Guilt is a powerful motivator. I’m acutely aware of that, as I have a Catholic mother-in-law (who hopefully isn’t reading this). And recently, I’ve been getting a fairly heavy dose of it.
In part because I told my wife that I have an amazing plan in place for Valentine's Day. I don’t. And I have no clue what I can now book that will live up to the high expectations I've set. But it’s mainly because I was one of the team who just gave Toshiba’s latest OLED a three-star rating.
To be clear, the team and I stand by that rating. While the Toshiba XF9F is the cheapest OLED TV we have seen at its size, with the 55-inch model we reviewed currently selling for an astonishingly low £699, it has too many flaws to recommend. Black crush, poor motion-handling, noisy upscaling: there are a lot of flies in the ointment.
No, I feel guilty because the confines of a review, and its focus on helping people know if the product is worth buying, meant I had to cut a lot of the positive things I wanted to say about the wider importance of Toshiba's OLED.
So I am unburdening my sins here, explaining why I'm still happy this set exists, even if I wouldn't buy it.
As home cinema fans, we all know OLED is great. Not every set is created equal, of course, but there’s a reason that sets with the technology on board continually earn accolades at our yearly What Hi-Fi? Awards are a staple of our best TV buying guide.
Their ability to offer perfect blacks and pixel-level light control are two things that no other panel tech can offer right now.
The rub is that they are still premium sets – undeniably a luxury item. Even entry-level 55- and 65-inch models, such as LG’s B-series, tend to carry £1500+ price tags at launch.
And over the past three years, we have seen sets belligerently refuse to drop into the truly “affordable” £500/$500-ish price point.
Unless you’re willing to go down in size to 48- or 42-inch sets, entry-level OLEDs have refused to drop below £899, even during big sales events such as Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day.
Toshiba bucked that trend for the first time last year, with the XF9F. And while it may have missed the mark in a few performance metrics, based on my nearly two decades of experience covering AV hardware, this is a big deal.
Even if it’s not perfect, in my experience, when one company manages to drive a technology down in price, it rapidly starts a trend.
Companies, unsurprisingly, don’t like being undercut. I can’t see LG, Samsung and co leaving Toshiba's OLED undercutting their wares in big-name stores unchallenged for long, as a result.
And I’ve got plenty of examples of this happening. Take the arrival of affordable 4K TVs over a decade ago.
For years, 4K was available, but it was an expensive luxury. That all changed when Hisense, which at the time was a tiny player in the market compared with top-dog Samsung, launched its H7 line of affordable 4K sets.
Were they great? No; like the Toshiba XF9F, they were not perfect. But they were the first affordable 4K TVs that normal people could easily buy. And as a result, they got quite the reaction, both from the press and consumers.
This sowed the seed in rival companies' minds, and a wealth of affordable 4K sets began to flood the market over the next few years. The technology then became increasingly mainstream, to the point that nearly every TV 55 inches or bigger now supports the resolution.
I’m not expecting the same to happen for OLED – I don't think we will see affordable £299 sets with the tech on board any time soon. But I can see the Toshiba generating a similar reaction. Especially as we’ve already seen early signs from LG Display, which, at CES 2026, confirmed it is working on a new “affordable” OLED SE panel tech.
We don’t have full details, but the company confirmed to us at the show that it will sit below the OLED EX tech seen on most step-down OLEDs, including LG’s own C-series. The only question is quite what LG Display regards as “affordable”. Does it mean truly affordable, or affordable by OLED standards? These are two very different price points…
Either way, I still can’t help but feel positive about the general shift in direction I’ve already seen start happen since Toshiba threw the gauntlet down last year. I certainly hope it reaches fruition in the not too distant future.
After all, the current state of the world means most of us are on tight budgets, while at the same time very much in need of the occasional escape from reality. Something that a good movie clearly offers – especially when watched on a decent OLED TV…
MORE:
These are the best OLED TVs we have tested
We rank the best 65-inch TVs money can buy
Our picks of the best soundbars
