While QLED does have superior peak brightness, I don’t think that’s really its strongest selling point. What it does best is sustaining what Samsung calls “colour volume”.
OLED is capable of reaching quite respectable brightness levels these days (around 1000 nits) but it achieves that by using an RGBW sub-pixel structure - each pixel consists not just of a red, a green and a blue sub-pixel, but also a white one. As the brightness level gets higher, more and more of the light being produced comes from the white sub-pixel; and what that means is that, as the brightness level rises, OLED steadily loses colour saturation. QLED is able to achieve the same level of colour saturation at peak brightness that it does close to black.
It’s worth checking out the available viewing angles as well. LCD displays (such as QLED) tend to suffer from poorer viewing angles - meaning they look great if you’re looking at them from straight ahead, put performance degrades as you move off-axis.
Well my procrastination has ended.
I finally visited a Richersounds this afternoon and ended up buying a LG C9
The picture on the Samsung Q90R did look a little better in their very bright showroom however it wasn’t £500 better which was the price difference now that the C9 has received a £200 price cut this week and I’m unlikely to be viewing in such bright conditions.
I also got a £125 gift voucher, free weekend delivery and a 6 year warranty thrown in as well.
For those in the UK I would highly recommend visiting Richersounds for your AV needs if you’re close to one of their stores, I’ve (touch wood) never had a bad experience with them and to give an example of their ethics the sales assistant I dealt with today actually undersold to me, I was prepared for the hard sell for the expensive QLED when the guy knew the sets I was interested in, but after finding out my needs he recommended cheaper OLED’s and let me have a play around with all the sets on display, then he just let me make my mind up, no hard sell just good advice when I asked questions.
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Yup. I never go anywhere else.
The question to me is do I prefer 5 years and John Lewis after sales or 6 years and richer sounds aftercare.
The implication that John Lewis offer better after sales care.
John Lewis is my other go to store for electronics, I actually have a small claim to fame with them,
a few years back I was working next door to their flagship Oxford Street store on the UK launch day of the MS Surface Pro 4,
I had been waiting for that day as I wanted a SP4 so walked in a minute or two after they opened and purchased said tablet, they wanted to take my picture and use it for promotional purposes as I was the first person who’d purchased a Pro 4 in the UK, but when there was no offer of a reduction in price I politely declined lol.
I’ve never had a problem with after sales with either chain but I have had the hard sell in John Lewis.
Richer Sounds’ warranty is sometimes not worth the paper it’s printed on. If a TV goes wrong in a way that can repaired, then they’ll repair it and everything is fine. But if it can’t be repaired, what they then do is to take the fraction of the six years that remains, and give you that fraction of the second-hand value of the TV. So, if it breaks irreparably after 4 years, you will get back only one third of the second-hand sale value of a 4 year-old television, which likely won’t be much.
For anyone who is in the same quandary as I was I can say I’m mighty glad I chose the OLED set.
Even before having the set calibrated and whilst still faffing around with settings the picture quality is superb, my fears about being the picture being too dark in a moderately brightish room were unfounded.
After being used to LED backlit LCD’s for the past few years the contrast took an hour or two to get used to, it is much better than LCD but different enough to be noticeable at first.
A slight minor point is if using a PC on it like I am doing now the anti screen burn technology is quite noticeable as the still screen whilst I’m am writing this is getting gradually darker,
this technology is also noticeable when watching sport as the constant on screen graphic for the score gets darker too, but wow the rest of the picture especially grass looks so much more natural than on my previous set which was a reasonably good LG nano cell LCD.
HDR and Dolby Vision have a very clear wow factor too.
Even eARC seems to work well so far, although when I had my Vero 4K+ directly connected to the TV full Dolby Atmos (not Netflix or Amazons versions of it) introduced around a 150 ms delay, but its fine for TV (the only Atmos I’ve tried from broadcast TV is BT Sports UHD channel) and the Netflix and Amazon apps.