Now firmly established as one of the highlights of the AV calendar, the latest Value Electronics TV Shootout for 2024 has just taken place. And by far the biggest winner from the event’s new three-way competition was Sony.
The new format found the 2024 Value Electronics TV shootout split into King Of OLED TV, King Of MiniLED TV, and Best Out-of-the-box Large TV categories. Three TVs competed in each of the MiniLED and OLED categories, with big-screen models from all six of the featured OLED and Mini LED ranges fighting it out separately for the large TV gong. And in all three categories it was a Sony model which – perhaps a little surprisingly in the OLED category’s case, at least – came out on top.
Looking at that OLED category first, the three 65-inch contenders (already shortlisted for their critical acclaim and popularity with AV enthusiasts) were the LG OLED65G4, the Samsung 65S95D, and the Sony 65A95L. The Sony 65A95L came out on top according to the findings of the Shootout’s panel of judges in four of the six categories under consideration: SDR reference performance, HDR General performance, HDR Bright Scenes performance, and Streaming performance. The Samsung model won in the SDR Bright Room and HDR Dark Scenes categories, but the Sony’s final overall score of 8.9 beat out the 8.8 and 8.4 tallies for the Samsung and LG OLED TVs.
The potential surprise here comes from the fact that the Sony 65A95L was actually released in 2023, and so doesn’t benefit from the very latest Quantum Dot OLED panel used in the Samsung 2024-released 65S95D. The LG G4, meanwhile, is also very much a 2024 release that again uses the latest generation of LG Displays’ brightness boosting micro lens array technology. The judges, though, clearly found from their tests that Sony’s expert driving of the 65A95L’s more long-in-the-tooth panel still delivered the most all-round accurate and effective picture quality results.
Switching to the MiniLED category, the three contenders were again all 65-inch models from Sony, Samsung and LG. Sony’s model was the new ‘Bravia 9’ K65XR90, Samsung provided the QN65QN95D, and LG’s entry was the 65QNED90T. Again the Sony model won out across four of the six available categories: SDR Reference, HDR General, HDR Dark scenes, and Streaming. Samsung again took two categories: SDR Bright Room and HDR Bright Scenes, but the overall scores found the Sony on 8.1, the Samsung on 8.0, and the LG on 7.3.
The full scores from the OLED and MiniLED 65-inch screen shootouts are shown below.
The King of OLED and King of MiniLED awards were both based on analysis of screens that had first been calibrated by respected professional calibrators DeWayne Davis (CEO of Audio Video Fidelity) and Classy Tech Calibrations’ Cecil Meade, with a pair of Sony’s new BVM-HX3110 professional mastering monitors on hand to provide a premium frame of reference for the shootout’s judging panel of AV industry luminaries.
For the final big screen shootout, the judges only set each screen to what they considered to be its best out of the box picture preset, rather than having them all fully calibrated. This approach tallies, of course, with the maximum sort of effort that most TV buyers will put into setting their new TVs up! It also, though, provides insight into which picture attributes different manufacturers prioritize when establishing their TV’s presets – and once again the approach of Sony’s A95L, this time in its 77-inch screen size, chimed better with what the Shootout judges were looking for than the presets of any of the other contenders.
Second and third places respectively in the big-screen shootout went to the 83-inch LG OLED83G4 and 77-inch Samsung QN77S95D – meaning that the three OLED contenders all finished ahead of the MiniLED models.
The judges for the 2024 Value Electronics TV Shootout were:
Robert Zohn, founder and president of Value Electronics and a former TV Broadcast Systems Engineer.
Jason Dustal, Field Trainer and ISF Instructor at AVPro Global.
Richard Drutman, writer/producer/director at NYC-based Triode Pictures
Charlie Anderson, award-winning cinematographer with ten feature-length films and countless music videos and commercials under his belt.
David Mackenzie, CEO of Fidelity In Motion, a specialist in mastering films for home video formats including 4K Blu-ray.
David Medina, Director of Encoding Services at Warner Bros Discovery.
Mike Osadciw, one of Canada’s prominent THX/ISF professional video calibrators with over 25 years of experience in consumer and professional video.
Kenneth Almestica, Senior Director Technical Operations at Paramount Brand Creative and a level III ISF Calibrator.
Nilay Patel, technical journalist and cou-founder and editor-in-chief of The Verge
John Reformato, professional ISF level-3-certified video calibrator and consultant, as well as an electric engineer with 23 patents in telecommunications technology.
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Related reading
Sony Bravia 9 LED TV First Look: The Future Is (Seriously) Bright
LG G4 OLED First Look: A Promising Tale Of The Unexpected
Samsung 65S95D Review: It’s OLED, But Not As We Know It
