The Best OLED TV

You can find two kinds of TV display technology today: LCD and OLED. An OLED TV is best suited for a videophile who wants the best possible image quality and is willing to pay a premium to get it. OLED TVs use a display technology that consists of organic light-emitting diodes. The main advantage of OLED displays is that the pixels emit their own light and thus require no backlighting to create a vivid and bright image. Because each pixel can turn completely off or on between frames, OLED TVs are capable of displaying truly black blacks on the screen, which allows the TV to produce noticeably better contrast than even the best LCD TVs. However, OLED technology is still prohibitively expensive for most people: You can expect to pay at least $500 more for an OLED TV compared with a high-performance LCD TV of similar size, and you can find a wider selection of affordable LCD options that look good and support 4K HDR standards. Higher-end LCD TVs can often be brighter than OLED TVs, so if you have a room with lots of windows that don’t have curtains, you might want to look at an LCD instead of an OLED. During my latest round of testing, the OLEDs looked fantastic in a living room when it was nighttime or cloudy, but on bright, sunny days a reflection from a skylight made it hard to watch the OLEDs compared with LCDs in the same location.