For 10 years, OLED TVs have been regarded by videophiles (and by us) as blue-ribbon investments that are worth their steep prices if you value the highest-quality movie or gaming experience. Yet we’d suspect that many casual TV shoppers might not know about OLED TVs or why they’re so highly regarded. The conditions are ripe for that to finally change in 2022. With more OLED TVs coming from more manufacturers in more screen sizes, this could be the year OLEDs begin to move away from videophile territory and become a viable option for more people.
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The history of flat-panel TVs has been written by two fundamentally different technological approaches to creating a TV image: transmissive displays versus emissive displays.
Transmissive displays operate by shining a backlight array through a liquid crystal element. You might know them by their more common names: LCD TVs or LED TVs. Crucially, the light- and color-producing parts of LCD/LED TVs are functionally and physically separate layers. I like to think of the liquid crystal and backlight as the meat and cheese on a sandwich, respectively.
In emissive displays, those functions aren’t separated. Each pixel (or picture element) produces its own light and color, so there’s no need for a backlight array. As you might have guessed, OLED TVs are emissive displays. For those who remember the brief reign of plasma as the must-have TV tech, plasma TVs were also emissive displays.
This independent pixel operation (independent from a backlight array and independent from every other pixel) allows emissive displays to greatly maximize contrast and produce richer colors. For example, when an OLED TV needs to display true black in a scene, it just turns those pixels off, whereas an LCD TV needs to find a way to block or turn off the backlight in that area of the screen. This is, in a nutshell, why OLED TVs are special. The ability to produce a true black on such a fine level increases the TV’s contrast (or the difference between the darkest and brightest parts of the image). The high level of contrast in an OLED TV can help your favorite movies and shows look downright jaw-dropping, which makes it an especially good choice to pair with high dynamic range (HDR) content.
As a bonus, because there’s no backlight array, OLED TVs tend to have excellent viewing angles, especially compared to LCD/LED TVs. This means you can watch them pretty comfortably from way off to either side.
Price has been the biggest barrier keeping most folks from having an OLED TV in their living rooms. OLED TVs have consistently carried higher price tags than high-performance LCD TVs—especially at screen sizes larger than 65 inches, where you could expect to pay at least 20% more. And “budget OLED” has never even been a category.
It wasn’t too long ago that manufacturing difficulties and relative scarcity painted a picture of exclusivity for OLED TVs, which kept the price high. While Sony and Samsung were the first to introduce OLED TVs, they quickly exited the market, leaving LG as the only brand selling OLEDs in the US for a time—and in a rather limited array of sizes and configurations. The earliest models had a range of issues, including an odd behavior colloquially called “vignetting” (where the edges of the screen look much darker than the middle), a tendency for darker gray elements to look yellowish-green, and concerns about uneven lifespan expectations among different colors. Those kinks were hammered out years ago, and manufacturers like Sony and Vizio have since joined LG in the US market, though LG Display has been the only company manufacturing the actual OLED TV panels. Yet the prices are still high compared with that of most LCD TVs.
Price isn’t the only consideration, either. OLED TVs are comparably much dimmer than similarly priced LCD/LED TVs. This boils down to operational mechanics: Individually operating pixels, the root of an OLED TV’s strength, can also be a weakness. In emissive displays, turning all the pixels to maximum brightness at the same time can damage the TV. So like plasma TVs before them, OLED TVs use a process called auto-brightness limiting, or ABL. Essentially, as more of the screen becomes bright, the total brightness is automatically limited to ensure safe operation.
In other words, a 2021 OLED TV could only get roughly half as bright as a similarly priced 2021 LCD/LED TV, especially those that use mini-LED backlights. However, it’s important to understand that those brightness numbers are discussed in terms of what’s called “reference brightness,” which describes the general/average light output that you’d notice when watching an OLED TV and an LCD TV side by side. For instance, very bright content that lights up the whole screen, such as a daytime sporting event, will look brighter on a high-performance LCD TV than an OLED TV.
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But when considering overall screen contrast—the measure of a TV’s average or peak brightness against its black level, or minimum luminance level—OLED TVs tend to have the best contrast around. Because ABL usually kicks in only when large portions of the screen are bright, an OLED TV’s perceptual contrast (how bright the TV will seem given its black level) is usually much better than that of LCD TVs, especially with HDR content where small, specular areas of the screen are very bright.
However, all that functionality is why it’s important to have control over your room’s ambient lighting if you plan to buy an OLED TV. For example, as much as I love OLED TVs, I don’t have one in my living room—I have a Samsung Neo QLED LCD, which is bright enough to combat the San Diego sunshine that often bathes my home. There’s no point having a beautiful TV if you can’t see it! If you can sufficiently darken your viewing room when you need to, however, there aren’t many TVs that will look better than an OLED.
One other concern that some people have with OLED TVs is the potential for “burn-in” damage, ghostly after-image of content that has been on the screen for an extended period of time. Usually this image retention is temporary, but sometimes it’s permanent. The party line for OLED burn-in is that it shouldn’t occur during “normal” use, and we agree, especially because most modern OLED TVs have pixel-shifting and cell-repair processes built in to ensure that damage doesn’t occur. You can also mitigate burn-in further by lowering your OLED TV’s brightness when it’s convenient. However, if you do watch content with a stationary image (like a news ticker or the heads-up display in a video game) for many hours every single day, you may want to consider getting an LCD TV instead. Ultimately, we think burn-in is only a notable concern for a minor subset of OLED owners.
This year, we’re seeing a few key developments in the OLED market that could help it become a better option for more people. For one, LG and Sony have continued to refine their panels to improve overall brightness, and both are adding more screen sizes to their lineups, including smaller 42- and 48-inch models—which is great for not only gamers but also anyone who just wants a more affordable OLED TV that fits in a modest-sized room. Also, companies like Vizio and Skyworth are selling more affordably priced OLED TVs in the US. (You can read more specifics about the 2022 OLED lines in our guide to the best OLED TV.)
But the OLED news generating the most buzz is that Samsung is returning to the OLED game after almost a decade on hiatus. (Samsung introduced one of the very first OLED TVs back in 2012 but abandoned them shortly thereafter.) The company has a single OLED TV line this year, the S95B Series, but there’s an important caveat: Samsung manufactures its own OLED panels, and S95B TVs have QD-OLED displays, a new variant of OLED. QD-OLED displays combine OLED panels with quantum dots—microscopic nanocrystals more commonly used to pump up the color saturation in the best LCD/LED TVs. Sony also announced a QD-OLED model this year.
Because QD-OLED is brand new, we don’t yet know what benefits or improvements it may offer over LG’s WRGB OLED panels (video) beyond what can be assumed based on the underlying technologies: It should look really good. (We plan to test these new TVs to find out, of course.) The other good news? Samsung has announced pricing for its QD-OLED TVs, and while they’re not the most affordable ones you can buy this year, they also won’t break the bank compared with some of the premium OLED TVs being sold.
As the old saying goes, it’s never a good time to buy a new TV. There’s always newer technology or a better deal coming. Based on trends over the last decade, OLED isn’t going anywhere. In fact, the tech seems to be further cementing itself at the top of best TV lists everywhere. This year, there are more OLED TVs—in more screen sizes and from more manufacturers—than ever before, which makes it a generally good time to buy one. While the prices are still nothing to sneeze at, you have many more options than you used to.
On the other hand, it’s too soon to predict how Samsung’s return to the market will affect prices going forward. The relatively approachable price of Samsung’s new QD-OLED model could mean that buying an OLED TV in 2022 is a bit risky. If QD-OLED has better production yields than LG’s WRGB OLED, we could see an entire range of even more competitively priced models in 2023.
Unfortunately, the uncertainty of whether it’s the right time to buy a new TV is difficult to avoid, no matter how much you spend. But we are certain of one thing: Even if some radical shift in TV technology means your 2022 OLED isn’t the absolute best screen on the market a couple years from now, it will still look better than any TV you owned before it.
This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell and Grant Clauser.
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