TV Brand ranking update: two+ years later

Finally here the post promised two submissions ago, and also an update (2+ years later) to the TV rankings from last post.

This update considers the following use cases from RTings.com:

1. 4K Gaming
2. PC Monitor
3. Sports
4. HDR Gaming
5. TV Shows
6. Movies

The Best Outdoor TVs category was not included in my ranking calculation because a full listing with a specific single score for that category seems to be missing.

The scoring works the same way as in last post, and that means: for each of those six Rtings.com usage categories, I simply find the first position where a TV brand appears on the corresponding scoring table. There are six categories, so that means there will be exactly six such numbers for each brand. Those six numbers get averaged per brand, and that will be the brand score. Simplistic interpretation: the lower the score, the better the brand.

As of today I get the following results, clustering the brands in tiers somewhat arbitrarily and manually by proximity:

Tier 1:
#1: LG with 2.17 (S.Korea)
#2: Samsung with 5.00 (S.Korea)
#3: Sony with 6.00 (Japan) 

Tier 2 (updated: this tier has spread out scores, but no need for three tiers really)
#4: Vizio with 14.50 (USA)
#5: Hisense with 25.33 (China) 
#6: TCL with 39.17 (China) 

(Keep in mind that for example Panasonic cannot be included in this ranking because RTings.com does not review TVs from Panasonic. Clearly it also does not review all TVs out there on the market.) 

We can comment quite a few things about this update to the rankings. Two years ago, or rather almost three, LG (South Korea) was #1, and Sony (Japan) was #2. Right now South Korea is hogging the top two places all for itself with LG and Samsung. The latter, who has been pushing QLEDs as allegedly the better technology against OLED for the last few years, not only crawled up from #4 to #2 surpassing Vizio and Sony, it is now allegedly also preparing an OLED offering: a sort of hybrid between OLED and Samsung's own "quantum dots". That ought to shake up things in that Tier 1, specially between the two South Korean giants.

As of today, the general consensus still is that OLED TVs offer the best image quality. And regardless of the OLED TV brand, all of them currently have a South Korean, LG-manufactured OLED panel. The technology offering the next best image quality after OLED is QLED, as from Samsung at #2 above. South Korea all over the iron throne.

Japan on the other hand, well... it's complicated.

Even if [1]: Japan was the first one to announce plans for 4K as well as 8K broadcast TV;
Even if [2] first Pioneer (Kuro plasma TV) from Japan, and then Panasonic (eventually got all plasma patents from Pioneer,) also from Japan, brought Plasma TV to the highest consumer image quality levels ever seen before OLED;
Even if [3]: Panasonic has won some international TV face-off competitions with its OLED TVs against Sony and LG;
and finally,
Even if [4]: Sony is now showing off an almost 6 million dollar modular super huge display... 

In spite of all that, again, Sony as well as Panasonic, any other Japanese brands (Toshiba and Sharp come to mind,) as well as all other brands in the world, currently still depend on LG panels for their OLED options. Quite a position of power over the industry for South Korea. Of course, the display panel is not everything on a TV. The image processing circuitry feeding images to that panel is crucial, and Sony as well as Panasonic seem to have some major tech strongholds there behind the panels, in particular with respect to motion control, color/shade gradations, and choice of tone mapping curves for HDR.

Vizio (USA) is offering great budget/best value options, catching up as far as image quality goes. And Hisense and TCL (both from China) appear now on the rankings, also seemingly catching up with respect to image quality for very competitive budget options.

While the rumour mentioned above about Samsung considering an OLED offering is circulating, now there is also some growing hype about the upcoming MICROLED technology, which should match OLED's perfect blacks, while offering much higher brightness levels, yet no permanent burn-in risks whatsoever. So basically, it will combine the best features of the two current best technologies (OLED and QLEDs,) while completely overcoming their respective shortcomings. Sounds like a holy grail, but we'll have to see how it delivers, and most importantly, how much it will cost.

I find the modular approach to building very large displays a particularly interesting development. The super huge screen from Sony is shown at the beginning of this post. Both Sony and Samsung have recently showed off prototypes based on that approach, and it really sounds very promising. It would allow consumers to flexibly and progressively build up and "grow" their desired screen size whenever they are ready to do so, and to whatever larger size they want. Let's say you start with a modest 55" screen, but then over time, and assuming enough money and space, you make that grid become a 100", 200", or even a larger display covering an entire wall, not by replacing your TV, but by adding more "screen tiles" to your existing TV. Important to realize that apparently no one ever complains about getting too large a screen, it's rather the very opposite. So screen size plays quite a major role in the consumer market. This modular approach might turn out to be a clear win-win for manufacturers as well as consumers.

Hopefully some sort of calibration ought to take care of proper brightness and color uniformity across all those tiles in those grids at all brightness levels, even if the tiles might come from different production batches finalized years from one another. Those uniformity issues might be one of the main possible problems for this modular/incremental approach, together with the difficulty of achieving perfect separation invisibility (or "seamlessness") between adjacent tiles. In any case, when such a grid/tiled based display becomes a desirable option even for colorist and film makers when they need professional reference monitors for their work, only then we'll know that these displays are among the very best that technology can offer for ultimate image quality.

Until then... 

Well, let's at least wait for Microleds, even if not modular, and let's also wait for that new hybrid OLED-QLED offer from Samsung.

Before all that, this updated ranking based on RTings.com scores might give an approximate idea of how the biggest players are standing right now against one another with respect to TV technology.