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Read on ...
My 77“ LG OLED for $4200 last year is the best consumer electronics purchase I’ve ever made. It’s so revolutionary, I can’t get anyone to believe me. The extreme brightness and contrast, though stunning, actually freaked me out. Took me six weeks to get used to it.
The Sony OLED panels are the same panels made by LG. They just slap on the Sony name and claim slightly better processing and charge more. Plus I’ve found a little-known way to buy the LG’s at about half of Best Buy’s current selling price.
My advice: if you’re buying a new big-screen up to 77”, don’t go NEAR anything but OLED. It’s really annoying to watch the video industry mags try to pretend the Samsung QLED’s are even comparable. Anything you’ve read claiming that is flat-out bullshit.
As you know, “organic” means “produces its own light.” Each and every pixel does that. Anything with the letters “LED” in it is basically the same tired, decades-old LCD screen technology: an elf shining a flashlight through layers of plastic. Full-array, local dimming, quantum dots ... more elves, more or smaller flashlights, but still the same concept. Doesn’t take an industrial engineer to see you’ll never get an optimal picture that way. Today’s QLED’s are much better and brighter than older ones, but that’s not really saying much. LCD was never the quality leader at any time (my 2002 plasma always looked better than my 2011 Sharp LCD). LCD’s edge was production cost and capability: if you wanted big screens, until recently, it was LCD or projection (even worse). OLED’s finally caught up in size, but it took awhile and the biggest ones are still very pricey.
Or so I thought.
Last year, the current model 77” LG was $8000 at Best Buy (and other front-line retailers). The previous-year model could be had for $7000, and I could discern no difference at all between them. (OLED is not making big strides year-to-year because it’s the hardware that matters — and it’s such a radical jump that there’s already no obvious way to improve it.) I didn’t want to pay that, so I started searching.
And searching.
And searched some more.
And I found a curious thing.
Some flaky-looking sellers I’d never heard of were selling the very same older model for absurdly low prices, like $3600 to $3900. They looked like scams, so I checked reviews, and sure enough they were just that. Kinda. Yes they were dishonest, but only in that they were pulling jerkoff tricks like forcing you to buy a BS extended warranty or tacking on extra fees. Sometimes they flaked on delivery. But no one who actually ended up paying said they didn’t get the TV or that it wasn’t the model promised. So I kept checking, and found a seller in my city — Los Angeles — on eBay with a good rating who offered it for $4000 plus tax and free delivery. I ordered it, and three days later was watching a new state-of-the-art OLED for a little more than half the retail price.
I haven’t checked the 77” lately, but I found the 65” LG OLED C9PUA for $1100 in about a minute. That might not even be the lowest, and it’s half the $2199 price for the current model at Best Buy.
What the hell’s going on here?
My belief is this: the biggest competition LG has for this year’s OLED is ... (drum roll) ... last year’s OLED. They can’t afford to have them around. This is specifically a problem with OLED because they’re still expensive and don’t change much year-to-year. If Best Buy were to offer the current and former models side by side, with one half the price of the other, that would be a real problem for both the retailer and LG. So they don’t allow it. Instead they try to blow out the old screens through unknown online dealers — quietly and quickly. A few minutes of research can sure pay big dividends. And allow you to buy the absolute state-of-art display for only a slight premium over yesterday’s news.
You’re welcome.
