We have a new recommended small OLED TV – but it's not all good news

This week, we updated our best OLED TV buying advice, replacing the 48-inch Panasonic Z90B with the 42-inch LG C5 as our main recommendation for people tight on space.

Normally that would be a cause for celebration. In most instances, we only ever add a new set to our buying guides when we have found something better to recommend, after all.

That’s a key reason so many of our advice pages have entries that have been there for months, or even years in some very rare cases. If it’s still the best, regardless of its age, we’ll keep recommending it.

And to be clear, the 42-inch LG C5 is an excellent small OLED TV. That’s why we gave it a five-star rating and What Hi-Fi? Award last year. If you want a Cliff Notes summary, here’s the verdict from our review:

“The 42-inch LG C5 is the best small OLED TV we’ve tested this year. Like its predecessors, it offers a near-flawless feature set and solid, sharp, immersive picture quality, neatly packaged in a small room-friendly frame. The only minor issue remains its audio, which, while fine for casual viewing, isn’t powerful or precise enough for immersive movie watching. Plan for a soundbar in your budget, if you don’t already have one.”

The issue is, despite all its perks, it’s not the best small OLED we have tested in the past 12 months. That honour went to the also Award-winning, slightly larger 48-inch Panasonic Z90B.

We confirmed that when we ran all the small OLED TVs we had head-to-head during last year’s Awards season. The reason is simple: at the time, it offered the best picture quality of all the TVs in the room.

Though it wasn’t the brightest, it offered the most even-handed performance, with colours and movements looking wonderfully natural. So, unless you were a gamer with numerous consoles and PCs requiring multiple HDMI 2.1 sockets, it was our main recommendation.

As we said in our 48-inch Panasonic Z90B review:

“From sparkling desert dunes in sci-fi epics to cars thundering across a race track and heated conversations behind closed doors, every scene we threw at this set looked wonderfully authentic and weighty. If you want a 48-inch OLED TV and value cinematic authenticity, the Panasonic Z90B is currently the one to get.”

The only reason we have stopped recommending it is that stock appears to have evaporated atypically early, making it near impossible to buy, unless you’re willing to grab a second-hand or display set.

We have asked retailers and Panasonic if any new stock will appear, and why it has sold out so fast, and we will keep you updated on what we find out.

Either way, while we think the 42-inch LG C5 is still more than enough OLED for most movie fans tight on space, its ascension to our buying guide isn’t the same cause for unbridled celebration it might normally be. And the early loss of the Z90B isn't a good thing for buyers in general. There are very few good, small OLED TVs around in general, after all.

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