After months of searching, we have a new value-for-money Mini LED TV champion

(Image credit: What Hi-Fi? / Netflix, Our Planet II)

The Mini LED TV market is always a battleground, with big name players including Hisense, TCL, Samsung, Sony and Panasonic all pushing hard to dominate the space.

But during the latest skirmish, after weeks of testing, it was a plucky new product from Amazon that impressed me, and the wider home cinema reviews team, enough to carve a space in our best Mini LED buying guide.

Why? The answer’s pretty simple, it performed the best at its price when we ran it head-to-head with its rivals in our dedicated viewing rooms.

This is a big deal as trying too hard is a key issue I’ve experienced and documented reviewing Mini LED TVs many times before.

To catch you up, many either boost contrast to the point dark detail is lost in a bid to overcome Mini LED sets’ inability to match OLED TV’s perfect back levels.

Or they go to the other extreme and get too focussed on showing off their main selling point – their incredibly high peak brightness levels. Here they raise the backlight too high, making images lose dynamic range and look a little flat.

Watching Blade Runner 2049 during the opening dark scene, reds looked under-represented, with Sapper Morton’s skin in particular looking a little flat. The same was true when we tested the TV with our It 4k Blu-ray. Georgie’s iconic yellow rain coat didn’t pop out of the otherwise grey backdrop as it should.

Second, while it is the best of its kind, it’s still a four star product. We’d also note that the margin between it and the Hisense U7N is very small. The only reason the Amazon beat it is its more mature light control, with the Hisense suffering from noticeably more bloom during our checks – this is where there’s a halo around bright sections of the picture directly next to dark segments.

But, those caveats aside, the Amazon is the best value Mini LED TV money can buy right now and one we’re thoroughly happy to recommend, especially to buyers still on older basic LED sets.

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Alastair is What Hi-Fi?’s editor in chief. He has well over a decade’s experience as a journalist working in both B2C and B2B press. During this time he’s covered everything from the launch of the first Amazon Echo to government cyber security policy. Prior to joining What Hi-Fi? he served as Trusted Reviews’ editor-in-chief. Outside of tech, he has a Masters from King’s College London in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion, is an enthusiastic, but untalented, guitar player and runs a webcomic in his spare time.

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