that used to be touted by Sony, Samsung and LG televisions costing over £2,000 can now be found on much more affordable options at big-screen sizes.
“Premium 4K TV technology has started to become more commonplace in these televisions,” explains Katrina Mills, category lead for TV and audio visual at John Lewis. “This has been driven by the customer, who generally wants the crisp and rich picture quality previously seen in much larger TVs, without the need to bring home something that simply doesn’t fit into the domestic setting,” she adds.
Although OLED TVs, where every pixel emits light independently, remain well outside the £500 budget, QLED screens, which use a metallic filter to enhance the picture quality, are becoming more commonplace on more affordable televisions. For this review, we only considered 55-inch TVs, big enough to be a main, living room TV. While we consider these the best 55-inch TVs under £500 you can buy right now, you can of course find some excellent performers at smaller sizes. The best cheap TV is sometimes just the one that fits on your bedside table.
