Should You Buy a Walmart Onn TV?
The sets are inexpensive, but they don't rival TVs from the top brands for performance
When you shop through retailer links on our site, we may earn affiliate commissions. 100% of the fees we collect are used to support our nonprofit mission. Learn more.
With many TVs now at their lowest prices in a year, you may be thinking about buying a new set. If so, Walmart’s Onn TVs may catch your eye.
As Walmart’s in-house electronics brand, Onn is one of a handful of private labels that make TVs and other products sold by just one retailer. Other examples include Best Buy’s Insignia TVs and soundbars, Amazon Basics cables and accessories, and Target’s Heyday products.
Test Results for Walmart Onn TVs
The three Onn TVs currently in our TV ratings include the 75-inch Onn 100044717, 65-inch Onn 100012587, and 43-inch Onn 100012584.
We also tested the 65-inch Onn 100071705 and Onn 100071708, which are no longer available. That first set had very good overall picture quality, and the other had excellent HD and 4K picture quality, but both but fell short in areas such as HDR and sound quality.
While often among the least expensive options in their screen sizes, Onn TVs tend to be somewhat inconsistent when it comes to performance.
As you can see below, several models score well in terms of overall picture quality, with one model earning top marks for high-definition and ultra-high-definition picture quality.
None, however, come close to earning top Overall Scores; most sets wind up in the lower half of our ratings for their respective screen sizes. One reason is that none of the tested models provide a compelling HDR experience. HDR is a feature that can produce brighter, more colorful images with greater contrast, closer to what we see in real life. Like many of the lower-priced TVs in our ratings, the Onn sets don’t do an effective job with HDR, mainly because they can’t get bright enough.
In addition, most Onn sets we’ve tested have middling to below-par sound (a soundbar can help with that), and a majority have fairly limited viewing angles, which is common with LCD sets.
Even the sets that do fairly well for overall picture quality often have shortcomings, such as black levels that are just okay and some backlight non-uniformity. That means you may see brighter cloudy areas in very dark scenes or in the black bars when you watch a letterboxed movie. None of the Onn sets we’ve tested so far have newer, more advanced features such as Mini LED backlights with local dimming, which can help in these areas.
Among the sets that didn’t fare as well, we saw additional problems, such as below-average color accuracy, a lack of fine detail, and below-average upscaling of regular HD content to the set’s higher-resolution 4K screen. That’s a task TVs handle routinely these days. On some Onn sets, the edges of objects appear jagged rather than smooth.
Our most recent tests on Onn TVs are fairly consistent with what we found with Onn sets from the past, though these TVs seem to be improving. One advantage of the newer 4K models is that they support HDR, even if they don’t do a great job with it. Some earlier Onn models we tested didn’t support HDR at all. The TVs actually degraded shows and movies with HDR, making images look washed out.
One last thing worth noting: Walmart recently announced it was acquiring smart TV maker Vizio. It’s not yet clear how the two brands will exist within Walmart’s TV lineup going forward.
Bottom Line
Given what we know, should you buy a Walmart Onn TV?
The prices will be hard to overlook, especially during major shopping events such as Walmart’s Deals for Days (usually in the summer, about the same time as Amazon Prime Day) or the run-up sales to Black Friday. And many Onn TVs can deliver decent overall picture quality, provided that great HDR performance isn’t a priority. In addition, many use the Roku smart TV platform, making it easy to access a lot of streaming services. So less finicky viewers looking for a bigger set at a bargain price might consider one of the better-performing Onn TVs.
But if you want top-notch picture quality and the ability to really experience HDR, you should look beyond Onn TVs to one of the major TV brands. You will probably have to spend a bit more, though many of those sets go on sale during those big shopping events, too.
If you’re thinking about buying an Onn TV, two of the three models below might be worth considering.