If you're in the market for an OLED TV, then look no further than the Sony A80L. We've spotted the Product of the Year-winning TV for £1499 (at 55-inches); that's just shy of its Black Friday price, making it a mighty tempting deal. That's an incredible saving of £900 on a five-star TV that we reviewed for £2399.
The 65-inch model is also on sale for £2099, down from £2999, another £900 saving. While this isn't the lowest price we've ever seen on these TVs – Black Friday 2023 takes that honour with £1000 off the asking price on both sizes – it's very close. Generally speaking, it's also a very good price for a five-star, What Hi-Fi? Award-winning OLED TV.
While LG is currently offering the C3 OLED TV for a fair bit less than this Sony, we're still enamoured by the A80L's performance, making it our top pick when it comes to a performance per pound ratio.
While 2023 was awash with next-generation QD-OLED and MLA OLED TVs, Sony proved that 'standard' OLED technology (often referred to as 'WOLED' because of its use of a white sub-pixel) is capable of absolutely stunning results when it's tuned with care and attention.
The A80L produces an image that pops with vibrant colours and superb contrast, yet combines that with a naturalism and subtlety that means you're always seeing movies and TV shows as intended. It balances all of these desirable picture traits to create an image that is nothing short of dazzling, allowing it to beat the likes of LG's C3 and Panasonic's MZ1500 OLED TVs.
The Acoustic Surface Audio+ technology, which uses actuators that vibrate the whole screen in order to make sound, ensures that the audio and imagery are spatially connected in a way that non-Sony TVs can't match, and the A80L sounds direct, detailed and open by general TV standards, too.
While the LG C3 is still an impressive and very likeable TV, we felt that LG didn't differentiate it from the C2 enough, despite increasing the price at launch. The A80L, on the other hand, is a startling step forward and the best performance-per-pound TV of the year so far, particularly with this discount. You might still want to consider the LG C3 if you're a hardcore gamer, though, as it has four HDMI 2.1 ports (the Sony A80L has just two, of which one also handles eARC duties) and supports Dolby Vision gaming and HGiG, which the Sony doesn't. For everyone else, though, the Sony A80L is a brilliant buy.
MORE:
Read our review of the Sony A80L (XR-55A80L)
Our picks for the best OLED TVs in 2023
The best 55-inch TVs: smart, HDR, 4K, and OLED options
