It's a quick question
When was the last time you actually watched TV in a pitch black room in perfect conditions
Yeah, me neither. Typically when I'm watching TV, my kids have every light on
I got sun coming in from the windows. It is like light chaos
Nobody's sitting in darkness, optimizing for picture quality. And that's kind of exactly why conventional wisdom about which TV tech to buy is wrong
for most people. I've been running a $3,500 OLED and a $1,600 mini-LED in real-world conditions
So movie nights, Rams games with every light on, gaming sessions that have gone way too late
And the results weren't that close, actually. Plus, there's new tech that I saw at IFA that I think is going to change the TV game
But I'll get to that. So for years, the TV advice has always been
OLED if you want the best blacks, then mini LED if you want brightness and size, but something
shifted this past year, and I don't think that most people who don't follow this tech closely
have caught on. The gap closed in some key areas and totally vanished in a few cases
and sometimes it actually flipped. OLED has not been sitting around idle. Everyone else kind of
dunked on it for being too dim. New OLED flagship, specifically the LG G5, Samsung's really awesome
S95F, are using new panel tech that hits ish 2200 to sometimes 2500 nits now. And that is a massive
jump. I had the LG G5 in a bright room with Sunday afternoon sun streaming through the windows
My nine-year-old doing homework with every overhead light on in our kitchen. I could still see that
picture perfectly. I know that might be a unique scenario, but suffice to say, super bright
picture looked great, and that used to not be possible. OLED's biggest weakness just got way
less weak, but mini LED still goes almost surface of the sun brighter. Sony Bravia 9
Hisense U8QG, can hit 3,000 to 5,000 nits. If your living room is bright during the day
the extra brightness matters, I think more than most people would think. So, quick set change
Speaking of managing kind of everything in a bright Southern California house, the TV, the kids, my busy Rams and Lakers schedule
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Here's what actually surprised me the most after testing these new sets. Mini LED blacks have gotten
really good. The blooming, where you kind of get those halos around bright stuff, especially on
dark backgrounds. You can still find them if you're hunting for problems, but during normal
watching, it's not there anymore at all. OLED still wins in a dark room though. Each pixel
it's OLED, makes its own light. And when something is supposed to be black, the pixel is just off
Pure darkness. I was watching Dune on both, and that movie has a ton of low light scenes
and OLED just looked cleaner. Those moments where you're trying to see faces in dim rooms or details
and shadows. OLED stays perfectly even across the whole screen. Oh, with mini LED tech, you could
possibly see some inconsistencies with the panel brightness. Sometimes you get like little patches
where one zone's slightly brighter or dimmer than it should be. It's not all that common
especially in higher end mini LED sets. We can sometimes see it in some mid-tiered entry level
mini LED sets. So if you're like me and you plan your, you know, your life around days, whether it's
rams on sunday or lakers during the week mini led i think is the move this year the extra brightness
means afternoon games look incredible even with the sun coming through uh the vivid colors
everything felt more dynamic and if you're the type who has like espn on the background all day
with that ticker running no stressing about burn it at all even if it's not that common anymore
especially on modern oled sets so the tvs that i would recommend uh sony bravia 9 and the samsung
QN90F would be my picks if you're looking for a sports first setup, which was high on a priority
for me. Movies though, OLED is still the winner if you can control the lighting. Pixels go from
completely off to fully on instantly. There's a riches to the image that mini LED kind of
approximates but doesn quite match I recommend the LG G5 a Samsung S95F or this guy the Sony Bravia 8 Mark II And because those are flagship sets you also getting flagship processors which in a lot of cases will upscale some content
So, and it's not always about the panel, sometimes about the processors, but the flagship processors in any of those OLED sets
pretty good. But there's kind of a small caveat, I guess, to the movie night part. Mini LED closes the gap fast
And I think in particular, the Sony Bravia 9 handles movies really really well. You lose a bit of that perfect contrast but
you do gain brightness and impact. I think for a lot of people watching movies that trade-off is
probably going to be worth it. Gaming though is where I think the gap is like almost non-existent
and gotten super small. OLED's got the speed advantage, zero response time, perfect motion
instant pixel response and if you're playing competitive shooters or anything where like milliseconds matter. That edge, like, can be real. But mini-LED caught up absolutely everywhere else
4K, 120Hz VRR, low input lag, all that stuff works great now. The real difference, I thought
was stress levels. Static HUDs, pause screens left too long, playing the same game for months
Mini-LED does not care, will never be a problem. OLED probably wouldn't be a problem either
Modern OLEDs don't have issues with kind of the screen protections, but if you're the type who
worries about burn-ins and that kind of thing, Mini LED removes that entirely. Competitive players
who want maximum performance go OLED. Everyone else, Mini LED saves money and maybe some headaches
Viewing angles, OLED totally dominates. You can sit almost anywhere the picture looks the same
so if you have a big couch, people sit everywhere. That's definitely a concern. Color accuracy holds
Brightness doesn't shift. Contrast stays intact. Mini LED still, all these years later, has that LCD thing where if you're not in the sweet spot, picture does tend to wash out
It has gotten better in the newer models. They're pretty good off-axis, but it is still definitely not as good as sitting just straight in the middle
Price matters here. A solid mid to upper tier flagship mini LED for 65 inch will run $1,400 to less than $2,000, maybe $1,900
Same size OLED, you're closer to $2,200 and then goes up from there
And that $800 to $1,000 difference is really significant. You scale up to 77 or 80 plus inches and OLEDs get really expensive really fast
Mini LED lets you go bigger without the premium. And for most people, the performance gap does not justify the extra cost at all
But one thing that I haven't talked about yet, I was in Berlin early this year for the IFA trade show
Somebody who loves TV technologies. I saw something that like stopped me dead in my tracks
It was RGB Mini LED from Hisense. You might have heard of micro RGB, Samsung, TCL, Sony
They're all working on it. And technically it's different technology than like RGB mini LED, but in the same sense that like QD OLED and OLED are technically different technologies, but similar enough
So normal mini LED uses blue LEDs behind the screen, then relies on filters to create red and green
RGB mini LED actually uses real red, green, and blue LEDs as a backlight
So it pure color right from the source The Hisense version hits 97 of the BT 2020 color space and it does ish 10 nits of brightness So that double what current already eye mini LEDs can do
I saw Samsung's version in person, which was the micro RGB. Also, people kept asking if it was OLED
It's not. It just looked that good. Biggest caveat I can give, though, is right now that technology
is dumb expensive. So that's a lot of money. Also huge sizes. The tech is here. It works and it will
trickle down to smaller, more affordable sets. If you can wait another year or two, this is actually
what's coming. I think it might deliver on that promise of OLED black with mini LED brightness
that I think we've been chasing for years. So after all that, like a real testing, here's what
I actually learned. The expensive OLED lost the cheaper mini LED and almost every real world
scenario, I threw at it. Bright room, sports, daytime TV, mixed lighting conditions. The only
time OLED generally won was in a dark room watching movies. That was it. That's the list. I don't do
competitive gaming, so that wasn't a concern for me. And I think that means for most people in most
rooms watching most content, Mini-L80 is probably the better buy. It's not the compromised buy
It's probably the better buy. If you watch movies in the dark and that's your primary thing
get an OLED. LG G5, Samsung S95F, Sony Bravia 8 Mark II. If you're an OLED person, those are the
top. Now there are tiers down that still give you the OLED awesomeness. If you watch sports
get a mini LED. And I think that should be a really easy decision. Sony Bravia 9, Samsung QN90F
Hisense UHQG, the brightness and color pop make sports look better. And you won't think twice
about that static ticker at the bottom. If you game competitively and want every possible advantage
get OLED for that response time. If you game casually and don't want to stress about burning
get mini LED and just save the money. And if you're just normally watching TV
a mix of everything in a room with windows and lights, like most people, for the first time
I think mini LED is a way to go. I think you'll be happier with it in situations
that will happen in your daily TV watching life. The truth that nobody wants to say out loud
and I'm sure I'm going to hear it in the comments, is that OLED became the answer to a question
most people stopped asking. What looks best in a pitch black room
It was a great question in 2015. Less relevant when you've got kids doing homework
sun coming through windows, and the light's on because you're not living in a cave
Mini LED solved the problem I think a lot of people have. An RGB, mini LED, micro RGB
is about to make this whole debate I think look kind of quaint. Give it a year or two for prices and sizes to drop
You might finally have a TV that just does everything right. But right now, if you're spending money, sort of know what you actually watch and how and where you actually watch it
That's the only thing that matters. I have links to down below. There are budget options I didn't talk about, high-end options
All that information will be down below if you want to click on it or learn more about TVs. I know this is a topic that's going to make some people upset
OLED people feel real passionately about. but I think it's a testament to not what's happened with OLED, but to how good sort of the LED side has gotten
That's even a question now of which one you should get, not a definite answer of absolutely which one you should get