Latest news with #ValueElectronics
Forbes
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The 2025 Value Electronics TV Shootout Results Are In—And The Winner Is…
The latest annual Value Electronics TV Shootout event took place over the weekend, pitting a quartet of 2025's most impressive TVs against both each other and the critical eyes of a judging panel of AV industry experts and luminaries. And after multiple rounds of judging across a variety of standard and high dynamic range picture quality categories, the overall winner was [drum roll please]… the Sony Bravia 8 II. Joining a 65-inch Bravia 8 II for this year's exceptionally heavyweight Value Electronics face off were 65-inch versions of Panasonic's Z95B range, Samsung's S95F range, and LG's G5 range. This for me adds up to the most all-round competitive roster of TVs that Value Electronics has ever put together for one of its shootouts – which of course makes Sony's overall victory with the Bravia 8 II all the more impressive. The judges hard at work during 2025's Value Electronics TV Shootout. The 2025 event took place on Saturday July 26 at Value Electronics' showroom in Scarsdale, New York, and featured all four TVs running side by side to make it easier for the judges to directly evaluate each set's capabilities across a wide range of picture attributes including: SDR Contrast/Grayscale, SDR Color, SDR Processing, SDR Bright Living Room, HDR Dynamic range/EOTF accuracy, HDR color, HDR processing, and HDR Bright Living Room performance. The four TVs were also set alongside, for reference, two of Sony's BVM-HX3110 professional mastering monitors, and each TV was fully calibrated by industry experts to make sure they could deliver their best efforts on a relatively even playing field. The tests comprised a mixture of test patterns and 'real world' content. The judging panel awarded each TV a score from 1 to 5 in each image performance category, with the average mark from the judges' scores becoming that category's final score. The average scores for each category were then themselves averaged out to give each of the four TVs overall average scores for SDR and HDR performance, with the SDR and HDR scores ultimately being added together to give us the final winner. Putting the four contenders through their TV paces at the 2025 Value Electronics shootout. Playing a big part in the Sony Bravia 8 II's overall victory was its SDR performance. It achieved the highest score in two of the four SDR attribute categories, helping it achieve a fairly substantial lead over the second-best rated TV for SDR, Samsung's S95F. Panasonic's Z95B came in right on the Samsung's heels for SDR, with LG's G5 bringing up the rear. Sony's TV didn't actually win the high dynamic range part of the shoot out, though. Here the victor was the Panasonic Z95B, which, like Sony in the SDR category, achieved the highest score in two of the four HDR attribute categories. The other two HDR categories were won by Samsung's S95F, leaving it a hair's breadth - literally .01 of a point - behind the Panasonic with its overall HDR score. Sony came in third for HDR, with the LG fourth. So if you find yourself watching HDR much more than SDR these days, you might want to consider the Panasonic Z95B or Samsung S95F ahead of Sony's overall winner. Final rankings with SDR and HDR scores added together found Samsung's S95F taking second place, Panasonic's Z95B bagging third, and LG's G5 occupying the final spot. Here's the full break down of scores, with the winning total in each category highlighted in yellow: The full set of results from the 2025 Value Electronics TV Shootout. Value Electronics has been a custom A/V integrator since 1998, with a retail showroom in the Village of Scarsdale, NY. Owners Wendy and Robert Zohn created and began sponsoring the annual TV Shootout event in 2004. — Related Reading Sony Unveils New Bravia TVs—Including A Premium QD OLED Range Panasonic Unveils Full 2025 OLED And LCD TV Line Up—Including 'Revolutionary' ThermalFlow OLED Samsung Goes Big On 'Vision AI,' 8K And Lifestyle TVs At CES
The Verge
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Inside the LG G5's shocking last-place finish at the 2025 TV Shootout
The 2025 TV Shootout went down over the weekend, and the results are shocking: yes, the Sony Bravia 8 II won the overall competition and my personal award for silliest name, but the LG G5 came in last place by a huge margin. I was one of the judges, and I think I have a sense of what's going on. If you're not familiar, the TV Shootout is an annual event hosted by Value Electronics, a boutique and high-end home theater store started by Robert and Wendy Zohn in 1998. They've been holding the event for 21 years now, and Robert proudly begins the occasion by holding up his framed registered trademarks for 'TV Shootout' and 'King of TV,' which is the title bestowed on the winner. I've been following the results for years, so it was a real thrill when Robert asked me to judge last year and equally exciting when he asked me back again this year. (As Vergecast and Decoder listeners know, I'm out on parental leave for a few months, but Value Electronics is 15 minutes away from my house and staring at TVs in a dark room for several hours with other display nerds is my personal heaven, so I made a tiny exception.) The event is pretty straightforward: the flagship 65-inch OLED TVs from Sony, LG, Panasonic, and Samsung were each professionally calibrated as closely as possible to reference standards by Dwayne Davis, a professional ISF calibrator familiar to AV forum nerds as D-Nice. The TVs (and MSRP) this year were: Robert had asked many more manufacturers to participate, and most declined, knowing they could not compete. He also excluded mini LED TVs this year after they didn't stack up to the OLEDs last year; he plans to have a separate shootout for those later. The Shootout judges were all professional display experts who work in and around the film industry. Many of them have been judging the Shootout for years now. They were: The rest of the room was filled with engineers and marketing folks from Sony, LG, and Samsung, several YouTubers, and various other display nerds, all paying close attention to the judging and the differences between the displays. The judges were asked to objectively evaluate how closely the images on each set matched a pair of $43,000 Sony BVM-HX3110 professional reference monitors across a number of categories in a very dark room, using both test patterns and real content delivered from a Panasonic Blu-ray player, a Kaleidescape streaming box, and an Apple TV, all switched by an AVPro Edge 8x8 HDMI matrix and delivered over Bullet Train optical HDMI cables. The closer the image was to those BVM reference displays, the higher the score, and the further from the reference, the lower the score. There were categories in which some TVs might have looked subjectively better than the reference displays, particularly in dark scenes where all the TVs tended to boost shadow detail to be more visible. But the judges were instructed to give lower scores for deviating from the reference in either direction. We were also instructed not to compare the TVs to one another, only to the reference monitors. It was only the final category, 'bright room out of the box,' that was totally subjective, and in which we were allowed to compare the TVs to each other. As the name suggests, the shades were opened in the room, and the TVs were set to uncalibrated filmmaker modes with energy-saving features turned off. More on this in a moment. As ever, this means the Shootout ultimately delivers a very specific kind of winner: the TV that can be most closely calibrated to match an expensive professional reference display when viewed in a dark room. We didn't look at anything else at all: not gaming features, number of HDMI inputs, operating systems, or even Dolby Vision support (which the Samsung does not have). This whole thing was about the limits of picture quality and picture quality alone. There are a lot of reasons you might pick any of these TVs that have nothing to do with how closely they can be calibrated to match a reference display, but that's not what the Shootout is about. It's a big upgrade year for OLED TVs: Panasonic is back in the US market with the Z95B, and there are new panel technologies in the mix. LG and Panasonic are using tandem OLED panels for the first time, while Sony and Samsung are using new, brighter QD-OLED panels. (You can pretty easily surmise that Samsung is providing the QD-OLEDs and LG is behind the tandems, but none of the manufacturers will confirm anything.) The underlying commonality of the panels means the Shootout really stresses the image processing differences between the manufacturers, and the results were fascinating. Panasonic had an incredibly strong showing, coming in first on the HDR tests and third overall by only a hair. Sony won the King of TV title for the seventh year in a row, which will do nothing to quell critics who say that measuring how close everything can come to a Sony reference display means Sony will always win. But the Samsung was a very close second, and to my eye, it only really fell behind because Samsung cannot help itself when it comes to colors — everything was generally a little more saturated and vibrant than the reference display. The shocker was the dismal showing by the LG G5, a hotly anticipated set because of that new tandem OLED panel. There's no other way to say it: the G5 basically failed several of the tests, showing the wrong colors on some of the linearity test patterns, big posterization artifacts in dark scenes, a slight green cast that kept reappearing, and an overall tendency to push color and brightness in dark scenes in ways that did not require display nerds to see. The LG made Sansa Stark look like she had a blocky red rash during a particularly dim Game of Thrones scene that the Sony and Samsung handled nearly perfectly. 'There are lots of problems with the LG this year,' said judge Cecil Meade. I heard other judges say, 'Have you seen what the LG is doing?' more than once. Indeed, the G5 was so far off on some of the test patterns that Dwayne reminded the judges that the lowest possible score was 1, not 0. This is generally a bad sign. If I had to explain why the LG did so poorly while the Panasonic did so well using the same panel, I'd put it down to confidence, bordering on cockiness. The test patterns tended to reveal that Panasonic's image processing is strictly by the book — the new kid in school playing exactly by the rules, while the other manufacturers have all learned where they want to push things or make their own choices. A simple example is HDR detail: the Panasonic dutifully accepts the metadata of the HDR content it's presented and doesn't display any detail beyond the listed brightness while all the other manufacturers have learned HDR metadata is often inaccurate, so they read the content directly to figure out how best to display it, which often resulted in additional detail being shown. This might result in a lower technical Shootout score, since it's a deviation from the strict reference image, but TV makers are all doing it because they've learned that consumers will reliably complain about losing detail in the highlights and shadows, not about having too much. These little tricks and tactics are both the result of experience building these displays and what feels like obvious attempts to differentiate in the market. Sony prides itself on reference-level restraint, and it tends to get that result, while Samsung uses the same panel to deliver punched-up Samsung-style colors. And I would say, based on LG's third-place showing in the Shootout last year, that LG has learned a vivid, contrast-y OLED look sells way more TVs than the ability to calibrate closely to a reference display. Everything came to a head in the 'bright room out of box' test, which was fairly controversial in the room. It's a totally subjective test with no real standard to measure against, and all the manufacturers spend almost all their engineering time making sure they look great this way because, well, most people put their TVs in a bright room and never change the settings. There's no way to really rate TVs of this caliber against each other on this test — it really comes down to personal preference. 'They're all fives — they're all bright, they're all colorful. What else is there to say?' said David Mackenzie, a judge on the panel who also helped author the UHD specifications. You can see it in the scores, where the LG managed to pull itself back into contention and the saturated colors of the Samsung pushed it into a commanding lead in the HDR test. I would go so far as to argue the bright room scores are important but should be taken out of the averages that determine the winners, because they're essentially a wild card. And it's true: the fine differences between these sets take a dark room and a lot of time and calibration to see. Anyone just putting one on the wall will undoubtedly be happy with their purchase, especially if you factor things like HDMI ports and Dolby Vision into your decision. I have both Sony and LG OLED TVs that reliably wow everyone who looks at them, and a lot of people love the contrast-y LG OLED look — and LG's cheaper price tags. But if you're chasing reference-level image perfection, it's another year for Sony, while it feels like LG has all but abandoned this particular game. And I'd guess Panasonic is going to put up an even bigger fight next time from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Nilay Patel Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Analysis Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Features Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. 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Tom's Guide
2 days ago
- Tom's Guide
This OLED was just crowned the 'King of TVs' — beating, LG, Samsung and Panasonic
The Sony Bravia 8 II OLED TV stole the show in the 21st annual TV shootout hosted by Value Electronics this past Saturday and was once more crowned "King of TVs." The event brought together four of the best OLED TVs in a bout that covered color, brightness, contrast and more. The TVs up against one another included the Sony Bravia 8 II, Samsung S95F OLED, Panasonic Z95B OLED, and LG G5 OLED. Unlike last year, Value Electronics did not host a secondary panel for LCD screens (which Sony also won with its Bravia 9 Mini-LED TV) but, counting this year's win, Sony has won "King of TV" in some capacity for over seven years running. LG G5 OLED Samsung S95F OLED Sony Bravia 8 II OLED Panasonic Z95B OLED Contrast/Grayscale 3.69 4.38 4.41 3.84 Color 3.84 3.88 3.84 3.97 Processing 3.31 3.66 4.22 3.78 Bright Living Room 4.06 4.19 4.19 4.25 Overall 3.68 4.00 4.16 3.92 LG G5 OLED Samsung S95F OLED Sony Bravia 8 II OLED Panasonic Z95B OLED Dynamic Range/EOTF Accuracy 3.41 3.88 3.94 4.03 Color 2.84 4.13 4.03 4.00 Processing 3.34 3.72 3.53 3.97 Bright Living Room 3.94 4.38 4.19 3.88 Overall 3.30 3.97 3.88 3.98 To determine the victor, a panel of judges rated the TVs on their SDR and HDR performances, scoring TVs out of 5 in terms of their Color, EOTF accuracy, processing, contrast, and "bright living room" performance. You can find the results of the shootout in a PDF on Value Electronics' website, but we've copied the most important results above for your convenience. Although the Sony Bravia 8 II OLED won overall, which makes a whole lot of sense given how its test results blew us away, the Panasonic Z95B OLED was crowned best HDR TV at the show. That's a phenomenal win for a company that only just returned to the US market last year. (Note: Panasonic opted out of the competition in 2024.) Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. It's also interesting to see just how poorly the LG G5 did. It had some of the lowest votes in the shootout across most categories, especially in its color, processing, and EOTF accuracy, the latter of which is a test to see how accurately a TV reproduces brightness levels. Samsung's S95F OLED TV wasn't far behind in SDR, but even with that special anti-glare coating, the Panasonic Z95B still beat it in the bright living room category, which I found particularly intriguing. And on the HDR front, the S95F wasn't too far behind the Z95B, which beat it out by just one decimal point. While Sony wrapped up a win, Samsung and Panasonic put up a good fight.
Tom's Guide
28-06-2025
- Tom's Guide
I review OLED TVs for a living — and this 3-year-old Sony is still one of my favorites I'd buy
There has been no shortage of excellent TVs that've launched in 2025. Specifically when it comes to new OLEDs, the Samsung S95F and LG C5 are among the best TVs ever tested here at Tom's Guide. But newer doesn't always necessarily mean better. In fact, when it comes to recommending premium TV picks to friends, family and readers, it's a 3-year-old set that's often at the top of my list. I'm referring to the Sony A95L, a flagship QD-OLED TV originally released back in 2023 that you can still buy brand-new today. Yes, Sony technically replaced the A95L with the 2025 Bravia 8 II OLED TV. But the successor only comes in 55- and 65-inch configurations. To accommodate those looking for bigger screens, Sony decided to keep the 77-inch A95L in its QD-OLED lineup. And there are a few reasons I think that was a pretty smart move, especially considering I recently introduced it into my own living room. When it originally launched, the A95L set a new standard for premium OLED TVs. It combined Samsung's QD-OLED panel technology with Sony's best-in-class Cognitive Processor XR. The result was a TV with unmatched color volume, excellent peak brightness for HDR content, near-perfect motion handling, and Sony's signature cinematic image tuning. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. I don't think anyone in the TV community was shocked when it won the Value Electronics annual TV Shootout event, being crowned the 'king of 4K TVs' by a panel of reviewers and display experts. At the time, it felt like this OLED was in league of its own. The Sony Bravia A95L is a QD-OLED TV that excels with every kind of content, every time. In our Sony Bravia XR A95L QD-OLED TV review we said the Editor's Choice TV offers superlative picture and top-notch sound. That clear distinction is why I think, a few years later, it remains a great choice. Our lab tests confirmed near-100% coverage of the P3 color gamut and outstanding Rec.2020 performance when it comes to HDR. Simply put, the A95L didn't leave much room for improvement. Sony A95L Sony Bravia 8 II HDR Brightness (10%, in nits) 1215 1584 UHDA-P3 Gamut Coverage 99.95 100 Rec. 2020 Gamut Coverage 89.41 90.55 Input Lag (ms) 16.1 16.3 The new Bravia II did rise to the occasion with a healthy degree of upgrades, but it's not nearly enough to render the A95L irrelevant as we've seen some other TV manufacturers do with the progression of their OLED lineups year over year. As the close test results above show, the A95L doesn't make customers sacrifice quality much for prioritizing a larger screen size. And if those customers happen to be gamers like me, the A95L offers 4K at 120 Hz, VRR and Auto Low Latency Mode over two HDMI 2.1 ports, plus PlayStation-specific features that optimize HDR and picture modes on the fly. Input lag measures a smooth 16 ms, and for me, the gaming experience has only increased my appreciation for the A95L as my console's monitor. It's rare to recommend a three-year-old TV, but the A95L is that kind of product. It's a no-compromises display with longevity built in, especially if you're serious about upgrading your home theater space and have an appetite for a big-screen gaming TV. Sony's TV division has always prioritized picture fidelity over flashy upgrades, and the A95L is a testament to that approach. Even in 2025, it remains one of the most visually stunning displays you can buy. It may not be new, but it's still among the best — as long as 77 inches fits your wall and your budget.
