OLED needs to lean into its unique strength, rather than fix its biggest “weakness”

There are certain things you always remember, no matter how many spins around the sun you’ve done.

For me, there’s the death of Optimus Prime in the ’80s Transformers animated film, the time my brother kicked me in the nuts so hard I got a nosebleed; and seeing an OLED TV for the first time.

The year was 2012, and I could still make it from one end of the Las Vegas convention centre during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) without a toilet break. Ahh, to have a 20-something-year-old’s bladder again…

I had been assigned to cover LG’s wares at the show that year. Top of the list was a new 55-inch giant OLED TV. Sure, there had been OLEDs at past shows. But they were dinky by comparison, and I hadn’t had a chance to check them out. So I was going in fresh.

As always, LG made a big song and dance about the technology, so I probably should have been more excited than I was at the time. Truthfully, slightly knackered from the flight and cantankerous over the ever terrible wi-fi in the show’s press room, I didn’t believe any of the hype until I actually saw it.

And there was one big reason for that. Even in the less than ideal show conditions, a disappointing HD resolution and terrible test footage, it delivered something I’d never seen a TV do before: deliver perfect blacks.

In AV terms, what then ensued was that love at first sight scene every romcom seems to have. The sound of other visitors screaming and grunting as they pushed past morphed into birdsong, and the stench of stale beer (at least that’s what I hope it was) was replaced with the smell of freshly cut grass. It was magical.

Since then, right up to the present day, while we have sometimes had our four-star tiffs, OLED and I have managed to keep that spark alive.

What’s the secret to our longevity, you ask? Well, it’s pretty simple: with its perfect blacks, OLED still gives me something no other TV or projector can.

That’s why, even though I will wholeheartedly recommend LEDs and Mini LEDs to people on a budget, or those with certain specific requirements, if a serious cinephile asks what the best option is, from a pure performance and picture-quality perspective, I almost certainly point them to an OLED.

When an OLED is watched in a dark room, with a decent sound system, the added contrast and oomph the blacks give, when deployed with finesse, is magical. This is a key reason the TV Product of the Year winner at the What Hi-Fi? Awards has generally been an OLED for more than half a decade.

But it’s also why this year, in particular, I’ve had some pretty loud alarm bells go off. For reasons unbeknownst to me, TV makers seem not only to have forgotten the importance of OLED’s black levels, but are instead focused on boosting another key metric: peak brightness.

Before regular readers say anything, yes, I am aware OLED TV makers chasing a high nit count isn’t anything new. In fact, you could argue the craze started back in 2022 with the launch of QD-OLED on the Samsung S95B. But here, the focus was as much on improving colours as it was “fixing” OLED’s perceived weakness, its inability to offer as high operating and peak-brightness levels as LED, especially Mini LED, rivals.

For me, the overt focus on brightness over all else only really started gaining proper pace with the arrival of Micro Lens Array, LG Display’s short-lived rival to QD-OLED. It's a technology which has since been replaced by Primary RGB Tandem OLED.

It was MLA that sparked the ongoing nit wars, where every TV maker seems to be fighting to have the highest figure possible, regardless of whether it actually improves the picture (at least in my mind).

We have detailed why this is problematic before, but the short version is that peak brightness is important, but only one of many ingredients that make for tasty picture quality. If you add too much to the pot, you risk ruining the flavour; as with most things, balance is key.

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The reason I am particularly concerned now is that, while I had seen the fight for brightness take away focus from other aspects of OLED sets’ performance before – MLA’s tendency to lose colour volume in low-light scenes, for example – the black level was generally left alone.

That changed in 2026 when we saw not one but two new TVs that didn’t nail blacks, pass through our test rooms.

First was the LG C6, which felt like a minor blip, with certain scenes looking a smidge grey until we adjusted the Near Black Detail settings. As we said in our review:

“The Near Black Detail adjustment proves particularly useful, too. Out of the box, the C6 occasionally prioritises shadow detail slightly over absolute black depth. In the opening moments of Alien: Romulus, for example, the blackness of space can appear just a touch raised compared with the LG C5. Dropping Near Black Detail to -1 neatly restores the sort of inky blacks OLED fans expect.”

Then the issue was repeated – to a far worse degree – on the LG G6. We found: “It seems as though LG has chosen to raise the black floor slightly, perhaps to increase shadow detail, but we regularly find that what should be perfect black looks slightly grey.”

And we then couldn’t fix it, with the -1 Near Dark Detail still looking a touch grey and -2 removing some dark detail.

To be clear, they are still good (great in the C6’s case) TVs. But my alarm bells are in full warning mode; I really hope it isn’t the start of a trend for OLED TVs in 2026. This is a brilliant TV tech that, in my mind, should continue to play to its greatest strength, rather than continue chasing Mini LED-level peak-brightness numbers.

MORE:

These are the best OLED TVs we have tested

We rank the best Mini LED TVs

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