3 reasons to buy an OLED TV right now

LG OLED TV mounted on a wall in a spacious living room with white painted walls

(Image credit: LG)

published 13 December 2022

If you want one of the very best TVs for your home cinema setup, for gaming or for binge-watching TV shows you should be looking at OLED TVs. They deliver truly exceptional picture quality and many of them feature cutting-edge tech that makes them ideal for upscaling older HD content or for playing Xbox Series X and PS5 games.

The difference between OLED and other kinds of TV is that most other TVs are backlit, so the pixels are illuminated by an external light source – and that light can leak into places it isn't wanted. With OLED, that doesn't happen. That's because each individual pixel lights itself and turns itself off when it's not needed. The result is that the picture is much more accurate and has a much better contrast than backlit displays, which can't usually match the precision and deep black levels of OLED.

1. They're actually affordable now

Like any new technology, OLED was pretty pricey when it first appeared. But manufacturers have got much better and much more efficient, and that means the cost of OLED panels has plummeted. Where OLED TVs typically cost thousands of pounds, even high-spec models have dropped below the £1,000 mark now.

2. You don't need to move to a bigger house

Smaller OLED panels were a bit of a challenge for manufacturers: they were extremely difficult to make in significant quantities, and that meant that manufacturers stuck with TV sizes of 50 inches and upwards. But they've now cracked it, and you can get OLED TVs as small as 42 inches from the best TV manufacturers. Not only that, but the price premium small OLEDs used to command is starting to disappear too: we recently saw the price of the brilliant LG C2 drop from £1,399 to under £900.

3. It'll upgrade everything

OLEDs offer incredibly deep blacks, superb contrast, vivid colours and wide viewing angles, and most models also pack very powerful image processors to make the most of those features. That means you'll get truly exceptional picture quality whether you're exploring a scary video game, watching a movie masterpiece or binge-watching shows on Netflix, Apple TV or Disney+. OLED TVs will make you fall in love with movies and TV all over again.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).