New TV Technology Coming in 2025
TV brands like Hisense, LG, Samsung, and TCL are building more sets with artificial intelligence, ever larger screen sizes, and improvements in both LCD and OLED TV technologies.
Anyone shopping for a new TV this year will encounter a few developments that could affect their purchase. Perhaps the biggest change will be the growing number of TVs touting new artificial intelligence (AI) features. You’ll also see more jumbo-sized TVs that push screen sizes to new limits—100 inches and beyond—as well as an expanded lineup of lifestyle TVs that display artwork and photos when you’re not watching TV.
You’ll also see the usual level of improvements in display technology. We expect more TVs to have the required peak brightness to do justice to high dynamic range, or HDR. We’re also seeing more sets with Mini LED backlights with local dimming, which can help LCD/LED sets provide better contrast and black levels. This can make the picture more vibrant and lifelike.
And OLED TVs are evolving, too, with some sets reaching higher-than-ever peak brightness levels. In addition, a few wireless flagship TVs won’t need to be physically connected to external components by HDMI; instead, these devices will connect to a separate box, which will communicate with the TV through WiFi.
AI Is Suddenly Everywhere
If you see a TV company that’s not boasting AI in its sets this year, it’ll be unusual; it was a big part of almost every TV brand’s announcements at CES.
Artificial intelligence in TVs isn’t new; TV manufacturers have used it to help improve picture quality for several years, mainly for upscaling lower-resolution content to a TV’s native 4K display. It has also been used to improve TV audio processing, often by matching TV sound to the listening environment.
Those capabilities will improve in 2025. For example, AI backed by powerful processors can recognize what type of content is being played and make adjustments on the fly to reduce problems like motion blur during fast action, or banding, which is when visible horizontal lines appear instead of smooth transitions of color. AI can also improve tone mapping in HDR, where the TV adjusts the dynamic range of the content to match the TV’s ability to display it.
AI can also help with audio, letting a TV recognize the type of content being played and optimize the sound for it. Other uses include upmixing stereo sound to multichannel audio, or helping make dialogue clearer.
But in 2025, AI moves beyond these areas to enable more intuitive interaction with your TV. For one thing, it will help you get more targeted program recommendations. Some LG sets will also be able to recognize your voice and then customize the home screen for each viewer with content suggestions and settings based on your preferences and viewing habits. (The company is also renaming its Magic Remote; it will now be called AI Remote.)
Photo: Samsung Photo: Samsung
Samsung’s smart TV remotes will have a separate AI button you can click for info about the show or actors without having to leave the program. Even more impressive, in my opinion, Samsung TVs will use AI to translate captions in up to seven languages in real time. Another AI trick, part of something called Samsung Food for TVs, uses AI processing to identify food shown on TV and then recommend recipes. It can also track Instacart food orders placed on smart devices that have the Samsung Food app.
Samsung will also be using AI in its TVs to serve as central hubs for devices in its SmartThings ecosystem. For example, a feature called Home Insights can give you real-time mobile alerts about your home, including safety notifications, when you’re away. Another option, called Pet and Family Care, lets you use the TV’s camera and speakers to check in on pets, or detect a family member falling or a break-in.
This year, we think we’ll be seeing more TVs that use the Google TV smart system, and the company says it will be rolling out its Gemini AI assistant in those sets to enable natural conversations with the TV, even when it’s off, and to deliver AI-compiled summaries of news events.
Both LG and Samsung say they are including access to Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant in their smart TVs, though it’s not yet clear just how it will be used. LG claims that Copilot will help its TVs “understand conversational context and uncover subtle user intentions.”
One open question: How much will the expanded use of AI increase the amount of user data being collected—and shared—by TV brands?
TV Screens Will Get Bigger
Last year we started seeing TVs as large as 98 and 100 inches become more widely available, at surprisingly low prices. For example, two of our best Black Friday TV deals were a 98-inch TCL set priced as low as $1,500, and a 100-inch Hisense set for $1,600.
While 65-inch TVs will remain the most dominant screen size in 2025, jumbo TVs are expected to grow in market share again this year.
“The sales of [extra-large] TVs have really taken off because the prices for those panels has dropped considerably,” says Paul Gagnon, vice president and industry adviser for consumer technology at research firm Omdia. “But more importantly, we’ve also seen that the competition has really intensified, particularly with some Chinese brands that have come in with very aggressive price points. As a result, some of the legacy premium brands have responded, and retailers are putting more attention on these sets.”
Most of the TV brands we’ve spoken to will have a good number of models with screens 85 inches and larger. Last year the giant TVs we saw tended to be entry-level models, so they could hit more budget-friendly prices. That might continue in 2025, but you’ll also see more jumbo-sized models in step-up series that offer better performance along with higher prices.
Photo: TCL Photo: TCL
One example is TCL’s first giant-screen model, the 98-inch 98QM6K, which will cost $3,500 when it becomes available in a few weeks. (A 65-inch model will cost less than $1,000.) It’s the least expensive model in the company’s new step-up Precise Dimming Series, which features quantum dots and a new Mini LED backlight technology, described below. Samsung says it will offer a 100-inch TV in its QN80F series, and a 115-inch model in its flagship QN90F series, both higher-end Neo QLED sets that don’t yet have a firm price.
Last year Hisense had two lower-priced 100-inch sets, which sold for less than $2,000. The models highlighted at CES, though, include 110- and 116-inch sets in a new super-premium UXN series, which use a new RGB backlight technology. The company will also have a 136-inch MicroLED TV, which will have an OLED TV-like TV technology that uses LEDs that can generate their own light, so no backlight is needed. (There’s more info about these, and other new TV technologies, in “New TV Tech Will Be Expensive,” below.)
At CES, we even saw a 110-inch outdoor TV from Sylvox that can stand up to inclement weather. While we imagine it won’t be easy to mount a 110-inch TV enclosed by a heavy exterior casing, the larger obstacle to owning one will likely be its $60,000 price.
More Mini LED TVs and Brighter OLEDs
In typical fashion, in 2025 companies will be touting tech advances to improve both picture and sound in TVs. Most though, will be iterative improvements, such as LG’s G5 OLED TVs, which use a new brightness booster technology that replaces the Micro Lens Array (MLA) tech used in previous flagship models. Samsung’s top sets get a new anti-glare technology that can greatly reduce reflections.
We’ll also see more TVs with faster than 120-hertz refresh rates. At CES there were a good number of mainstream TVs with 144-Hz refresh rates, and Samsung said its flagship OLED and Neo QLED sets this year will be 165-Hz models. Faster refresh rates are beneficial when playing fast-paced content such as gaming and quick-moving sports because it can produce significantly smoother motion with less blur and ghosting.
More sets this year will include Mini LED backlights, which can help LCD-based sets improve blacks and contrast. That’s because in an LCD set, the backlights are always on, and the pixels in front of them open and close to let through the right amount of light for each scene. But in very dark scenes, some light always manages to leak through. This can make black tones look gray, and it can create halos around light objects that appear against a dark background.
OLEDs don’t have that problem because there’s no backlight. Individual pixels emit their own light and can be turned off completely, so dark areas of the picture can be truly black.
One way to improve this is by using full-array LED backlights, where LEDs are arranged across the entire back of the panel rather than just on the edges as in many TVs. That’s combined with a feature called local dimming, where the LEDs are divided into zones that can be separately illuminated or darkened. The result is that dark areas look darker, and you’re less likely to see halos.
Mini LEDs take that technology a step further by shrinking the size of the LEDs, so you can pack thousands of them behind the LCD panel. They are also divided into dimmable zones, but because the LEDs are smaller, there can be a much greater number of zones.
This year we’ll see improvements in that technology. For example, TCL, which had the first Mini LED TV we ever tested, is touting a new type of Mini LED backlight that uses a new, smaller lens setup that offers more precise light control. It’s also able to be placed much closer to the panel’s light diffuser—which spreads light across the panel—to reduce halos around objects. And it’s using a new, more efficient LED chip that TCL says can significantly boost brightness.
New TV Tech Will Be Expensive
There are always a few eye-catching TV displays at CES that get our attention but are either too expensive for the average consumer or are still in the concept stage. But they’re an interesting glimpse at what may lie out on the horizon.
For example, Hisense debuted two new TV technologies, TriChroma LED TV and MicroLED TV. Offered in a 116-inch screen size, the 1116UX TriChroma LED TV uses an RGB local dimming technology. In simplified terms, it’s an LCD TV that uses thousands of red, green, and blue Mini LEDs to produce colors, rather than a white or blue backlight and a color filter to create color. Each of the small backlight zones can be adjusted for both brightness and color.
The company claims this approach will produce a richer, wider gamut of colors than conventional LCD/LED TVs, with higher peak brightness levels (up to 10,000 nits) and minimal halos.
Photo: Hisense Photo: Hisense
Hisense is taking it even one step further with its first MicroLED TV, a TV technology Samsung has offered (at very high prices) for several years now.
With MicroLED sets, there’s no longer a need for a separate backlight; every pixel is made up of tiny red, green, and blue LED subpixels that give off their own light. That means each pixel can be turned on or off, just like in an OLED set, so these TVs promise great contrast, deep blacks, and richly saturated colors.
MicroLED TVs can get much brighter than OLED TVs, and because they use inorganic materials they should have longer lifespans and be free from burn-in, which is when a TV retains an image onscreen even after it switches to a different scene. Hisense will offer MicroLED TVs in 136- and 163-inch screen sizes. Prices weren’t discussed, but expect them to be high.
Samsung has sold true MicroLEDs for a few years now, but it also showed a new concept called RGB MicroLED TV. It appears to be very similar to Hisense’s TriChroma TV in that it uses a separate backlight made up of red, green, and blue LEDs. Not much information about it was available, but these two quasi-MicroLED sets seemed designed to bridge the price gap between conventional Mini LED TVs and true MicroLED TVs, since they’ve so far been prohibitively expensive for consumers.
LG captured a lot of attention with its OLED T TV, a sleek, transparent OLED TV that you can see through when it’s not displaying a show or movie. There are two modes: transparent and opaque, the latter using a slide-up film to provide better contrast when needed. It’s also wireless, with connections made via a separate external box, much like Samsung’s new wireless OneConnect box. The 77-inch 4K TV was first shown last year, but it now has a price: $60,000. Samsung also showed a transparent MicroLED set, with a bezel-less design on three sides so it looked like a glass frame.
This year, in fact, both LG and Samsung will offer wireless TVs in some premium mainstream models.
Lifestyle TVs Proliferate
TV makers are launching more competitors to Samsung’s The Frame TVs, which turn into art/photo displays when you’re not watching TV. Samsung’s new model, called The Frame Pro, is a Neo QLED TV that offers better picture quality than the company’s other models, thanks to the use of quantum dots and Mini LED backlights. However, Samsung’s implementation is unique, in that the Mini LEDs are aligned only along the bottom row of the screen, not across the entire display as we’ve seen in every other Mini LED TV we’ve tested. Samsung says the new TV will still have local dimming, along with a maximum refresh rate of 144 Hz—up from 120 Hz—which should appeal to gamers. Connections are now made via a wireless OneConnect box, which sends video and audio to the TV via the latest WiFi 7 standard.
The company will also continue to sell the Serif, which has a unique I-shaped frame, and the Sero, a unique model that can rotate between landscape to portrait orientation to display mobile content, in 2025.
Photo: Samsung Photo: Samsung
Hisense and TCL will continue selling their own lifestyle sets, which debuted last year. TCL’s NXTFrame TV is a QLED model, as is Hisense’s CanvasTV, though the latter gets a 144-Hz refresh rate. In addition, Google is partnering with both companies to use proximity sensors that automatically kick the sets into a mode that shows helpful info—such as top news stories, weather, and traffic—when it senses you enter the room.
LG offered a look at an updated version of its portable StanByMe model. Called the StanByMe 2, the 27-inch touchscreen TV features a rechargeable battery in the display rather than the wheeled stand, so it can be detached from the stand and used separately with one of the planned accessories, including a shoulder strap that doubles as a wall mount. This model—still a concept—has a higher 1440p resolution, plus the ability to be charged via USB C rather than a wall outlet.
All these TVs have low-reflection matte screens that give digital artwork the textured look of real paintings, a choice of frames, and access to art stores for additional choices.
NextGen TV Keeps Growing
As we noted above, more TVs will support NextGen TV; the term refers to the next generation of over-the-air TV signals, technically called ATSC 3.0, that you can pick up with an antenna. The one exception is LG, which told us that none of its TVs this year will include an ATSC 3.0 tuner because of a patent dispute with one of the licensors.
This technology can carry a lot more data than the older ATSC 1.0 standard, so broadcasters will be able to offer ultra-high definition (4K) programs and movies with HDR—something not possible with regular over-the-air broadcasts. So far we haven’t seen any 4K broadcasts; we are receiving 1080p signals with HDR.
A big advantage is that the new standard is IP (internet protocol)-based, so it can carry internet content alongside traditional TV broadcasts. With Next-Gen TV, you may also be able to get TV shows and other content on smartphones, tablets, and even in moving vehicles. Broadcasters are also promising improvements in emergency and weather alert systems.
Right now, about 75 percent of the country has access to NextGen TV signals. To receive these new TV signals, though, your TV will need an ATSC 3.0 tuner because these new signals won’t work with the tuners found in almost all current TVs. (You can use your current antenna, however.) But at CES we saw a good number of external tuners, starting around $80, that you can use to get NextGen TV signals on TVs that lack an ATSC 3.0 tuner. We expect prices to come down even further later this year.
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