lg 55 inch lcd panel brands

For many years, TVs with LED backlights have dominated the market. Manufacturers release many LED models every year that have different features. You won"t get the same excellent dark room picture quality as an OLED but LED TVs have a few more advantages than OLEDs (check out our article about OLED vs. LED). LED TVs" biggest advantages are their brightness, which allows them to get brighter than OLEDs, and they"re immune to permanent burn-in. LED TVs are also sometimes called LCD instead; LED refers to the technology used to create the backlight, whereas LCD refers to the technology used to produce different colors and shades. As all LCD models currently on the market use LED backlights, the two terms are often used interchangeably.

We"ve bought and tested more than 300 TVs with LED backlights, and below are our recommendations for the best TVs with LED panels that you can buy. See also our picks for the best TVs, the best PS5 TVs, and the best TVs for Xbox Series X.

The Samsung QN90B QLED is the best TV with an LED panel we"ve tested. It"s an impressive TV with amazing picture quality and a great selection of gaming features. It uses a Mini LED backlight, with way more dimming zones than most LED TVs, which allows for greater control over the local dimming feature for better dark room performance, with less distracting blooming around bright objects. It also gets exceptionally bright, meaning it can handle lots of glare in a bright room.

The best LCD TV for a home theater is the Hisense U9DG. It"s a unique LED TV because it uses dual-panel technology. It means it has two LCD panels stacked on top of each other, delivering the equivalent of a local dimming feature with two million dimming zones; most other TVs only have a few hundred at most. This technology helps provide the TV with the best contrast ratio we"ve tested on any LED TV. The black level is nearly perfect, even in bright scenes, and there"s almost no blooming around bright objects.

The best mid-range TV we"ve tested with an LED panel is the Hisense U8H. It"s an excellent TV overall, with fantastic contrast and an impressive Mini LED local dimming feature, delivering deep blacks in a dark room with very little distracting blooming around bright objects. It has exceptional peak brightness and reflection handling, ensuring it can easily overcome glare in a bright room. It has worse processing overall than the Samsung QN90B QLED, though, so it"s a bit of a step down. There"s more noticeable banding in areas of similar color, and it has slightly worse motion processing as well.

The best LED TV we"ve tested in the budget category is the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED. It"s a great TV overall, with superb contrast and fantastic black uniformity, making it a great choice for a dark room. It has a decent full array local dimming feature, but there"s a bit more blooming than there is on the Hisense U8H, and it"s not as bright. It has a wide color gamut, so colors look vibrant and realistic, and it displays HDR content the way the content creator intended.

Replaced the Insignia F50 QLED with the Hisense A6H, as the Insignia is discontinued and very hard to find. Replaced the Hisense U6H with the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED, as it"s a bit better overall. Added the Samsung QN95B QLED, TCL 6 Series/R655 2022 QLED, and Insignia F50 QLED as Notable Mentions.

Our recommendations above are what we think are currently the best LCD TVs to buy for most people in each price range. We factor in the price (a cheaper TV wins over a pricier one if the difference isn"t worth it), feedback from our visitors, and availability (no TVs that are difficult to find or almost out of stock everywhere).

Huge price drops on OLED TVs towards the end of last year made it a fantastic time to buy – especially the LG C2, which cements its status as our number one pick, when combining image quality, features, size options and price.

The best OLED TVs on the market today deliver beautiful image quality because of the self-lighting pixels that define this kind of technology. What these pixels allow for is rich, precise contrast for HDR in a way that even the best LCD TVs can’t match. That means they deliver an incredible cinematic picture that brings you more detail in darker areas of the screen than you’ll ever get from an LCD TV.

With one of the best OLED TVs, many of which are among the best TVs on the market, you"ll also find a starker contrast between light and dark, which is similar to the laser projection in movie theaters – especially if you buy a larger TV, like one of the best 65-inch TVs or best 75-inch TVs. Big TV brands, like LG and Sony, use OLED tech in their premium TVs. Even Samsung, a TV company that’s been holding out on OLED, entered the OLED TV space earlier this year.

The LG C2 OLED is the best OLED TV for the majority of people. While the LG C1 OLED from 2021 is still a great TV, and the LG G2 and Z2 offer elevated experiences compared to the C2, we wholly believe that the C2 offers the best performance-to-dollar ratio and is the TV to beat even when the 2023 model starts to ship.

The LG C2 isn’t flawless, however. In our tests we found that off-axis color saturation does diminish a bit when you move to the left or right of the screen when compared to the new QD-OLED models. It"s also worth noting that LG doesn"t support either the IMAX Enhanced or HDR10+ format.

The latest Vizio OLED TV – officially called the H1 – is a cheaper alternative to the more premium screens that LG and Sony have been producing for the past few years. For folks who don’t want to spend a fortune, the Vizio OLED has most of the same key features and it offers largely similar performance as other OLEDs for hundreds of dollars less – albeit with a less bright output that most other OLEDs surpass. In our tests we found it coped perfectly well with most lighting conditions short of direct sunlight beaming in.

If price isn"t a concern for you and you simply want the best OLED TV you can buy at any price point, then the LG G2 OLED is the TV for you. The OLED65G2 uses its extra brightness to make pretty much every frame of any source you care to mention look even more sublime than it has on any LG OLED before.

To anyone familiar with LG’s OLED TVs over the years, the impact made by the extra brightness the heat sink unlocks is instantly obvious: we found that the extra brightness gives colors more volume and punch, regardless of whether you’re talking about a very vibrant, rich tone, or a subtle, mild one.

LG"s A2 series TVs are the firm"s cheapest OLED offerings, and while they"re not quite as feature-rich as their more expensive stablemates they still deliver a lot of TV for the money. LG"s OLED panels are wonderful things with superb color and contrast, and while the panel here isn"t as bright as the ones in more expensive LG TVs it"s still very good and very clear. It also has LG"s webOS smart TV operating system, which we think is the best in the business.

The A2 series is outfitted with LG’s α7 Gen 5 AI Processor, which first appeared in the company’s 2021 models and provides features such as dynamic tone mapping and 5.1.2-channel sound upmixing. The Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HLG high dynamic range formats are all supported by the A2 series, along with Dolby Vision IQ and HGiG (HDR Gaming Interest Group). Its Filmmaker mode delivers accurate color and motion settings, and also shuts off any automatic processing that would change the picture from the way a movie’s director originally intended for it to be presented.

A new wide color gamut panel for the A80K combines with Sony’s XR OLED Contrast Pro, XR Triluminos Pro, and Cognitive Processor XR features to deliver deep blacks and detailed shadows in images, along with rich, fully saturated colors. Overall picture brightness is satisfactory, if a bit below what you’ll get from the very best OLED TVs, such as the LG G2 and also the LG C2 series. Still, Sony’s mid-tier OLED manages to look great even in well-lit rooms, and it stuns in ones that are dimmed for best-quality movie viewing.

More mid-tier OLEDs at larger sizes (65 inches and above) can double that figure, or even triple it – while experimental "rollable OLED" screens can go for six-figure sums. 48-inch OLED sizes tend to offer only a small discount, if any, though we could see the long-teased 42-inch OLEDs drop launch prices further, if they ever materialise.

It"s a tighter race than ever, then, though it"s worth assessing secondary characteristics for OLED and QLED screens. An OLED with a cheap processor may cause more artefacts and video noise (as we saw in the LG BX), while a QLED with edge-lighting (the Q60T) won"t get the true benefit of its enhanced color and contrast. Format or feature support can be crucial if you"re hooking up your TV to a PC, a games console, or a 4K Blu-ray player too.What is the lifespan of an OLED TV?According to LG Display, the makers of the OLED panels that go into every OLED TV on the list - around 100,000 hours. For most folks that"s about 10 years of TV watching and far exceeds the 40,000 to 60,000-hour lifespans of most LED-LCD TVs. That said, OLED TVs can experience something called burn-in when a static image is left on the screen for prolonged periods of time - so be sure to change the channel every few days.Best OLED TV competitors: what else is out there?OLED is, for many, the premium TV tech of the moment. Though once weighed down by inaccessible price points, a flurry of cheaper mid-range OLEDs and smaller panel sizes has helped bring OLED closer to the mass market. TCL"s own plans to manufacture its own inkjet OLED TV panels at a significant price reduction over traditional OLED production methods could spell trouble for the likes of LG and Panasonic too.

Samsung’s current TV lineup includes QD-OLED hybrids (they combine OLED panels with quantum dot tech, utilising the self-emissive properties of the former and color enhancements of the latter) in 55- and 65-inch screen sizes, and Sony is offering similar-sized sets that use the same tech. In our hands-on test of Sony’s A95K QD-OLED, we found that its high brightness and impressive color depth gave it an edge over standard OLED models, though the picture quality boost comes at extra cost. Is QD-OLED tech worth the higher price? We’ll weigh in on that after we get a TV in-hand for a full-scale review.

For those with cash to splash, you"ll be choosing between a high-end OLED TV and Micro LED – a self-emissive panel technology that Samsung has leant into in recent times, but which has proved difficult to offer either affordably or at mainstream sizing (76-inch is the smallest we"ve seen so far, as of 2021).

The Hisense U8H matches the excellent brightness and color performance of much pricier LCD TVs, and its Google TV smart platform is a welcome addition. But it’s available in only three screen sizes.

The Hisense U8H is the best LCD/LED TV for most people because it delivers the performance of a much pricier TV yet starts at under $1,000, for the smallest (55-inch) screen size. This TV utilizes quantum dots, a full-array backlight with mini-LEDs, and a 120 Hz refresh rate to deliver a great-looking 4K HDR image. It’s compatible with every major HDR format. And it’s equipped with two full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 inputs to support 4K 120 Hz gaming from the newest Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Add in the intuitive, fully featured Google TV smart-TV platform, and the U8H’s price-to-performance ratio is of inarguable value.

Chief among the U8H’s many strengths is its impressive peak brightness. When sending it HDR test patterns, I measured an average brightness of 1,500 nits, with peaks just north of 1,800 nits (a measurement of luminance; see TV features, defined for more info). To put that into perspective, consider that the 65-inch version of our budget 4K TV pick (the TCL 5-Series) typically costs around half as much as the 65-inch U8H but achieves only around 30% to 40% of its brightness. On the other side of the coin, the 65-inch version of our upgrade pick (the Samsung QN90B) costs almost twice as much as the 65-inch U8H, but it achieves only nominally higher brightness. Adequate light output creates convincing highlights and image contrast and (when necessary) combats ambient light from lamps or windows. It is a necessity for any TV worth buying—especially if you hope to watch HDR movies or play HDR games—and the U8H simply outpaces most TVs in its price range (and some in the next price bracket up, too).

The U8H’s brightness, black-level integrity, and local-dimming abilities make this an excellent TV for watching HDR content. The U8H is capable of playing HDR content in all of the major formats (HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and HLG), but when it comes to impressive HDR, what’s under the hood is much more important than format compatibility. The most crucial thing for good HDR is high brightness and deep color saturation, and the U8H’s quantum dots achieve the latter. It’s not as simple as just having quantum dots, however: While many TVs (even the budget options) have quantum dots nowadays, what is often not taken into account is that brightness directly affects color saturation. For example, both the 2022 TCL 6-Series and the Hisense U8H are equipped with quantum dots, mini-LED backlights, and local dimming. But because the U8H is notably brighter than the 6-Series, it also achieves a higher total color volume. During our color-volume testing, the U8H exhibited color ranges at more than 100% of the DCI-P3 color space (the range of color needed to properly display HDR content), and it is capable of roughly 10% more total color volume compared with the 6-Series.

In terms of design, the Hisense U8H is not as svelte as our upgrade pick, but it’s plenty sturdy and doesn’t look or feel cheap. Two narrow, metal feet jut out from beneath the panel and steadily hold the TV. They can be attached in two separate spots, either closer in toward the middle of the panel or out toward the edges, to account for different-size TV stands. The feet are also equipped with cable organization clasps—a nice touch for keeping your TV stand free of cable clutter. Though the TV is primarily plastic, its bezels are lined with metal strips, providing a bit more durability in the long run. I moved it around my home, and it was no worse for wear, but we’ll know more after doing some long-term testing.

The Hisense U8H has some difficulties with banding, or areas of uneven gradation, where transitions that should appear smooth instead look like “bands” of color (sometimes also called posterization). Like many current 4K HDR TVs, the U8H uses an 8-bit panel rather than a 10-bit panel, which affects the color decoding and color presentation process. This is usually relevant only with HDR video and games. When playing games on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, I saw a few instances where the content wasn’t rendered correctly and displayed ugly splotches of color on the screen. However, this almost always occurred during static screens (such as a pause menu or loading screen); I rarely spotted it during actual gameplay. Hisense has stated that it would address the problem in a future firmware update, but at the time of writing it was still present. This is a flaw that may give dedicated gamers pause, but we don’t consider it to be a dealbreaker for most people.

Finally, like most TVs that use vertical alignment (VA) LCD panels, the U8H has a limited horizontal viewing angle, which may be a bit annoying if you’re hoping to entertain a large crowd. Our upgrade pick uses a special wide-angle technology to address this.

Shopping for a new TV sounds like it could be fun and exciting — the prospect of a gleaming new panel adorning your living room wall is enough to give you goosebumps. But with all the brands to choose from, and different smart capabilities (we can explain what a smart TV is) to weigh, as well as the latest picture tech to consider, it can be daunting. Is this article, we compare OLED vs. LED technology to see which is better for today’s modern TVs. Once you determine which panel type is best for you, make sure you check out our list of the best TVs to get our editor’s recommendations.

Non-OLED TVs are made of two main parts: An LCD panel and a backlight. The LCD panel contains the pixels, the little colored dots that make up a TV’s image. On their own, pixels cannot be seen; they require a backlight. When light from the backlight shines through an LCD pixel, you can see its color.

The “LED” in LED TV simply refers to how the backlight is made. In the past, a thicker and less-efficient technology called CCFL (cold-cathode fluorescent light) was used. But these days, virtually every flat-screen TV uses LEDs as its source of backlighting. Thus, when you see the term “LED TV,” it simply refers to an LED-backlit LCD TV.

Currently, LG Display is the only manufacturer of OLED panels for TVs, famed for top-line models like the CX. Sony and LG have an agreement that allows Sony to put LG OLED panels into Sony televisions — like the bright X95OH — but otherwise, you won’t find OLED in many other TV displays sold in the U.S.

The differences in performance between LG’s OLED TVs and Sony’s result from different picture processors at work. Sony and LG have impressive processors that are also unique to each brand, which is why two TVs with the same panel can look drastically different. A good processor can greatly reduce issues like banding and artifacting and produce more accurate colors as well.

Other brands that source panels from LG include Philips, Panasonic, HiSense, Bang & Olufsen, and more. You’ll also see lesser-known brands sparingly, but for now, they’re all getting their panels from the same source.

Samsung does make OLED smartphone panels, and the company recently announced it would start building new TV panels based on a hybrid of QLED and OLED known as QD-OLED, but it will be a few more years before we see the first TVs that use this technology.

Despite the name, microLED has more in common with OLED than LED. Created and championed by Samsung, this technology creates super-tiny, modular LED panels that combine light emission and color like OLED screens do, minus the “organic” part. For now, the technology is primarily being used for extra-large wall TVs, where colors, blacks, and off-angle viewing are excellent but with more potential for greater brightness and durability than OLED TVs.

LED TVs rely on LED backlights shining behind an LCD panel. Even with advanced dimming technology, which selectively dims LEDs that don’t need to be on at full blast, LED TVs have historically struggled to produce dark blacks and can suffer from an effect called “light bleed,” where lighter sections of the screen create a haze or bloom in adjacent darker areas.

Because OLED pixels combine the light source and the color in a single diode, they can change states incredibly fast. By contrast, LED TVs use LEDs to produce brightness and tiny LCD “shutters” to create color. While the LED’s brightness can be changed in an instant, LCD shutters are by their nature slower to respond to state changes.

That’s why gamers, in particular, want TVs that can handle VRR or Variable Refresh Rate. It’s a rare feature on both OLED and LED TVs, but you can expect to see it show up on more models in both types of TVs. Right now, you can find VRR in certain Samsung, LG, and TCL TVs. But neither OLED nor LED TVs have a real advantage when it comes to VRR; some models have the feature, and some don’t. Your gaming system also has to support VRR, though that shouldn’t be much of an issue if you own a new Xbox Series X, PS5, or even a PS4/One X.

OLED, again, is the winner here. With LED TVs, the best viewing angle is dead center, and the picture quality diminishes in both color and contrast the further you move to either side. While the severity differs between models, it’s always noticeable. For its LED TVs, LG uses a type of LCD panel known as IPS, which has slightly better off-angle performance than VA-type LCD panels (which Sony uses), but it suffers in the black-level department in contrast to rival VA panels, and it’s no competition for OLED. Samsung’s priciest QLED TVs feature updated panel design and anti-reflective coating, which make off-angle viewing much less of an issue. While OLED still beats these models out in the end, the gap is closing quickly.

OLEDs have come a long way in this category. When the tech was still nascent, OLED screens were often dwarfed by LED/LCD displays. As OLED manufacturing has improved, the number of respectably large OLED displays has increased — now pushing 88 inches — but they’re still dwarfed by the largest LED TVs, which can easily hit 100 inches in size, and with new technologies, well beyond.

LG says you’d have to watch its OLED TVs five hours a day for 54 years before they’d fall to 50% brightness. Whether that’s true remains to be seen, as OLED TVs have only been out in the wild since 2013. For that reason and that reason only, we’ll award this category to LED TVs. It pays to have a proven track record.

Can one kind of TV be healthier for you than another? If you believe that we need to be careful about our exposure to blue light, especially toward the evening, then the answer could be yes. Both OLED and LED TVs produce blue light, but OLED TVs produce considerably less of it. LG claims its OLED panels only generate 34% blue light versus LED TV’s 64%. That stat has been independently verified, and LG’s OLED panels have been given an Eye Comfort Display certification by TUV Rheinland, a standards organization based out of Germany.

OLED panels require no backlight, and each individual pixel is extremely energy-efficient. LED TVs need a backlight to produce brightness. Since LEDs are less energy-efficient than OLEDs, and their light must pass through the LCD shutters before it reaches your eyes, these panels must consume more power for the same level of brightness.