If you happen to’ve perused What Hello-Fi?’s homepage this week, you’ll have observed it’s been a reasonably large one for our staff of house cinema and audio reviewers. It’s because, in addition to overlaying Amazon Prime Day 2we additionally revealed the primary batch of What Hello-Fi? Awards 2023 Finest Purchase winners on Wednesday.
And whereas I like each class in our awards, as I watched the ocean of feedback move into my electronic mail inbox and our social media feeds, one explicit class caught my eye – Finest TV.
This was as a result of it was apparent that lots of you, our pretty readers, have robust opinions on the winners and had been, in most situations, politely questioning our reasoning.
That’s already superior, however what made me genuinely smile and obtained the cogs in my mind shifting was that each one of you made superb factors.
“What concerning the Panasonic MZ2000? I’ve the older mannequin and it’s the very best I’ve seen for accuracy!” wrote one reader.
In the meantime, one among my real-life pals, who additionally occurs to be a tech journo, piped in with, “LG fanboy, staff Sony for all times,” referring to our choose of the very best gaming TV.
And whereas the latter could not sound terribly articulate, and is outright unsuitable, it does showcase fairly how aggressive and fascinating the TV market is in the mean time.
By that, I wish to be clear that I’m not referring to the continued struggle between the Micro Lens Array (MLA) and second-generation QD-OLED panel applied sciences right here. We’ve already gone into plenty of element about that battle in previous options. As an alternative, what I’m speaking about right here is how, whereas each TV producer appears to be nailing one facet of TV image high quality, we’re but to see one ship your complete bundle.
This obtained me pondering, “What would the right OLED seem like in 2023”?
The extra I thought of this query, the extra I realised the reply is definitely fairly easy, based mostly on my expertise serving to take a look at this yr’s units. Particularly, it will mix the very best components of Panasonic, LG and Sony’s present TVs.
Let me break down the recipe I’m pondering of.
To start out with, we’d throw in Panasonic’s “because the director supposed” accuracy. We’ve made no secret of the truth that, based mostly on our testing, that is an space Panasonic has been a transparent chief in for fairly a while. We’re nonetheless reviewing the MZ2000, which I had the pleasure to take a look at final week, so I’m going to as a substitute reference our expertise with the older Panasonic LZ2000 right here. Learn our assessment and it’ll inform you the whole lot you have to find out about why Panasonic is so good on this explicit metric:
“If it’s steadiness and authenticity you most worth in a TV, you’re going to like the Panasonic LZ2000. Every little thing we watch, from take a look at favourites Blade Runner 2049 and No Time To Dieto TV reveals The E-book Of Boba Fett and Gradual Horsesplus the brilliantly foolish Foo Fighters horror movie Studio 666has an easy correctness to it,” wrote our TV skilled, Tom Parsons, in his LZ2000 assessment.
Subsequent, I’d throw in Sony’s sensible movement dealing with. I’ve detailed the significance of movement dealing with in a earlier characteristichowever the brief model is that it is a metric that defines how effectively a TV offers with shifting components of the image. Sony is at present the very best of the very best on this space. Most lately, this was showcased on the Sony A80Lwhich we reviewed earlier this yr.
Right here once more, our testers had been amazed fairly how a lot better the Sony did than competing units, going as far as to report:
“Sony’s excellence on this space [motion handling] lets you apply extra smoothing and sharpening than you possibly can with different TVs with out disagreeable shimmer or the cleaning soap opera impact being added.”
Lastly, I’d throw in LG TV’s superior connectivity and gaming options. Learn any of our current OLED TV opinions and also you’ll discover we’ve a standard gripe with just about each non-LG set – they solely have two HDMI 2.1 inputs, one among which normally doubles as an eARCsomewhat than the 4 you get on C and G-series LG OLEDs.
Why’s that annoying? It’s as a result of Dolby Atmos requires an eARC enter, and subsequent to each next-generation console or PC requires an HDMI 2.1 connection to run at framerates over 60Hz. So if in case you have PS5 and Xbox Sequence X and Atmos soundbar, you received’t be capable to join them unexpectedly on most units.
Think about how nice it will be if we might get an OLED that mixes all these strengths to create the final word house cinema expertise! I’m definitely excited on the prospect, which is why I penned this characteristic. Let me know when you agree, or share your excellent OLED TV recipe on What Hello-Fi?’s social channels.
MORE:
These are the greatest OLED TVs we’ve examined
Take a look at our hand-chosen picks of the greatest gaming TVs
We element the greatest Dolby Atmos soundbars at present out there
