The Best TV a Normal Person Can Buy Just Went on Sale
Before I came to Popular Mechanics, I was Esquire’s technology editor for 10 years. I saw hundreds of TV demos at CES and other trade shows. I tested dozens in my own apartment-plasmas, LCDs, LED LCDs, an enormous Sony 4K TV that took up an entire wall of our tiny living room. But the one thing that stood out over everything else was OLED.
You’ve probably heard of it, but just in case, a refresher: OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode. Each pixel is self-illuminating, which means each pixel can be turned on or off. (in other TVs the pixels are lit up by back lights, either on the frame of the TV in cheaper models, or from the entire back panel.) Dark sections of your screen can be completely black, even if the areas next to them are bright white. That means the better contrast than other TVs. There’s no motion blur the way there can be on LCDs, because the refresh rate is not an issue. It’s the best picture can get on your TV.
Sony introduced the first consumer OLED TV in 2007. It was 11” on the diagonal and cost more than $2,000. It didn’t take off, mostly because of the price and size. Even when LG and Samsung started producing larger models in 2012, they were still around $8,000.
The price has been slowly going down ever since, and today LG announced that they’re selling the 2018 B8 for an all-time low: $1,499.
You could have it mounted on the wall in time for the Super Bowl.
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