Although Sony’s X900F LCD TV series came out in 2018, they’re very much still available. And handily, their relative age means they’re still available at massively reduced prices. In fact, if you snap one up now, you’re truly getting an upper mid-range big-brand TV for the price of an entry level one.

The key to their success is that despite their affordability, they use direct LED lighting with local dimming—like the Samsung Q8FN. There aren’t as many ‘dimming zones’ as you get with the Q8FN, but having this sort of backlight configuration at all is remarkable for such an affordable gaming TV.

The set does partner its still great pictures, though, with a respectably low 30ms of input lag if you use its game preset. And the bottom line is that no TVs as affordable as the X900Fs are going to be perfect. All that really matters here is that the X900F is comfortably the all-round best TV for gaming in its price range.


If you're looking to buy a 55" TV on a budget, look no further than the TCL 6-series. This is 2018's model, but that means you can often find it on sale but, quite frankly, it's a bargain at full price. While the earlier TCL models suffered from poor build quality, and several screen flaws, the 6-series solved these issues to deliver an ace Roku-powered TV. What's more, it makes a great gaming TV too. While it doesn't have the low, low response rate of $1000+ panels, it manages between 6ms-12ms, which is above average for TVs of this size and price. What's more, it has full-array local dimming, which means the contrast ratios are good (the blacks, especially, are nice and deep).

Where the TCL suffers is in the colour range, which is merely average for 4K TVs of this budget. While it has decent HDR, that can't quite mask the lower vibrancy of images, although (to be honest) you're unlikely to notice much of a difference unless you're playing the most colourful of games. At 55", it's less noticeable too, although if you're looking to go 65" you need to work out if you're ok getting a TV that does blacks and dark tones better than colours and light tones. For the price, however, it's very tough to fault the TCL 617. It even comes with voice control if you're into that sort of thing.

You can even drop down to 43" if you're looking for a 4K TV as part of a PC set-up / second room gaming rig. The contrast remains as impressive, and it's obviously a little cheaper too.

How we test: gaming TVs

In figuring out what makes the best gaming TV, we have focused on four main performance elements.

First, input lag: how long a screen takes to render image data received at its inputs. This is critically important to gamers. Input lag was checked with HDR, SDR, 4K and HD game feeds to check there were no major anomalies between different sources (there weren’t with any of our selected TVs).

We checked input lag in two ways: using a Leo Bodnar input lag measuring device, and photographically, where we split a video feed of a running timer into the TV we’re testing and a reference BenQ gaming monitor, take a photo, and then see how far the time reading on the TV was behind the reading on the reference monitor.

The photographic method enables us to spot potential moment to moment variations in input lag that some TVs suffer with, and which the Bodnar device doesn’t provide.

Next, we considered contrast. How well a display is able to reproduce the darkest and brightest parts of a gaming image is essential to a truly satisfying game experience. Especially now many games are supporting the expanded brightness range associated with HDR. As part of the contrast assessment, we also looked for issues such as flickering brightness levels and backlight ‘blooming’ around bright objects.

As part of the contrast testing, we measured each TV’s peak light output using an X-Rite i1 Display Pro light meter. This lets us know how far a set can go towards achieving the sort of extreme brightness levels HDR gaming is capable of.

Colour performance was also carefully scrutinized, paying attention to the richness, balance, consistency, freedom from striping noise and authenticity of the tones being shown. Pretty much all HDR material also carries a wider colour range than the old standard dynamic range format we’ve been stuck with for so many years. This can have a transformative effect on game graphics, making them look both more lifelike and more dramatic/three dimensional.

Finally, we looked a motion and sharpness. We mention these together as to some extent they’re related. If a TV suffers badly with judder or blurring when you’re panning around in Fortnite or hurtling into the scenery in Forza Horizon 3, that’s going to affect the picture’s sense of sharpness significantly. We also studied ultra-detailed but relatively static 4K game graphics looking for signs of softness, shimmering noise, ever-enthusiastic edge-enhancements, grain or any lack of depth and three-dimensionality that might be caused by a TV being unable to deliver enough color finesse to ‘match’ the number of pixels in the screen.