Wow! LG won. Congrats! Maybe time for me to get back the E9 that I returned in anticipation of GZ2000. Cheaper too.Results:
Best Living Room TV: Panasonic GZ2000
Best Home Theater TV: Panasonic GZ2000
Best HDR TV: LG C9
Best Gaming TV: LG C9
Best TV of 2019: LG C9
Huh? When? Do I get to watch the Super Bowl in HDR anytime soon? (I know, we're talking streaming shows and movies not live sports but just sayin'). For most people, HD SDR is gonna be the bulk of their viewing for a little while longer, I suspect. Sports/broadcast for sure, and also the general disparity between the size of the catalog of what's available on Blu-ray vs. Ultra HD Blu-ray (for the home theater/movie crowd).Thanks to the all the people involved in making it another great event. That was fantastic and the blind format went off without a hitch. Credit to the whole team for being creative and taking feedback into making each event better than the previous years'.
What was the biggest advantage of the blind test? The virtual elimination of confirmation bias is what I'd say. People were actually discussing differences and inquisitive on what they see certain things on display vs another. This was a contrast to previous years where the audience was mainly justifying their purchase or trying to imprint their brand preference onto others. Not in some aggressive manner mind you, just a subconscious baggage we all carry.
I've been paying very little attention to the new batch of sets so it was very much a blind test to me thus I was mainly concerned with what I was seeing on screen. If wish I could see how my score related to the overall findings but I think it'd be close.
My personal take is as follows so feel free to get offended at your own discretion:
A. Samsung Q90R. It's *only* use case is bright viewing in a reflective room. If that's your main use case, go for it! As soon as lights go dim or it's asked to handle dark content, it's game over. I have no idea what it costs but unless it's 50% lower than the cheapest OLED on stage, absolutely no would be my take on this.
B. Panasonic GZ200. Very solid all around. The two things that I would have a hard time getting over; it's over dimming of static logo's and it's banding issue due to Panasonic over driving the panel to hit high nits. Both pieces are clearly visible and would start grating after a while. Price difference is virtually impossible to justify.
C. LG C9. Easily the star of the show. Either on par or ahead in most areas. The set I'd take except for one big issue. Vertical lines on black content. Vincent mentioned that was the 2nd panel and the 1st one had even worse lines. If this is a LG processing issue, I'd be concerned. Lower on the list is the low apl handling of highly compressed dark content such as S8 Ep3 of Game of Thrones.
D. Sony AG9. It's failure on HDR tone mapping is unacceptable and the fact that Sony doubles down on it's being the right way tells me it's not for me. It's smooth gradation advantage of years past has been more or less matched by LG now. Hard to say what they're left with at this stage unless you have a preference for their method of HDR.
As SDR content becomes a thing of the past, upscaling of SDR has little to no relevance and all the sets did a great job of scaling up 1080i/p content to 4k so no real magic to be had there.
Did the C9 suffered from black crush?I’ll echo Roberts comments in thanking all involved. Blind testing is fascinating having never tried it before.
The majority of the tests was splitting hairs but some were obvious e.g. the stars in ‘Beautiful Planet’ and the 10,000 nit HDR gaming which LG looked a class above the rest in colour impact.
I took a photo of the Panasonic HDR banding issue in ‘The Meg’ that surprised us. It disappears at reduced nit levels which we only found out at the end of the day.
My guess of which set were which had the LG and Panasonic flipped as the LG appeared to crush blacks a little more which I knew was a Panasonic trait from previous shootouts i’d attended.
Congrats to LG.
For me , the brand that I expected to win certainly won it, the Panasonic gz2000 best home theatre TV like previous years and that's what my target usage is, I don't play games or want HDMI 2.1 right now. Compared to Sony, i think lg's hdr can have a little better impact, especially Dolby vision, hdr10 is very scene/tone mapping dependent. While LG has the better OS and gaming features compared to the other two as well, might be relevant to some people, to me they are not, I'm purely looking at the tv as a movie display in a dark room, the Panasonic gz2000 it is. I own a ag9 but I had (or will have in the future) the money to swap it for a Panasonic gz2000,. I will do it.^Wow, lets just keep throwing stuff up against the wall and see what sticks. It was a blind test and sure the sets were calibrated...this is not LG first win at a shootout, if the results showed the opposite, I bet no one would say anything...give me a break.
When a certain brand loses, their are always those who just want to come up with ways to poke holes in the way the shootout was conducted, neither shootouts are infallible and dont satisfy all period...no one should let a shootout determine their purchase. Sony won the US shootout, LG won the European won...
LG won, it Was a scientific shootout and it was fair...get over it.