Cyber Monday and Black Friday might have been and gone, but there are some great TV deals still hanging on.
A lot of stores still have huge savings on everything from award-winning Mini LED sets to price crashes on weird and wonderful items, such as next-gen 8K resolution and behemoth 98-inch TVs.
And look, I get that there is some appeal for going off the beaten track and jumping at the idea of grabbing a 98-inch TCL for £1999 at Peter Tyson or Samsung’s latest 75-inch 8K Mini LED with a healthy £900 knocked off its price. Even though on the latter you’re still schilling out £3000, both items will at the very least be conversation pieces when people come over…
But my honest response to most people is that they’d be better off looking at one of the cracking discounts doing the rounds on a regular OLED.
The reason for this is pretty simple. For the same money, or at times less, you’ll get a much better-value deal. As I’ve said hundreds of times before, performance-per-pound/dollar and picture quality are two of the biggest metrics we base our review scores and buying advice on.
And from these metrics, the deals on flagship OLEDs are much better at the moment. Take, for example, the current Samsung 8K deal, where you can grab the giant 75-inch QN700C Neo QLED for £2999 – a hefty £900 saving on its regular £3899 price. For £300 less you could get a 55-inch Sony A95L QD-OLED. Specifically, the Sony XR55A95L is now just £2698 at Peter Tyson.
Sure, it has less screen space, but 55 inches is more than big enough for most homes, and trust me when I say the A95L is THE best TV to arrive this year when it comes to picture quality.
When we got it into our test rooms, TV/AV editor Tom Parsons, our technical editor, Ketan Bharadia, and I were all blown away by quite how good it was, as it consistently delivered stunning levels of brightness and contrast as well as wonderfully authentic colours in all our checks.
The conclusion of our Sony A95L review says it all:
“Be in no doubt; the Sony A95L is a stunning TV. Not only is it capable of going astonishingly bright and producing incredibly vibrant colours, but it also uses those abilities to recreate movies and TV shows more accurately than the TVs with which it is competing.”
Mini-LED panels, like the one on the Samsung, simply can’t match the blacks of QD-OLED sets such as the Sony. And its main draw – 8K – is in my mind still a bit of a gimmick as there’s next to no native content to watch at that resolution, so you’ll be relying on upscaling pretty much all the time, which in our experience usually hurts, not helps, picture quality.
The same is true for the TCL. The TCL 98P745 4K is available for an incredibly low £1999 at Peter Tyson, a huge £1000 saving on its regular price.
Yes, £1999 is a cracking price for 98 inches. But again, for the money, there are much better options. Let’s take the 5-star LG G3 as an example. This next-gen OLED features brightness-boosting MLA tech and is THE best flagship for next-gen gamers thanks to its inclusion of four, as opposed to the standard two, HDMI 2.1 ports.
You can grab the 55-inch LG G3 for just £1499 at Sevenoaks at the moment. That’s a massive saving on its regular £2399 price. Or, if you want to go larger, the 65-inch LG G3 is currently retailing for £2148 at Sevenoaks – an equally impressive discount on its regular £3499 price.
In my mind the picture quality and connectivity benefits you’ll get on these more than make up for the reduced screen real estate, making them a better purchase for any enthusiast or home cinema fan.
I’m sure angry readers – who are most likely to be from Australia, based on past correspondence telling me to “just build a bigger house” the last time I argued that picture quality is more important than screen size once you go beyond 55 inches – will disagree. But, please at least consider the above before you pull the trigger on a new TV. Long term, you will 100 per cent be better off with a reliable, normal-sized OLED than a next-gen 8K or giant 100-incher.
