I've searched high and low and there's a drought of good cheap TV deals

Summer is here, which means many of us are taking time off to jet off to parts unknown or enjoy a decent staycation.

If the latter is your plan, then you may well be thinking about upgrading your TV to catch up on that series you’ve been putting off binging, or movie you added to your wish list weeks ago, but have somehow not quite gotten around to watching.

And while we'd all love a top end, premium OLED TV, with times as they are, you may not have the oodles of cash required to get one spare and be locked into the sub-£500 / $500 "cheap" TV market, as a result.

Sadly, if that sounds like you, after searching high and low for solid deals to recommend, then I have some bad news.

Specifically, that now is a pretty terrible time to be shopping for a cheap TV, at least if you want to go for one we know is good.

Every single one of the sets we have fully tested and recommend in our best cheap TV guide have been cheaper in the not too distant past.

On top of this, based on my near two decades of experience covering yearly AV sales events, my 'deals Spidey sense' is telling me that most will be back on sale very soon.

For the sake of brevity, let's take the three most popular recommendations in our buying guide, the 50-inch Amazon Fire TV Omin QLED, 65-inch TCL P755K and giant 70-inch Sharp GK4245K as examples.

Running in reverse order, the giant Sharp is the best option right now. You can buy the Sharp for £480 on Very, which for a 70-inch TV is pretty reasonable.

Sharp GK4245K: was £490 now £480 at very.co.uk

It's not perfect, but the Sharp GK4245K is the only "cheap" 70-inch TV we've tested and recommend, offering picture quality that's beyond any other set its size and price.

View Deal

The downside? That’s only a £10 saving on the set’s average price.

If you want a giant 70-inch TV for less than 500 bucks, it’s pretty much the only option we recommend and a pretty good bargain, even at full price, hence our reviewers’ conclusion that the set was great value "thanks to both an excellent Tivo smart system and an overall level of picture quality that really has no business turning up on such an affordable home cinema-sized TV".

So, even though just £10 off is not really a great "deal", you won't find a better 70-inch TV without spending a lot more, based on our testing.

Next in line is the four-star TCL C755K. At the moment you can buy the 65-inch C755K for £499 at Electric Shop. That’s actually £31 more expensive than the price we reviewed it at in October last year. As a result, it’s currently a very hard TV to recommend despite its solid picture quality for the money,

Finally, the five-star 50-inch Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED sitting at the top of our buying guide as the overall recommendation we give most people is available on Amazon for £459. This is at first glance a pretty good deal, with the unit carrying a £659 RRP.

But, as you can see in the below price tracking chart, the set hasn't sold for its “full” price for more than a day or two since July last year.

We’ve also seen it drop as low as £399 numerous times over the past few months, including at the end of April. So, the team and I are 99 per cent sure it’ll drop even lower very soon.

That means unless you really need your new TV now, you will almost certainly be able to save some money if you’re willing to exercise a little patience.

The only word of solace I have for those that can’t wait is that, though it’s not its best price ever, for less than £500 the 50-inch Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED remains a great value TV, especially by our hallowed performance-per-pound metric – so much so that I even bought one for my parents last year.

Though, like all cheaper sets, it’s not perfect, offering distinctly grey blacks and a non-gaming friendly 60Hz max refresh rate, it remains the best performer at its price. As we said in our review:

“Budget TVs are hard to get right, but the 50-inch Omni QLED succeeds where others have failed thanks to a consistent, considered performance and impressive feature set.”

So you won’t be buying an outright lemon, even at its current price – it just won't be a great "deal".

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