I was hoping to snag a nice TV this Black Friday to upgrade from my current (discontinued) Panasonic 50″ plasma television. This Panasonic was one of the first things I bought when I first moved to Seattle many years ago and it’s served me well for both movies and videogames. Plasmas aren’t sleek and they eventually became commercially unviable, but their image quality is still great, even compared to what we have today.
The majority of TVs out there right now are LED and OLED screens (plus QLED, if you’re into that sort of thing). In looking for an upgrade, I wanted a TV that met the following conditions:
- Significantly larger than my current TV (65″ and up)
- Superior image quality to my current TV
- Less than $1000
Turns out it was difficult to find a television that met all of these conditions. While OLED and high-quality LED prices for great TVs continue to decline, they still aren’t all that cheap.
I spent a lot of time researching which models would be best for my needs (Digital Trends and RTings were invaluable resources), so I thought I’d share some of my findings. Here are the TVs I seriously considered this Black Friday/Cyber Monday. I’ve linked to the 65″ models.:
TCL 6-series [Amazon, Best Buy]: This budget TV offers some great bang for your buck. It also features a Roku OS, which is super easy to use and contains lots of great services built in from the start. Unfortunately it’s been plagued by inconsistent panel quality, which produces clearly visible vertical bands in some models. Even at $800 for the 65″ model, I just couldn’t trust that this would deliver a better image quality than my current device.
Vizio P-Series [Amazon, Best Buy]: Vizio’s P-series delivers some great image quality, with some sophisticated full array local dimming. On the downside, these TVs have an OS that is very sluggish and difficult to use. On net, though, I actually wanted to buy one of these for about $900 but my local Best Buy ran out before I could pull the trigger. There’s also a P-Series Quantum that offers some advantages over the P-Series, but it is significantly more expensive and difficult to find in stock anywhere.
Sony X900F [Amazon, Best Buy]: Overall, a great TV with a responsive OS that’s well-reviewed (it also looked great on the Best Buy display wall) but its biggest downside is price. At around $1600 for a 65″ version, you’re getting up into OLED territory. And if you’re going to spend that much, why not just go all the way?
LG C8 [Amazon, Best Buy]: LG produces the best OLED panels in the industry, so it’s no surprise that their 8 series is considered the holy grail of OLED TVs. OLEDs produce some of the most gorgeous images available to consumers today, although I am nervous that I would experience screen burn-in while playing videogames. But the biggest downside is this TV is still pretty expensive. As of this writing, a 65″ C8 is still $2600. That’s just too high of a threshold for me, especially for a product that will likely be significantly cheaper in a year or two. Still, I’ll be saving up my ducats for this one and hoping that a killer deal eventually comes through.
Other TVs I considered not buying: I thought about getting the Samsung NU8000, which was also on sale this weekend,but having owned Samsungs at other times in my life I’ve been pretty unimpressed with their performance in dark rooms and their viewing angles, and it didn’t seem like the Nu8000 did a particularly great job of solving either of these issues. Samsungs are also still relatively expensive, given what you get.
The Vizio E-Series also seemed really appealing on a price level, but it doesn’t have as advanced local dimming as the P-Series and I wasn’t convinced that it would deliver better image quality than my existing Panasonic plasma.
Conclusion: There are a ton of great TVs out there, but I think I’m going to have to wait a little while longer before ones I want drop to a price that I consider to be palatable.
Am I missing any obvious solutions? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.