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Lee Neikirk is a writer focused on AV gear. He has tested and calibrated more than 300 displays and once gave an outdoor TV a shower. tv nightstand
After completing a new round of testing, we’ve added the Samsung S95D to Other good OLED TVs and added the LG G4 and Sharp FS1 to the Competition section.
OLED TVs are the best-looking TVs you can buy, delivering extremely high image contrast, rich colors, smooth motion, and much better viewing angles than LCD TVs offer. They carry a higher price, but they’re a worthwhile upgrade for anyone who is truly passionate about movies or gaming.
We recommend the Samsung S90C Series because it provides awesome picture quality at a relatively competitive price.
This TV delivers stunning picture quality and great features for a relatively reasonable price. But it does not support Dolby Vision HDR.
This OLED TV is an excellent choice, especially if you want Dolby Vision HDR or a screen size smaller than 55 inches. But it’s not as bright or colorful as our top pick.
This TV takes the superb QD-OLED picture quality of our top pick and adds more brightness, better video processing, and superior onboard audio. But those improvements come at a high cost.
Buy an OLED TV if you’re willing to spend more to ensure that movies, sports, TV shows, and video games look their absolute best.
You’ll find fewer OLED TVs for sale than LCD TVs. We looked for the best combination of performance, features, and value.
We use measurement equipment and Portrait Displays’s Calman software to evaluate crucial TV metrics such as contrast and color accuracy.
Today’s OLED TVs are almost as bright as LCD TVs, but LCD TVs are still much more affordable.
This TV delivers stunning picture quality and great features for a relatively reasonable price. But it does not support Dolby Vision HDR.
Samsung’s S90C Series combines an OLED panel with quantum-dot color to produce outstanding picture quality. (Read our TV buying guide to learn more about the tech terms we use here.) The S90C offers dazzling HDR imagery, zippy responsiveness during gaming, and sleek, durable build quality. This TV feels especially futuristic, too, as it comes equipped with a solar-powered remote control and built-in cloud-gaming features.
We found two downsides. First, Samsung TVs don’t support the Dolby Vision HDR format, which is a dealbreaker for some people. Second, the 83-inch model, the largest in the series, doesn’t utilize the QD-OLED panel, so it may not stand out as much from other OLEDs in performance.
Samsung has a new version of the S90C for 2024: the S90D. However, we’ve decided not to test it or recommend it due to Samsung’s decision to manufacture the TV with both QD-OLED and traditional WRGB OLED panels and sell both under the same moniker. You can read more in the Competition section.
This OLED TV is an excellent choice, especially if you want Dolby Vision HDR or a screen size smaller than 55 inches. But it’s not as bright or colorful as our top pick.
For a long time, LG’s C Series has been the go-to pick for most OLED buyers because it hits the sweet spot between price and performance. This year’s LG C3 Series remains an excellent choice, especially if you’re looking for a 42- or 48-inch screen size. But the arrival of the Samsung S90C makes the value proposition of this LG OLED a little less clear-cut.
The C3 uses a standard OLED panel, as opposed to QD-OLED, so it is neither as bright nor as colorful as our top pick. Plus, its webOS smart-TV platform feels a little long in the tooth.
However, the C3 supports Dolby Vision HDR, which some shoppers consider a mandatory feature, and overall it’s still one of the best OLED values of 2024, delivering top-notch picture quality and all the extras you might expect from a premium TV.
This TV takes the superb QD-OLED picture quality of our top pick and adds more brightness, better video processing, and superior onboard audio. But those improvements come at a high cost.
If money is no object, to get the absolute best in OLED performance, the Sony A95L is the best-looking TV of 2024. Although our other picks are great all-rounders, the A95L truly excels at reproducing content as the director intended. If you’re a stickler for cinematic accuracy, this is the OLED to buy.
This TV’s peak brightness is on par with the top OLEDs from Samsung and LG, but it offers better color accuracy, better upscaling of non-4K content, and better video processing to produce a cleaner image. It also has better built-in speakers, though it could still benefit from a soundbar or surround system.
The A95L isn’t perfect, but its shortcomings are minor: It has higher input lag and fewer HDMI 2.1 inputs than our other picks, and a few hitches in the menu software occasionally marred the user experience. But if perfect picture quality is what you’re after, the A95L is the OLED TV for you.
I’ve been reviewing TVs, computer monitors, and other displays and home theater gear for over a decade. I have ISF Level III training, and I’ve tested and calibrated hundreds of TVs—from premium $8,000 flat panels to $100 doorbusters—using hardware such as light and color meters, pattern generators, and input lag testers. I’m equally comfortable testing displays in pitch-black labs and in real-world home environments.
If you’re picky or passionate about picture quality—if you find yourself wishing that shadows or letterbox bars were truly black (rather than a kind of charcoal gray) when watching movies or playing games in the dark, or if you’re frustrated by your TV’s lack of vivid yet realistic colors—you might consider building your living room or home theater around an OLED TV.
You can read more about OLED’s performance advantages over LCD in this article.
OLED TVs have long been considered the highest-quality displays by hardcore videophiles. New developments may make one a good choice for your home.
The major drawback of OLED TVs is that they don’t come cheap: Even the smallest, most humbly appointed models will still run you at least $1,000 at this writing. Typically, you pay around 10% to 20% more than you would for an LCD TV with otherwise similar specifications. At screen sizes bigger than 65 inches, the price disparity is even larger.
You have fewer OLED TVs to choose from in comparison with LED TVs. The main manufacturers are LG, Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony (although Panasonic OLEDs are not readily available in the US). In deciding on which TVs to test, we looked for the series that seemed likely to offer the best combination of performance, features, and value.
To evaluate OLED TVs, we used a combination of objective measurements, subjective viewing, and side-by-side comparisons. Our measurement equipment consisted of Portrait Displays’s Calman Ultimate software, a C6 HDR colorimeter, and a VideoForge Pro signal generator. For subjective testing, we used source material from streaming apps, Blu-ray discs, contemporary gaming consoles, and HDR benchmark discs. Read more about Wirecutter’s TV testing methodology.
No matter what type of TV you’re looking for, you can trust that we’ve done our homework to help lead you to the right choice.
For those who have no idea where to start in the TV buying process, we explain the tech terms and answer the big questions.
This TV delivers stunning picture quality and great features for a relatively reasonable price. But it does not support Dolby Vision HDR.
Samsung’s S90C Series is the best OLED TV for most people because it checks off all the boxes for picture quality, features, design, and affordability.
This OLED TV is brighter and more colorful than its competitors. The S90C boasts awesome brightness for an OLED TV, and the combination of an OLED panel and quantum-dot (QD) color technology (in most screen sizes) results in gorgeous color production. Maintaining color purity at high brightness levels is something that OLED TVs have traditionally struggled with, which is one reason QD-OLED TVs have so much potential to look amazing.
The S90C provides this improved color performance in addition to the many impressive performance qualities that OLED technology already offers, namely perfect black levels, smooth motion, and much wider horizontal and vertical viewing angles than LCD TVs give you.
The S90C is bright enough to work well even in a room with lots of ambient light or windows, though it isn’t quite as bright as our upgrade pick. But unless you absolutely need maximum brightness—and are willing to pay more to get it—the S90C is ideal for the majority of viewing environments.
During testing, I measured almost perfect accuracy on the S90C while it was in Filmmaker Mode in both SDR and HDR. You can expect rich colors, realistic skin tones, well-preserved low-light detail, and excellent motion quality, especially for content mastered at 1080p or higher.
It offers a variety of options for picture customization. By default, the TV comes set to Intelligent Mode, a proprietary Samsung setting that automatically punches up the picture, adding brightness and color to whatever you’re watching or playing. Though this mode can be overwhelming in a dim or dark room, it takes full advantage of the S90C’s 1,000-plus nits of brightness and 99% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, the color space used for Ultra HD/HDR mastering.
Intelligent Mode doesn’t aim for total accuracy, but it’s a great way to watch whatever you want while still eking out all the QD-OLED panel performance you’ve paid for. Our measurements revealed that this mode still maintains a good degree of accuracy, especially in color temperature (the neutrality of white and grayscale elements). We suspect that the average viewer will be fine leaving this mode on most of the time and will appreciate the set-it-and-forget-it approach.
If you want to do more tinkering, turning off Intelligent Mode enables a wide variety of more traditional picture modes, including the most accurate mode, Filmmaker Mode, plus all of the controls you might need to fully calibrate the TV to SDR or HDR standards.
Low input lag makes for responsive gaming sessions. The S90C is capable of 4K resolution at up to 144 Hz when connected to a PC, and it achieves very respectable input-lag numbers (I measured it at a hair over 9 milliseconds) while playing at 4K 60 Hz.
The S90C is equipped with the latest iteration of Samsung’s Game Bar, a gaming-centric overlay that provides a variety of functions and information relevant to gamers. Because the TV has four HDMI 2.1 inputs, you can reliably connect all kinds of modern gaming devices without worrying about running out of ports.
Even if you don’t have any consoles to plug in, Samsung’s built-in cloud-gaming feature lets you play games right on the TV from Xbox Game Pass, Amazon Luna, and Nvidia GeForce Now. To take advantage, you still need to have a subscription to those services and to connect a Bluetooth controller to the TV, but getting what’s essentially a cloud-gaming device in addition to a TV just ups the S90C’s value further.
The Samsung Smart Hub experience is way better this year. In 2022, Samsung redesigned its smart-TV platform to enhance the focus on streaming and cloud-gaming services, creating two full-screen hubs (labeled “Media” and “Game”) where related source devices and apps are automatically allocated—so, for example, your Blu-ray player lives alongside Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, while your PlayStation lives alongside cloud-gaming apps and Twitch.
It was a welcome redesign with one notable flaw: On some TVs, it taxed the processing and was rather sluggish. The latest version of Smart Hub is much snappier, and the only consistent issue I’ve found is getting the TV’s built-in Amazon Alexa support to reliably respond to my voice commands. You can also use Samsung’s own Bixby voice control.
The design is reliably sturdy. Samsung’s first-generation QD-OLED panel was a bit flimsy. Our test unit wasn’t falling apart, but the panel was prone to slight warping or bending along the horizontal axis. Fortunately, Samsung seems to have listened to feedback and strengthened the materials for the second-gen QD-OLED models. This is especially good news because the S90C is available in larger screen sizes—77 and 83 inches—where such reinforcement is crucial.
This TV has plenty of connectivity options, namely four HDMI 2.1 inputs, two USB ports, an Ethernet (LAN) port, an RF input for cable or satellite hookup, and an optical audio output.
The remote is sleek and eco-friendly. For a few years now, Samsung has been pairing its midrange and higher-end TVs with an eco-friendly remote that doesn’t use disposable batteries. Instead, a large reflective surface on the back of the remote uses sunlight or room lighting to keep the remote charged (though you can also charge it via USB-C if necessary). In all my time with many Samsung TVs over the past few years, I’ve never once seen one of the solar-powered remotes run out of juice. It’s a great addition all around.
The Samsung S90C doesn’t support Dolby Vision HDR. Samsung continues to refuse to pay to license Dolby Vision HDR, widely regarded as the best-looking HDR format. The S90C still offers support for the HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG formats, and I can confirm that HDR10+ content (the closest in quality to Dolby Vision) looks excellent on this TV. But most Blu-ray discs and all Windows-based gaming sources, Xbox consoles included, use Dolby Vision.
We don’t consider this omission a dealbreaker because on a TV of this pedigree, even standard HDR10 looks brilliant, especially with Intelligent Mode enabled. But if you’ve invested in a lot of Dolby Vision–compatible discs or source devices, you might consider the LG C3 instead.
The 83-inch model doesn’t have quantum dots. Perhaps the strangest detail about the S90C Series is that Samsung tacked on its largest size, the 83-inch version, well after launching the original 55-, 65-, and 77-inch models. The 83-inch model doesn’t use a QD-OLED panel as the smaller sizes do; instead it employs a WRGB panel sourced from Samsung’s main rival in this category, LG.
This isn’t exactly a flaw, but it’s a fly in the ointment: Because the 83-inch S90C uses an entirely different panel technology, I can’t be certain whether its performance metrics exactly match those of the 65-inch model I tested, though other aspects—design, smart features, ports—should be identical. PC gamers should also note that the 83-inch size doesn’t support refresh rates up to 144 Hz as the other sizes in the S90C Series do.
The screen lacks a light-polarizing film. Without that film, the S90C can sometimes display shadowy areas that don’t look as dark when you have ambient light in the room. I found this to be a minor problem. Most of the time, when you’re watching the relatively bright screen in a brighter room, your eyes already can’t resolve shadows dark enough for you to consistently notice the brightening or “floating” black levels.
Where it becomes an issue is when the TV is in a darker or more filmic mode (such as Filmmaker Mode), but you have enough light in the room to trigger the ambient-light reaction. It might be a pain in a very particular viewing environment, but we don’t think it’s a dealbreaker.
This TV is not the best choice for displaying older content. During our side-by-side comparisons with the LG C3, the S90C didn’t upscale sub-1080p content, such as DVDs or older video games, as well. In a world where 4K resolution has become mainstream, this is unlikely to be a huge problem for most folks, but it’s worth keeping in mind if you have a big DVD collection or you love retro games. The S90C’s superior brightness and color in comparison with the C3 might not be worth paying for if most of your content looks noisy.
If you’re watching content in a normally lit or brighter room, we recommend putting the S90C in Intelligent Mode, if it isn’t set to that already, and turning the Picture Clarity setting off to eliminate the soap-opera effect across all your content. You do sacrifice some accuracy in using Intelligent Mode, but it’s a great way to equalize the TV’s luminance and saturation across content types, HDR or not.
When you’d rather watch your TV in a dim or darkened environment and see content at its most accurate, turn Intelligent Mode off and choose Filmmaker Mode. You should still turn Picture Clarity off, but the mode should otherwise be optimized from the get-go for maximum accuracy and detail preservation.
This OLED TV is an excellent choice, especially if you want Dolby Vision HDR or a screen size smaller than 55 inches. But it’s not as bright or colorful as our top pick.
If you’re dead set on having Dolby Vision HDR, or if you want a terrific OLED TV that’s smaller than 55 inches, you can’t go wrong with LG’s C3 Series. While the C3 is a bit dimmer than our top pick, Samsung’s S90C, and lacks that model’s color-enhancing quantum dots, it still boasts all of the hallmarks that make OLED TVs so great, including massive contrast, vivid colors, and almost perfect viewing angles.
It offers less brightness and color volume than our top pick. Our measurements revealed that the C3 is dimmer than the S90C in every picture mode, but the difference isn’t terribly significant until you get into HDR levels of brightness.
For example, in Filmmaker Mode, the C3 averages a bit less than 200 nits of brightness for SDR video, while the S90C sits around 250 nits. But in that same mode in HDR, the C3 struggles to hit 700 nits, while the S90C exceeds 1,000 nits. This isn’t a major blow to the C3 in terms of its overall picture quality, however—this TV just doesn’t fare as well when competing with sunlit windows or bright floor lamps.
In our testing, the C3 produced commendable results in color saturation, overall color accuracy, and gamma tracking. But because this TV lacks quantum dots, it does a worse job than the S90C of maintaining color vivacity when those colors need to be especially bright.
Those color differences aren’t only visible in HDR content: Even with both TVs in Filmmaker Mode, Indy’s face in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom looked ruddier on the S90C than on the C3. Admittedly, it’s a minor difference, and you’d never be anything but wowed by the C3 unless you were watching it side by side with a QD-OLED TV.
It’s compatible with more AV formats than our top pick. If you still watch a lot of movies on disc or have a complex home audio setup, the C3 may suit you better due to the long list of audio and video formats that it plays nice with.
Most UHD Blu-ray discs and many streaming services utilize Dolby Vision HDR as their dynamic metadata format of choice, and the C3 has the edge over the S90C in being able to play content in that highest-grade HDR format. The C3 isn’t compatible with HDR10+, but that’s a much less common format right now.
This TV also does something else that the S90C doesn’t do: It supports the DTS audio formats, which are another staple of Blu-ray discs and DVDs.
Speaking of, the C3 is the more solid choice for viewing lower-quality content as on DVDs, or when you’re streaming older content or playing older video games, because it does a better job of cleanly upscaling those sources to display on its 4K panel. Ironically, this improved handling is likely a result of the C3’s naturally smaller color volume compared with the S90C, as the older content isn’t being “stretched” as much as it is on a brighter and more colorful TV.
The S90C is better for HDR, while the C3 is better in dark rooms. Despite the C3’s Dolby Vision support, I found while watching HDR from a variety of sources that the roughly 300-nit brightness difference between the S90C and the C3 had a notable effect, one more significant than you might expect.
One of the most popular HDR benchmarking discs features a set of recordings of people with different skin tones, meant to show off a TV’s ability to accurately present what are often complex and subtle colors and hues. This test also demonstrates the way in which a TV handles light reflecting off the models’ hair and skin. In a side-by-side comparison, the S90C’s handling of this reflecting light was night-and-day better than the LG C3’s; the results looked more impressive and generally more realistic, especially when both TVs were competing with ambient lighting.
If you’re less concerned about Dolby Vision support specifically and just want the best-looking HDR for the price, I have to recommend the Samsung S90C Series.
On the other hand, because the LG C3 Series’s screen has a polarizing filter, something the S90C lacks, this TV isn’t as affected by ambient light in darkened rooms. If you know that you like to watch mostly non-HDR movies in an environment with more traditional theater-style lighting, the C3’s more stable black levels make it the better choice.
Its smaller sizes are great for desktop gaming. The C3 measured just a hair more input lag than the S90C, but you’d only notice the difference if you were playing games on these two TVs at the same time. The C3 is still an excellent choice for gamers overall, especially because its 42- and 48-inch size options are so much easier to place on a desktop.
PC gamers should note that whereas the S90C supports 4K resolution at up to a 144 Hz refresh rate, the C3 is limited to 4K at 120 Hz. It’s still a dream to play games on, however, and LG’s Game Optimizer mode—like Samsung’s Game Bar—is a helpful addition that allows you to monitor and tweak ample game-facing settings on the fly.
You don’t get the cloud-gaming services that you get with the S90C, but if you already have consoles or a PC to hook up to the C3, that shouldn’t be an issue.
LG’s webOS smart-TV platform feels outdated. Though smart-TV platform usage tends toward personal preference more than objective fact, I have found myself favoring Samsung’s Smart Hub over LG’s webOS platform for the past couple of years. I find that, at least organizationally, webOS isn’t as well optimized.
This problem is exacerbated for the C3 by LG’s inclusion of the chunky, plastic Magic Remote, which uses infrared to cast a cursor to the screen and feels much more like a toy than the sleek, solar-powered remote that Samsung includes with the S90C.
That’s not to say that webOS is lacking in content or customization—it’s as zippy as ever and has every app you could hope to use. But while I find myself willing to browse around and explore other smart-TV interfaces, the combination of ads, obscure shopping channels, and cursor-based navigation in webOS is off-putting.
LG has OLED TV design down to an art. Especially in the smaller sizes, LG’s use of carbon-fiber materials in the C3 nicely complements the famously thin OLED screen, making the C3 seem almost portable in comparison with the average flat-screen TV, yet it also feels sturdy.
The TV’s lightness actually compounds the clunky feeling of the remote control, which hasn’t had a design makeover in years.
Despite its minimalistic airs, the C3 fits in a robust port selection, including four HDMI 2.1 inputs, three USB 2.0 ports, an optical audio output, Ethernet (LAN), and an RF input for cable or satellite connection.
The C3 doesn’t have an equivalent to the S90C’s Intelligent Mode, but you can access Filmmaker Mode whether you’re watching SDR or HDR content, and that’s your best bet for accuracy. As for other settings, if they’re not already off for some reason, you should disable Super Resolution, Noise Reduction, MPEG Noise Reduction, Smooth Gradation, Real Cinema, and TruMotion most of the time.
If you want to use Filmmaker Mode for accuracy but eke more brightness out of the TV, go into Advanced Settings, turn off Auto Dynamic Contrast, and make adjustments to the Peak Brightness setting.
The Game Optimizer mode should kick on automatically when the TV detects a gaming source, but you may have to turn the mode on manually when connecting a PC to the TV for gaming.
This TV takes the superb QD-OLED picture quality of our top pick and adds more brightness, better video processing, and superior onboard audio. But those improvements come at a high cost.
The Sony A95L is the TV to get if you want the best that money can buy. It takes the stellar QD-OLED picture quality of our top pick and adds higher brightness, a more robust speaker system, better video processing, and more accurate out-of-the-box color.
This is the best-looking OLED TV overall. Like our top pick, the Sony A95L is equipped with a QD-OLED panel, meaning it uses quantum dots to increase the saturation and vivacity of its colors. But the A95L offers higher brightness than our other picks, boasting around 1,400 nits with HDR video.
While most higher-priced OLEDs excel in contrast and color performance, the A95L takes it a step further. During testing, I directly compared the A95L with LG’s G3 and Samsung’s S95C. They were all fairly even in terms of brightness and basic performance, but the A95L proved the superior TV in crucial areas like color-temperature accuracy, upscaling non-4K content, and other video-processing functions.
Most high-end OLED TVs excel when playing the latest 4K HDR content, but the A95L proved to be the best choice for displaying older, lower-bitrate, or non-4K content. For example, when displaying Mad Men in 1080p on Blu-ray disc, the LG G3 and Samsung S95C showed some off-tint banding at the edges of lamps, while the A95L’s better processing helped it avoid such aberrations.
Finally, the A95L claims an edge during HDR content thanks to a built-in ability to adjust tone mapping between a “dark room” setting that favors shadow gradation and a “bright room” setting that favors brightness. When displaying Iron Man in a room with the lights on and windows open, the other higher-end OLEDs still sometimes lacked the needed brightness, but changing the A95L’s tone-mapping setting made it easier to watch in a bright room.
You could get by without a soundbar. The A95L uses a technique called Acoustic Surface audio, where the speakers are arranged behind the screen and play audio through it. A good soundbar would still sound better, but generally the A95L sports a better balance between bass, midrange, and treble frequencies. And it has better separation of sound elements, like dialogue and background music, compared with TVs that have more-standard speaker setups. Even compared with the LG G3, which has a 4.2-channel speaker setup, the A95L sounds better.
You can install the A95L’s wide-set feet at two height positions: one to keep it closer to the tabletop and one that gives more space to accommodate a soundbar. Just note that with either position, the feet are set all the way to the edges of the screen, so you’ll want to make sure your TV stand is wide enough.
Google TV is an excellent smart platform. Google TV is our favorite smart-TV platform, and its implementation here was generally snappier and/or less replete with ads compared with the proprietary smart platforms used by Samsung and LG. This TV also supports Apple AirPlay 2 and HomeKit.
There were moments when the A95L’s menu software was sluggish. Though this was a small nuisance to encounter on such an expensive TV, it wasn’t a dealbreaker.
This isn’t the best OLED TV for gamers. The A95L has higher input lag and fewer HDMI 2.1 inputs than our other picks, as well as both of the flagship OLED TVs from Samsung and LG. It’s still a fine TV to game on overall, but our other picks are better for dedicated gamers, unless they need maximum brightness.
Unlike with most TVs, almost all of the A95L’s picture modes are accurate and well calibrated out of the box. Although this TV lacks a Filmmaker Mode, we found that (whether in SDR or HDR) the Professional picture mode is best for a very dim or dark room, while the Cinema mode delivers a lot of accuracy for a brighter room.
When watching HDR, use the HDR tone mapping option in the picture menu to select “gradation preferred” in a darker room or “brightness preferred” in a brighter room.
If you have a particularly bright room: The Samsung S95D may be better equipped to compete with bright-room light sources such as sunny windows and standing lamps than any OLED TV to come before it. Technically, the S95D is brighter than our upgrade pick (peaking a little above 1,600 nits for HDR), and it also boasts a slightly larger color volume, meaning it can boost its light and color presentation to fend off incoming ambient light without creating major picture inaccuracies. But the S95D’s real secret weapon is its matte screen. Whereas most TVs use a glossy or semi-glossy finish, the S95D—much like Samsung’s Frame—uses a matte finish that does an excellent job of dispersing and reducing glare from ambient-light sources.
However, the S95D still falls behind our upgrade pick, the Sony A95L, in certain performance areas: It isn’t nearly as accurate without special calibration, it lacks Dolby Vision support, it has worse onboard speaker performance, and it can’t quite keep up with the A95L’s video and motion processing. On the other hand, the S95D is slightly more affordable in particular sizes, and it’s the better choice if you watch a lot of TV during the day.
Sony revealed its 2024 TV lineup in April, among them the new Bravia 8 OLED. The Bravia 8 uses a standard OLED panel (meaning it doesn’t have a QD-OLED panel) and is available in 55-, 65-, and 77-inch screen sizes. Sony says that the Bravia 8 is marginally brighter than last year’s A80L and features a more premium finish but is not meant to compete with our upgrade pick, the A95L, which will continue to be sold throughout 2024. We hope to get the Bravia 8 in for testing soon.
Although we’ve tested and dismissed LG’s higher-end G4, we still plan to test the B4 and C4, both of which look to be promising entries in the budget and midrange price categories, respectively.
Samsung’s new S85D is the company’s main competitor to LG’s C Series, our current runner-up. The S85D uses panels from LG, so we expect that its primary differentiation from the LG C4 will be in terms of design, software, video processing, and some gaming features. We hope to test the S85D later in the year.
After concluding testing on LG’s G4 OLED, we think buyers looking to spend that amount of money will be better served by our upgrade pick, the Sony A95L. We conducted extensive testing on the G4 alongside the new Samsung S95D. Like the S95D, the G4 boasts four HDMI 2.1 inputs, low input lag, highly accurate picture modes, and very high HDR brightness for an OLED TV—over 1,600 nits. However, the S95D is the better choice for gamers and fares better in a bright viewing environment, while the A95L remains the top choice if you want a premium, Dolby Vision–capable OLED TV that boasts advantages such as better onboard audio and sub-4K upscaling. The G4 is an excellent TV, but it doesn’t stand out amongst the OLEDs in this price range.
We have chosen not to test the Samsung S90D (the 2024 version of our top pick) because of Samsung’s decision to manufacture the series with both QD-OLED and WRGB OLED panels, effectively making it a toss-up as to which technology you get upon purchase. We strongly believe that the inclusion of quantum dots is the primary strength of Samsung’s OLED line, and with no way to predict which kind of panel buyers will receive when they purchase the S90D, we do not feel comfortable recommending the series this year.
Upon testing Sharp’s FS1 Aquos OLED TV, we found it to be overpriced for what it offers. It’s one of the very few OLED TVs available that are equipped with the Roku smart TV platform, and it’s a rather solid performer overall, but it falls well short of our top pick in core aspects such as peak brightness and color volume, despite the fact that it costs several hundred dollars more at this writing. Unless you’re especially committed to having a Roku TV, you’d be better served by one of our picks.
We tested and dismissed the following TVs in 2023 or earlier:
After comparative testing with the Sony A95L, we dismissed Samsung’s S95C and LG’s G3 as potential upgrade picks. All three of these premium TVs offer better brightness than our top pick and runner-up pick, but the Sony offers more upgrades across the board—with better built-in audio, better video processing, better color volume than the non-quantum-dot G3, and better panel durability than the S95C (plus Dolby Vision support).
Sony’s A80L Series is the company’s closest 2023 competitor in price to the Samsung S90C and LG C3, yet it still costs a couple hundred dollars more. Reliable sources report that it isn’t as bright as our picks, it’s a worse choice for gamers due to higher input lag, and it offers only two HDMI 2.1 inputs (whereas the S90C and C3 each have four).
We dismissed the 2023 LG B3 Series from consideration because it was only marginally more affordable than our picks but offered generally worse picture quality, an older processor, fewer screen sizes, and only two HDMI 2.1 inputs. We also dismissed LG’s 8K Z3 OLED and wireless M3 OLED series from consideration, because 8K and wireless operation do not make those series worth such a high price tag in comparison with our picks.
We tested LG’s smaller OLED Flex TV as a gaming monitor, and you can read about it in our guide to the best gaming TVs.
Panasonic introduced a new flagship OLED TV, the MZ2000, but like all Panasonic TVs it isn’t available in the US. So we did not test it.
We previously dismissed budget-conscious OLED TVs such as the Skyworth XC9000 and the Vizio OLED65-H1, and we haven’t heard any news from those companies about refreshed models.
This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell and Grant Clauser.
Lee Neikirk is a senior staff writer reporting on TVs at Wirecutter. He has been testing and reviewing AV gear since 2012 and is an ISF-certified TV calibrator. When he’s not fussing over pixels, Lee is either jamming on a guitar, playing video games, or driving around endlessly trying to find beach parking.
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