Three years ago, $1,199 bought you a mid-range LED TV with a decent panel and no meaningful gaming features. Today it buys a 65-inch LG OLED C5 with 8.3 million self-lit pixels, 144Hz, 0.1ms response time, four HDMI 2.1 ports, Dolby Vision, and Dolby Atmos. Amazon has the LG OLED65C5PUA model at $1,199, within reach of its record low and roughly half what this class of TV cost at launch a few years ago. No Prime membership required.
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OLED still does things no other display technology can
The LG C5’s 8.3 million self-lit pixels each produce their own light and switch off independently to produce true black. That’s not a software processing trick or a local dimming approximation: when a pixel is black on an OLED panel, it’s physically off, which means the contrast between a bright star and the dark sky around it in a space scene is essentially infinite. No LED or QLED panel achieves this regardless of how many dimming zones it uses, because there’s always light bleed between zones that produces the glow around bright objects in dark scenes that OLED eliminates entirely.
The Alpha 9 AI Processor Gen8 handles picture processing with AI Super Upscaling that enhances non-4K content to near-4K quality, adapts the picture profile automatically based on what’s being watched, and manages brightness optimization per scene. Brightness Booster technology magnifies individual pixel output to compensate for the brightness gap between OLED and high-end LED panels, which was historically the main trade-off of buying OLED over a premium LED set. LG’s UL verification for Discomfort Glare Free performance means the C5 performs well in bright rooms, addressing the other traditional OLED concern for daytime viewing.
