LG OLED C9

I've had an LG OLED (65" C9) for roughly 2 years, and its the best TV I've owned, hands down. It is amazing for movies and TV, because of its inky blacks. (unliked LED/LCD, the OLED pixels are actually turned off individually) which are just as good as a Plasma I owned 10 years ago. It also supports 4K/120Hz for gaming, and looks amazing with my XBox Series X. The primary complaint I've seen for this TV is that its not bright enough compared to LED models, but I've not found it too dim, even in a room that gets lots of morning sun. Another OLED concern is burn-in. After 2 years of 90% Netflix/YT and 10% gaming (mostly Forza Motorsports 7), I have not seen any signs of burn in. Apparently the built-in image shifter/orbiter works well. EDIT: In terms of smart TV misfeatures-- the voice search requires a scary opt in that I've never done. Aside from that, I'm able to disable most tracking, and I've not seen any targeted ads. The biggest issue I have with the TV is that the LG the "magic remote" is incredibly annoying as it pops a cursor onto the screen randomly when moved.

Yeah my LG C9 looks great, minor dimming where the captions are, but that’s it. In the 7 years since they’ve gotten better, with micro lens arrays and stuff to improve brightness without heat causing faster decay. RTINGs has some great content on TV longevity, but I haven’t seen anything for monitor workloads.

Maybe it depends on the country? I've got a LG C9 and can't recall _ever_ getting any ads in webOS since buying it. In fact, the most annoying thing is the Rakuten button I never use on the "smart" remote. I've overall been very happy with our LG TV and have been recommending it highly over our old Samsung - which was slowly updated to remove features and eventually took about 45 seconds to boot up.

I hope that you're right but I don't think you are. While we (you, me, most of HN) see smart TVs as an anti-feature, most of the public sees them as a huge feature. "I can't buy a TV that doesn't support Netflix, I want to watch Netflix!" "yes but you can just get a AppleTV and watch Netflix with that" "I don't like the Apple TV service, it doesn't have as many good shows as Netflix!" Even if you can convince them that AppleTV can show them netflix you need to get past such insurmountable obstacles as "needing an HDMI cable" and "having two remotes" and "which input does the TV need to be on?" and "which remote do I use for the volume?" And, yes, CEC fixes some of this and 80% of the time when it works it's fantastic. I think we'll see TVs which have "swappable" OSes before we see smart-free TVs but I don't think either one is gonna happen in my lifetime. I'm just resigned to buy the least-shitty smart TV experience I can and to neuter it as much as I can. Currently I have a nice LG C9 OLED which doesn't bother me at all. If this dies before me, or, I feel compelled for an 8K/UltraHDR upgrade, I think LG will continue to offer reasonably non-shitty experiences on their top of the line TVs which I can block from the internet still. When they stop doing that I'll just buy a projector. When projectors become infested with this nonsense I'll just move to the woods and become a hermit.

I have an LG C9 and while it has a lot of "smart" features, they stay out of the way. The thing is, there are TVs you can buy which have fewer "smart" features but they are business-oriented for things like conference rooms and display walls and, are far more expensive. Even if you didn't care about spending extra money, the panels in these displays are not optimized for TV/Movies, they are optimized for presentations/display. The biggest question really is what are you planning on watching? If you're watching a lot of dramatic content where you actually care about picture quality, I really don't think you can do better than an OLED, and an LG CX OLED in particular. If you've never experienced a huge OLED in a dark room, it's an amazing thing to behold on a great movie which takes advantage of huge shifts in brightness/darkness of scenes. I recently re-watched the matrix and having that OLED does amazing things to the feel of the picture. When Neo/Morpheus get dropped from the Nebuchadnezzar into the white room in the matrix for the first time it goes from this rich deeply color saturated picture to this incredibly bright stark white in an instant and it's a change you can feel as much as you can see. If you're curious technically WHY OLED is just so incredible, and some more rational points of view on it, this ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=226kWMOVGGc ) was the video which convinced me to get an OLED. RTINGS has some great data on the CX OLED (the newer version of the C9

An OLED TV. I work in computer graphics and the image quality of my TV makes me smile every day. HDR is a much bigger deal than 4K. The pure blacks of OLEDs make them hard to beat. Not only for the global contrast level. The pixel by pixel contrast level and absence of light leaking at bright edges greatly improves the clarity of the image. I picked up an LG C9 a while back. There have been two more generations since then. Not really big differences between them. So, go with what’s cheapest (currently them middle gen). Other OLEDs are just as pretty. But, some other brands have obnoxious ads in their UI. And LG has good support for 120Hz and other gaming features. So, I’m still happy with my pick.