Hail to the new King!

[donaldk]

Plasma is now finally overtaken by the LG WRGB OLED panel based TVs from LG and Panasonic. In a November 7 shootout organised by UK reviewsite HDTVtest.co.uk, the flat LG 65EF9500 and curved Panasonic TX-65CZ950 OLED TVs were pitted against the last premium Plasma from Panasonic the 2013 TC-P60ZT60. 28 HDTV enthousiast viewers formed a panel to judge the three calibrated displays side-by-side. Two review forms were discarded, making for a panel of 26 testviewers. 12 selected the Panasonic OLED as the best performing display, 11 chose the LG, and three prefered the Panasonic plasma.

Panasonic designed its own panel adressing and processing electronics, for what is a flagship, proof of merit and ability display, that will cost €10K, which should allow one to buy almsot two LGs. So, one would expect the Panasonic to win by a wider margin, but it is curved, something that at the relatively small screensize of 64.9" TVs offers no benefit while reducing viewing angles and associated color shift and contrast. Secondly the LG supports HDR, albeit at limited peak brightness, and the Panasonic is awaiting a firmware update to support HDR.

Brighter whites and darker blacks are also strenghts of the new OLED TVs, only points the Plasma scored were for near black screen uniformity and detail.

HDTVTest.co.uk, is yet to publish the full results of the shoot-out but inital resuklts are available at Forbes.

[donaldk]

And more results from HDTVtest:

Perhaps more surprising was how close the LG EF9500 ran the Panasonic CZ950, especially considering that the former can be bought for less than half the price of the latter at this time of writing. The Panasonic OLED exhibited less vignetting and vertical banding in dark scenes than the LG, but suffered from a faint vertical yellow band on the right side on a full-white screen, which thankfully was mostly unnoticeable in real-life content.<\q>

The Panasonic wins on pure color and black representation, but is still lacking HDR and a flat surface.

Outright colour accuracy was also better on the Viera 65CZ952, though the LG 65EF950V’s colours could be calibrated (using a specific technique) to a reasonably accurate level that’s not too dissimilar to those displayed by the Panasonic CZ952 and ZT65. The Panasonic OLED delivered superior above-black handling versus the LG: while some attendees praised the 65EF950 for revealing more shadow detail than the TX-65CZ952B, we thought that the LG was actually displaying them too brightly (and occasionally floated blacks even after we’d checked and rechecked that we used the correct [Brightness] setting using a PLUGE pattern), and the Panasonic was more accurate to the source.<\q>