Best TVs For Bright Rooms That Are Sunshine Ready (2024)

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Jon Martindale

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Forbes Vetted

Nov 18, 2023,12:01pm EST

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If you have a living room or home space with a lot of large windows that gets lots of afternoon sun, it can be tricky to find a TV that's bright enough and still looks good. It can be done, though. The best TVs for bright rooms come from big names and show a great picture no matter the time of day—and some of them can even operate in direct sunlight.

Our favorite bright room TV is the Samsung QN90C, which has a great QLED display to light up a room by itself. In brighter rooms, though, you can watch your movies in gorgeous detail with all the curtains open. The Samsung The Terrace goes even further, working well outdoors with its strong IP rating and weatherproofing. Don't want to spend more than a few hundred dollars? The TCL 6-Series provides a solid balance of a well-lit picture and price. Whatever you're looking for, though, here are the best TVs for bright rooms you can buy.

Best TV For Bright Rooms Overall: Samsung QN90C
Best TV For Bright Room Movie Watching: Sony X93L
Best Outdoor TV For Bright Rooms: Samsung The Terrace
Best Affordable TV For Bright Rooms: Hisense U8K
Best OLED TV For Bright Rooms: LG G3 OLED

Best TV For Bright Rooms Overall

Looks Great Even With All The Curtains Open

Samsung QN90C

Best for:Enjoying movies and games with bright, brilliant colors.

Best TV For Bright Rooms For Movie Watching

The Best Mini LED Picture You'll Find

Sony Bravia XR X93L

Best for:Enjoying movies and games in a bright room.

The Sony Bravia X93L takes a slight step back from the peak brightness of our top model, but enhances picture quality—particularly with lower resolution content—to make it the best TV for watching movies or HDR TV shows in a sunny living space. It's great for gaming, with a high refresh rate, unique Sony features for PlayStation 5 integration and plenty of HDMI 2.1 ports for connecting whatever gaming systems you want.

The X93L has an incredibly high peak brightness that's over 1,500 nits. That means that no matter how bright your room, you'll be able to enjoy this TV with its full picture quality. Use it to watch older, lower resolution content too, and it will use its impressive upscaling and color enhancement algorithms to make DVDs and FHD Blu-rays look better than ever before. The only caveat with this model is that it's bigger sibling, the X95L, is marginally better, but its availability is so poor at the time of writing that the X93L is the more attractive model.

Pros:

Very bright, great for bright rooms
Supports Dolby Vision and HDR 10
Image adjustment algorithms really boosts older content

Cons:

Not quite as bright as our top model

Best Outdoor TV For Bright Rooms

Looks Great Even In Direct Sunlight

Samsung The Terrace Full Sun 65-Inch

Best for: Enjoying your favorite movies and shows even on a bright day.

This is the brightest TV that Samsung makes that’s also designed for your patio or backyard space. Since it's designed to sit in direct, bright sunlight and still be viewable, it needs to have a high brightness so you can see all your content. It does the job well, with a brightness that can reach in excess of 2,000 nits, this is a TV that looks amazing whether it's in direct sun, in a bright room or anywhere else besides. It has full weatherproofing with an IP55 rating and is rated for full-sun exposure, should you want to use it outdoors, although it will also work great in a covered area (There's also a partial sun version if you want to save some money and don't need that additional protection). Either way, you get a super bright TV with a beautiful 4K QLED panel and a durable design. The Terrace has full array local dimming and impressive black levels which help make HDR shine, and it supports HDR10+ for dynamic metadata support in compatible shows and films.

The screen can withstand up to six hours of sunlight at up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and it automatically dims if the temperature rises anywhere beyond that. Although its weather rating is strong, we'd suggest you purchase a dust cover in case of hail or lightning storms. Best to play it safe with a TV that costs this much.

Pros:

High brightness
Strong protections against weather and high temperatures
High refresh rate and low input lag for gaming

Cons:

Expensive

Best Budget TV For Bright Rooms

Flagship-TV Specs For Under $1,000

Hisense U8K

Best for: Enjoying a high-end display on a budget.

Best OLED TV For Bright Rooms

As Bright As It Gets For OLED

LG G3 OLED

Best for: Enjoying the contrast and responsiveness of OLED in a bright room.

The LG G3 isn't just the latest generation of LG's flagship OLED TV range, it's the brightest OLED TV ever made. With the ability to sustain a brightness as high as 1,500 nits in HDR mode, and several hundred in SDR mode, this is an OLED TV that can display a gorgeous picture in a bright room. While it still looks its best in a darkened room, where you can really appreciate the deep black levels OLED delivers, this TV looks stellar no matter where you put it. With its vivid colors, it makes everything from movies, to TV shows and games absolutely pop off the screen.

It comes with four HDMI 2.1 ports for connecting a range of consoles and media players, has a high refresh rate and a typically low input lag thanks to the reaction speed of OLED-driven pixels. It also supports VRR through Freesync and G-Sync technologies, so whatever graphics card or console you hook up to it, you can enjoy tear and stutter-free gameplay.

Pros:

All the quality of OLED with high brightness
Great gaming features
Incredible picture quality

Cons:

Not quite as bright as the top Mini-LED models
Expensive

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How We Chose The Best Bright Room TVs

To find the best TVs for bright rooms, we combined our first-hand knowledge of a wide range of TVs, with the opinions of our fellow tech writers here at Forbes, thoughts of colleagues throughout the industry and robust research.

We've have hands-on time with some of these models in person, so well know their build quality and features, and we've performed extensive comparisons between third-party and user reviews, to find the TVs that everyone says are great; not just the professionals.

You can rest assured, these are the best bright room TVs you can buy in 2023.

Why Trust Forbes Vetted

The Forbes Vetted tech team is well-versed in all things digital, having written hundreds of articles in the category. A couple of staffers, including Dave Johnson, our deputy editor, have even authored a number of books on the subject. The tech vertical is overseen by Rebecca Isaacs, the consumer tech and electronics editor at Forbes Vetted.

Jon Martindale, the writer of this story, is a regular Forbes Vetted tech contributor. He has bylines in digital publications including Digital Trends and PCGamer, and formerly ran his own PC hardware review website. We’ve collectively conducted extensive research and testing on the best bright room TVs to create this extensive list.

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