(July 21, 2026) Every year, the TV market injects its offerings with a fresh stack of acronyms, upgraded panel technologies, smarter processing, and enough marketing language to make even seasoned enthusiasts reach for a second cup of coffee. That’s what makes the Value Electronics TV Shootout such an interesting stop on the mid-year AV calendar. Now in its 22nd running, the event gives some of the best televisions available a chance to square off in a controlled environment.
This year’s event, held last weekend in Scarsdale, New York, arrived with a noticeably different feel. Panasonic, which had a strong showing in 2025, is once again out of the mix after stepping away from TV sales in North America. That leaves LG, Sony, and Samsung as the three manufacturers represented in the 2026 competition. Sony has long carried a reputation for reference-level image processing and overall picture accuracy, while Samsung has been aggressively pushing its QD-OLED models into serious crown-chasing territory. LG, meanwhile, remains one of the central forces behind OLED television technology, even as its recent Shootout performances have struggled to match the top scores posted by rival Samsung and Sony sets.
Another major twist for 2026 is the arrival of Micro RGB LCD technology. Rather than asking OLED and Micro RGB models to battle for one overall crown, this year’s event split the field into two categories. The reason? There are likely several, headlined by the fact that OLED and Micro RGB take fundamentally separate approaches to display performance, each with its own strengths, compromises, and path to overall image quality.
With that split in mind, here’s how the 2026 field was arranged.
The OLED Contestants
- 65" Samsung S95H QD-OLED (QN65S95H), MSRP: $3,399, available at Value Electronics
- 65" Sony BRAVIA 8, Mark II QD-OLED (K65XR80M2), MSRP: $3,299, available at Value Electronics
- 65" LG G6 Primary RGB Tandem 2.0 W-OLED (OLED65G6WUA), MSRP: $3,299, available at Value Electronics
- 75" Sony BRAVIA 9 II RGB LCD TV (K75XR90M2), MSRP: $4,599, available at Value Electronics
- 75" Samsung R95H RGB LCD TV (MRN75R95H), MSRP: $4,499, available at Value Electronics
- 75" LG MRGB95B Micro RGB LCD TV (75MRGB95BUA), MSRP: $4,999, available at Value Electronics
OLED, LCD, Micro RGB... What Does It All Mean?
OLED, or Organic Light Emitting Diode, is a self-emissive display technology. That means each pixel produces its own light and can turn off when the image calls for black. In real-world viewing, that gives OLED its signature strength: deep black levels, precise contrast, and little to no blooming around bright objects on dark backgrounds. A starfield, a candle in a dark room, or white subtitles over black are all scenarios where OLED’s pixel-level control can shine.
Even within the OLED group, though, not every panel is built the same way. Samsung’s S95H and Sony’s BRAVIA 8 Mark II use Samsung Display's QD-OLED panels, which rely on blue OLED light and quantum dot conversion to create red and green. The big advantage is color performance; QD-OLED offers access to a slightly wider color gamut. LG’s G6 takes a different path with LG Display's new RGB Tandem 2.0 W-OLED panel. It uses a stacked OLED structure with color filtering and a white subpixel to help drive brightness and overall output. Both approaches are capable of outstanding performance, but they don’t always arrive at the same result.
Micro RGB, meanwhile, is still an LCD technology, and that distinction matters. These TVs lack self-emissive pixels like OLED. Instead, they use an LCD panel in front of a more advanced backlight system built around red, green, and blue LED elements, rather than a more traditional blue or white LED backlight. The goal is to deliver higher brightness, stronger efficiency, and wider color gamut reproduction, particularly in bright HDR material where color volume and luminance can make a major visual difference.
The tradeoff is that Micro RGB has to manage light behind an LCD layer, which means local dimming behavior remains critical. Bright objects on dark backgrounds can still produce blooming, black levels can lift depending on the scene, and off-axis viewing can still soften contrast and color accuracy. More dimming zones and better control algorithms can reduce those issues, but they don’t erase the basic difference between a backlit LCD and a self-emissive OLED panel.
How the TVs Were Judged
The Shootout isn’t designed to be a beauty contest where judges simply pick the most eye-catching picture, nor are the TVs judged directly against one another. Instead, performance is measured against a reference standard. This year, each display was evaluated in comparison to a Sony BVM-HX3110 professional mastering monitor, the kind of display used in post-production environments where accuracy matters. To set the stage, each TV was calibrated by longtime industry professional DeWayne Davis and positioned in Value Electronics’ darkened showroom, giving judges a controlled environment for comparing consumer TVs against a professional reference image.
The scorecards were split into SDR and HDR voting categories, which is important because a television can be excellent with one type of content and less convincing with the other. For SDR, judges evaluated shadow detail, grayscale linearity, low-luminance color saturation, skin tones and general color accuracy, clarity and grain preservation, and motion handling. Those categories speak directly to everyday viewing, including movies, broadcast content, legacy material, and anything mastered within a traditional dynamic range. HDR judging added its own set of priorities, including shadow detail, HDR tone mapping and luminance, low-luminance saturation, high-luminance wide color gamut performance, posterization and quantization behavior, and motion handling. In plain terms, those categories help determine how well a TV can preserve detail in shadows and highlights, maintain color saturation as brightness demands climb, avoid banding, and handle motion without adding unwanted artifacts.
Once the evaluations were complete, judges’ scorecards were tabulated to determine separate winners for both OLED and Micro RGB categories.
The Winners
Samsung was named the 2026 King of OLED TV after posting the strongest overall performance in both SDR and HDR judging. The S95H earned a 4.6 overall average in SDR and a 4.7 overall average in HDR, giving it the most complete score profile of any display in the competition. That’s a big result for Samsung, especially considering Sony’s long-running reputation for reference-level processing and picture accuracy.
On the Micro RGB side, Sony took top honors. The BRAVIA 9 II True RGB LCD TV posted a 3.9 overall average in SDR and a 4.0 overall average in HDR.
When taken together, the larger scoring picture is hard to ignore. Even though Sony’s BRAVIA 9 II earned the Micro RGB title, Samsung’s S95H OLED still finished well ahead when considering both SDR and HDR performance. In fact, Sony’s Micro RGB effort didn’t outscore Samsung’s OLED in any individual category, though the two tied in HDR motion handling. In other words, the Shootout produced two category winners, but the scorecards still point to the S95H as the stronger overall performer. So, if you’re looking at the broader field and asking which TV most convincingly earned top billing, Samsung’s S95H is the clear King of this year’s Shootout.
Here's a look at complete average scores for each model across all categories (click to enlarge):
Making Sense of the Results
Step back from the scorecards, and the takeaway is pretty clear: OLED still holds the advantage when the goal is reference-level picture accuracy. That was true in SDR, and it was even more obvious in HDR, where Samsung’s S95H created real separation from the rest of the field. Micro RGB may represent a meaningful step forward for LCD-based TV design, but the results suggest it still has ground to cover before it can fully match OLED’s combination of black level control, contrast precision, and image consistency.
That tracks with buying advice I've been giving friends and family for years. For most people wanting a premium TV, OLED is still the way to go. Its self-emissive design gives it a fundamental advantage in the areas that tend to matter most when watching movies and high-quality TV shows, especially in rooms with controlled or moderate ambient light. Put simply, if you want the deepest blacks, robust contrast, and the most convincing image, OLED remains hard to beat.
That doesn’t mean LCD is out of the conversation. It still makes sense in several real-world situations, beginning with screen size for the money. Historically, LCD has been the easier way to buy a very large TV without sending your wallet into hiding, even if this first wave of Micro RGB models isn’t exactly playing the budget card. LCD can also be the smarter call for unusually heavy use with static screen elements, such as all-day news channels, sports tickers, or video games with fixed on-screen graphics. Modern OLED sets include protections against permanent image retention, and normal mixed use isn’t something I’d lose sleep over, but there are edge cases where LCD remains the more comfortable choice.
Brightness and room environment also matter, though maybe not as often as some buyers assume. There’s a common belief that LCD is automatically the better choice for bright rooms, and that can be true when a room is flooded with sunlight or has a large wall of windows dumping light directly onto a screen. In those situations, the higher output potential of an LCD-based TV can effectively fight the room. But for many moderately bright living spaces, today’s better OLED TVs are more than capable. I use an OLED in a room with a good amount of natural light, and while it’s not a sun-blasted room, brightness has never been a meaningful issue.
For the enthusiast crowd, Samsung’s HDR performance is probably the biggest headline. The S95H didn’t just win the OLED category; it dominated the HDR scorecard, taking top marks in tone mapping and luminance, low luminance saturation, high luminance wide color gamut performance, and tying for first in motion handling. That matters because 4K HDR discs and high-quality HDR streaming titles are where top-tier TVs have the best chance to separate themselves. If your main priority is movie night performance in a light-controlled room, especially with HDR content, the S95H should be at the top of your shortlist.
The SDR story is a little more nuanced. Samsung still came out on top with a 4.6 SDR average, but Sony’s BRAVIA 8 Mark II was right behind at 4.5. That’s close enough that buyers should think carefully about how they actually watch TV, because a lot of everyday viewing still comes from SDR sources. Cable, satellite, broadcast TV, live sports, older films, YouTube, and plenty of streaming content rely heavily on standard dynamic range material. The scorecards don’t isolate upconversion as its own category, meaning they don’t directly answer how well each TV takes an HD source and scales it to a 4K panel. Sony has traditionally been strong in that area, and that remains part of the broader buying conversation even if it wasn’t broken out as a dedicated Shootout score.
Skin tones and shadow detail are also worth paying attention to. Those are two areas where small differences can have a large impact on how natural an image feels. Our eyes are especially sensitive to faces, so skin tone accuracy can make or break the believability of an image even when everything else looks technically impressive. Shadow detail carries similar weight because losing information in dark scenes can flatten an image. In SDR, Samsung and Sony were extremely close in several of these core categories, which is why this isn’t as simple as saying the S95H is the only TV worth considering.
LG’s result is harder to ignore. The G6 may still be a strong television in isolation, and in a normal home environment it’s very likely to deliver a picture that many buyers would find excellent. But the Shootout isn’t judging TVs in isolation. It’s judging them against a professional reference monitor, and under that level of scrutiny, LG again landed behind Samsung and Sony in the OLED field. For buyers chasing top-tier accuracy and reference-level performance, these 2026 results make it difficult to recommend opening your wallet for a G6, though that recommendation may change if aggressive sale pricing is a factor.
For my money, the real choice comes down to Samsung versus Sony and how and where the TV will be used. In a dark or well-controlled room where HDR movie performance is the top priority, Samsung’s S95H is the stronger play. But if the TV is going into a room where reflections, lamps, windows, or off-angle light regularly hit the screen, Samsung’s anti-glare treatment deserves a closer look before buying. Some viewers will like the way it suppresses direct reflections, while others may notice that it can lift the appearance of black levels when light hits the panel. If HD and SDR content is what you’ll be watching most, and your room is prone to reflections, Sony’s OLED still deserves very strong consideration.
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