The Crampton & Moore/ HDTVTest 2017 TV shootout event took place in Greater London on Sunday the 13th of August, with Panasonic, LG and Sony scooping awards. The Panasonic EZ1002 pipped the LG B7 OLED to be crowned the “Best TV of 2017” after accumulating the highest score across all eight judging categories for picture quality.
43 participants attended the public shootout event, of whom 33 votes were counted (the other ten non-voting attendees comprised five latecomers and five manufacturer representatives). They were asked to assign a score of 1 to 5 to every TV for each judging category/ subcategory after looking at carefully curated video clips that were displayed on all the televisions through an 8-way distribution amplifier kindly loaned by CYP Europe. Price was not a consideration throughout the voting process.
The five TVs compared side by side were (arranged from left to right alphabetically but split into OLEDs and LED LCDs) the LG OLED65B7V, the Panasonic TX-65EZ1002B, the Sony KD-65A1, the Samsung QE65Q9F and the Sony KD-65ZD9. All are 65-inch, 4K HDR retail sets which had been run in for at least 200 hours to minimise drifting after calibration which was carried out with the help of Tyler Pruitt from Portrait Displays using two Klein K10-A meters profiled to a JETI Spectraval 1511 reference spectroradiometer, as well as SpectraCal’s CalMAN Ultimate software. A Sony BVM-X300 4K HDR professional broadcast monitor was also present for reference purposes during selected judging categories.
The first award that was up for grabs was “Best Home Theatre TV”, honouring the display that delivered the best picture quality with a pristine source (1080p Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray) in a darkened environment for critical viewing. Scores from the “Contrast Performance”, “Colour Accuracy” and “Near-Black Uniformity” categories were totted up, and the Panasonic EZ1002 (the only OLED with an effective colour management system which did not introduce posterisation artefacts at higher settings) emerged victorious with 13.67 points, followed by the Sony A1 with 12.63 points.
Recognising that not everyone has the luxury of watching high quality sources in a light-controlled room, a “Best Living Room TV” award had been designed to celebrate the television that dealt with compressed sources best in a brighter environment. The Sony A1 OLED (15.89 points) walked away with this award on the strength of its exemplary video processing which upscaled, suppressed posterisation and handled compressed video better than the competition. The Panasonic EZ1002 was the runners-up for this award with 15.45 points.
Up next, both the “Best Gaming TV” and “Best HDR TV” awards were won by LG’s B7 OLED television. The former result was totally unsurprising, given the OLED65B7’s very low input lag of 21ms, smearing-free motion owing to OLED’s near-instantaneous pixel response time, and general pop from true 0 cd/m2 blacks even in HDR mode.
Perhaps more unexpected was how the LG 65B7 pulled more votes than the 1800-nit Sony ZD9 in the HDR category. Three types of HDR scenes were shown, namely a dark sequence from Sicario, two 1000-nit scenes from Kingsman: The Secret Service and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and two 4000-nit scenes from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Pacific Rim.
The OLED televisions naturally had the upper hand in dark-scene HDR rendition, but among the three OLEDs, the LG B7 performed best with 1000-nit and 4000-nit HDR footage thanks to its reduced ABL (Automatic Brightness Limiter) restriction, not to mention dynamic tone-mapping that retained most specular highlight details. Even though we explained during the shootout that tone-mapping 4000-nit HDR content is a function of balancing brightness and highlight detail, and that there’s no standard for tone-mapping anyway, the attendees favoured LG’s retention of specular highlights over Sony’s approach of maintaining overall brightness but clipping some bright highlight detail.
LG’s triumph in the HDR category marks a spectacular reversal of fortune from last year where the company’s E6 OLED – hampered by subpar tone-mapping – was beaten by the LED LCDs (Samsung KS9500 and Panasonic DX902) in 2016’s TV shootout.
After the scores from all eight judging categories were added up, the Panasonic 65EZ1002B was the winner with 32.99 points, and thus took home the much-coveted “Best TV of 2017” gong. The LG OLED65B7 came a very close second with 32.28 points. The 0.71-point difference was averaged across 33 voting attendees, so the actual difference in marks was more than 20 points, but considering that the 65in B7 (street price £2,999) costs half the price of the EZ1002 (RRP £5,999), LG’s 2017 OLEDs will surely dominate the minds of propective buyers when value-for-money is taken into account.
Note: If you’re interested in buying any of the TVs in this shootout, please consider purchasing from Crampton & Moore (call 0113 244 6607 and ask for David Conner) who went to great lengths to organise this event and secure the televisions for the shootout. A very big thank you to them – they deserve your continuing support so the next shootout can happen.
@vincent
How did the oled TVs compare to the Sony reference monitor in terms of colour accuracy.
And was their any advantages over the rgb oled monitor against the woled TVs. In terms of picture quality.
Was surprised given the ZD9s HDR results after reading the reviews on this site for the last year – how did YOU feel the sets compared Vincent on HDR?
Were you not in alignment with the crowd?
Given oled’s suffer from burn in should they really be recommended for gaming?
For us consumers it would be perfect to see all scores so that everyone could pick important for them categories and by that buy the sutaible TV ?
Can you do this for us?
How was the LG configured in game mode? Attendees reported on AVS Forum that the LG has more “punch” than the Sony A1 and even the Z9, but in my experience (own a B7), it’s aggressively tone mapping and relatively dim. Was the LG in HDR Game or a PC mode?
Great event. However, the results might be heavily biased if the attendants were able to identify the TVs on their looks. How do you know that the attendants didn’t have a favorite to begin with, or a hidden agenda? The manufacturers have lots to win (and loose) on reviews like this, so buying a few votes could be easily done. A test like this should be blind. The TV frames should be covered in coming events to make this trustworthy.
Isak yes it could have but with such a split in the results it hardly seems likely. Panasonic Won 2 categories LG won 2 categories and Sony Won 1. And the categories won are exactly what you would expect
-Colour and Contrast accuracy = PANASONIC
-Upscaling = SONY
-Gaming and HDR = LG
The Panasonic has no ‘faults’ so didn’t get marked down in any score so won on average score across the board
We finally have a comprehensive comparison to reference don’t ruin it
@isak
I agree with you, attendees needed to be unaware of the TV brand and technology used (OLED/LED/QLED) in what they were observing to be able to choose without bias, because invariable people are biased to their own choices, and so market-share by brand will always risk biasing a group for such a shoot-out imo.
One of the other potential problems with the shoot-out in terms of fairness is surely that the Sony reference monitor – that all the others are to measure up to – is firstly, not a 65” display, it is only ~30” making it difficult to compare to in a critical way when the dpi will be much higher; well, unless each TV is placed suitably far back so that they project a comparable dpi, but that in itself introduces an issue to compare HDR fairly or PQ when minification is being observed. And secondly, the Sony reference monitor is OLED technology, automatically disadvantaging both QLED and LED in any areas that they are better than said OLED technology. The QLED tech is mostly likely disadvantaged in the colour accuracy comparison, and the QLED and LED are likely to be disadvantage in the HDR tests – especially as the OLED reference monitor nit specification is absent from Sony’s website info, and being a discontinued OLED product, I thin it is unlikely to be better than the ~900nits seen in other newer OLED TV panels.
On a slightly more obvious point about the ability of those in attendance to choose in a technically accurate way; either by comparison with a failed reference image, or by them choosing by what they preferred. If they were choosing on technical merit in a flawless way, you would surely expect the ZD9 to have scored higher than the Sony A1, because Sony’s own engineering team – the ones that provided the professional grade reference monitor – unequivocally stated that the ZD9 Flagship is superior for picture quality to the A1. With such a glaring mistake in the results, you could be left wondering if anything decided was technically correct.
A comparison test is a valuable tool but ONLY if it is done completely blind as in consumer programming testing of food/household products.There is no other way to ensure that bias to a particular product is elliminated.If for example you had purchased a LG OLED TV you would certainly not(knowingly) say that a SONY OLED TV had the best performance at a shoot out!
Hopefully future “shoot outs” will adopt the meaningful ,established,proceedure when comparing products in this situation .Until then these type of comparisons are a waste of time.
“2016 LG OLED models voted worst HDR after terrible firmware update!!!”