Major U.S. electronics retailer Value Electronics has just completed its 2026 TV shootout event – and the results have sent shockwaves through the AV world.
The Value Electronics TV shootout has become a major date on the AV industry calendar since the first one took place in 2004, building its reputation on its format of assembling judging teams of industry experts and journalists to cast judgment on a collection of the year’s most acclaimed and high profile TVs, all running side by side in a direct head to head format. So the announcement that Samsung has finally managed in 2026 to overcome the dominance in recent shootout years of rival brands such as Sony, LG and Panasonic can be considered very big news.
Especially as the victory of Samsung’s 65S95H OLED TV comes in the context of a shootout that featured more TVs than usual – an expansion initiated in response to the arrival of new RGB LED TVs on the TV market alongside the more established OLED and LCD alternatives. In fact, three of the six contenders in this year’s Value Electronics TV shootout were RGB LED models, with the other three all using premium OLED screens built on either the Quantum Dot or Primary RGB Tandem versions of OLED technology.
The three OLED models pitched against each other for the shootout were the Samsung QN65S95H, the LG OLED65G6, and the Sony K65XR80M2, while the three RGB LED screens were the Samsung MRN75R95H, the Sony Bravia 9 II (K75XR90M2) and the LG 75MRGB95B. All six TVs were professionally calibrated before head to head testing began, and they were accompanied for reference purposes by no less than four of Sony’s BVM-X3110H professional mastering monitors.
All the TVs were put through their paces using a selection of test signals and real-world content, before the team of expert judges were invited to provide scores across a range of separate standard and high dynamic range picture quality areas. With SDR the categories were: Shadow detail; Linearity; Low luminance saturation; skin tones & general accuracy; clarity and grain preservation; and motion handling. For HDR the categories were: Shadow detail; HDR Tone Mapping & luminance; Low luminance saturation; high luminance WCG colour; posterization and quantization; and motion handling. The average scores across all these categories were then obtained to find the overall winners in each SDR and HDR category.
Having been pipped by a fraction to the HDR performance title by Panasonic’s Z9B in 2025’s shootout, Samsung managed to get over the line quite comfortably this time round, with its 65S95H OLED model topping the league for both SDR and HDR content, leaving it the clear overall winner too. In fact, in the HDR section the 65S95H really crushed the competition, scoring .7 of a point higher (on a 1-5 scale) on its overall average score than its nearest rival, the Sony K75XR90M2 (Bravia 9 II). The Samsung OLED only beat Sony’s K65XR80M2 OLED by .1 for SDR playback, but even that still counts as a strong achievement against a TV as widely acclaimed as that Sony OLED.
Sony did manage to come out a comfortable winner of the RGB LED section of the shootout with its Bravia 9 II, but the Samsung OLED TV’s scores were comfortably the best of the six TVs together. In fact, neither the Samsung 75R95H, LG 75MRGB95B or, most surprisingly of all, the LG OLED65G6 managed to achieve overall scores of four or more for either their HDR or SDR performances.
While the Samsung QN65S95H won the best overall TV award, it is worth adding that OLED and LCD TVs don’t necessarily suit the same target markets; if they did there wouldn’t seem to be much point in all the brands included in this shootout selling TVs that use different core technologies. This shootout’s methodology of mastering monitors and professionally calibrated TVs suggests, though, that OLED remains at least the technology of choice for home theater enthusiast set ups. Though Sony’s Bravia 9 II and to some extent Samsung’s MRN75R95H can perhaps both be considered to have performed well considering they are essentially debut versions of a new screen technology.
Below you can find the full table of scores for all six TVs across all the SDR and HDR voting categories:
“This year’s TV Shootout® clearly demonstrated just how far premium television technology has advanced,” says Robert Zohn, President of Value Electronics. “Our goal has always been to provide consumers with an impartial evaluation under identical viewing conditions, allowing the televisions to speak for themselves.” Zohn adds, “This was the right year to recognize OLED and Micro RGB [RGB LED] TVs separately. Both technologies represent the very best in premium television performance, and each has unique strengths. The competition was very close and the results reflect the exceptional engineering and innovation that continues to push video performance to new levels.”
—
