Black Friday may be coming up, but having reviewed and covered some of the flash deals on a handful of 2024’s best OLED TVs, I can tell you in no uncertain terms – prices are already atypically low on many of this year's top sets.
So low in fact, that during Prime Day and Amazon’s subsequent Big Deal Days events earlier this year, myself and the wider home cinema reviews team found ourselves outright gobsmacked at how low some of 2024’s latest OLED TV prices were plummeting.
This started in July, when LG cut the price of the LG C4, across every size, by multiple hundreds of points – at points making it so the newer model was less than £100 / $150 more than the outgoing LG C3.
Heck, even Sony got in on the action a month later, cutting over £500 / $500 off its only new OLED this year, the Bravia 8, in September, mere months after the TV launched.
Even now, you can still enjoy solid savings on both companies’ OLEDs. Though it’s not the best deal we’ve seen this year, you can currently buy a 55-inch LG C4 on Amazon for £1254, a 34 per cent discount on its launch price, for example.
As a journalist who’s covered the OLED TV market since the panel tech became a thing, trust me when I say that seeing such big discounts on new sets this early is atypical.
Which is where this opinion piece comes in. Having mulled why this could be the case for the past few months, there are two possible reasons that hold weight in my mind.
The first, and in truth most likely, is that the companies are aggressively pricing the new sets in a bid to boost sales. 2023 wasn’t a great year for TV sales, with shipments dropping three per cent globally, according to Counterpoint research. LG and Samsung were particularly hit hard, with the former seeing a six per cent slump, and the latter a five per cent drop.
To make matters worse the same research suggests that both companies’ upstart rivals enjoyed growth during the difficult period. TCL is reported to have enjoyed a 5 per cent uplift, while Hisense saw a – still impressive – four percent increase year-on-year.
But, in the back of my head I have a far more interesting theory, that would also be great news for consumers – they’re cutting prices of the basic OLED panels because something big is on the horizon and the two want to clear stock before it arrives.
What could that be? I’m not actually sure, but there are a number of exciting prospects. It could be that the the Award-winning, brightness boosting micro lens array (MLA) sported on LG’s flagship LG G4 is going to trickle down to the company’s step-down LG C5 next year. Considering how impressed we were with the LG G4, which offers one of the brightest and most immersive home movie experiences available this year, this would be awesome.
Or, it could be that the companies have had a breakthrough and finally managed to make Mini LED competitive in the top end of the market. However, given how every company tried and failed to do that this year, we’re not holding our breath on this one. Jump over to our Sony Bravia 9, Samsung QN95D and Hisense U8N reviews and you’ll see a pattern – Mini LED’s inability to deliver the same perfect blacks as OLED is an ongoing issue, with no easy fix.
There are a number of answers as to why. And while I can’t settle on one or say with any confidence that I’m 100 per cent right, the “something big is coming” alarm is going off in my head and I can’t help but hope I’m right – and we’re about to see something awesome happen in the world of TVs.
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