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Is now the time to buy a 65-inch OLED? These models just dropped below $1,000

By Nick Pino

Is now the time to buy a 65-inch OLED? These models just dropped below $1,000

Let me start with the bad news: Many of the best Black Friday TV deals are over. If they didn't end at midnight on Saturday morning, they ended on Cyber Monday.

But not all of them. This week I found two terrific 65-inch OLED TVs that kept their discounts and remain, at the time I'm writing this, under $1,000.

Those two TVs are the entry-level Samsung S84F and LG B5 OLED. They might not be the top dogs in their respective lineups, but they deliver incredible OLED performance in the most popular screen size at a price that most folks can afford. Here's what you need to know about them.

The Samsung S84F may be the bottom model of the company's OLED lineup, but don't write it off -- it's a surprisingly capable TV that can deliver outstanding contrast thanks to its self-emissive pixel structure.

The reason you'd want to pick up a Samsung S84F OLED (besides the price) is its Tizen smart platform that supports HDR10+ playback from Amazon Prime, free content on its built-in Samsung TV Plus service, as well as game streaming services like Xbox Game Pass.

If you can shell out a bit more, the Samsung S90F upgrades the WOLED panel to a QD-OLED one, which brings with it a wider color gamut. Without it, the color on the S84F is good... just not class-leading.

But hey, if you want a 65-inch OLED that delivers the benefits of self-emissive panel technology at a reasonable price, the S84F is a solid pick.

So if the Samsung S84F is so great with its HDR10+ playback and NQ4 AI Gen2 Processor, why would you pay $50 more for an LG OLED? Well, while Samsung might have created the first commercial OLED TV, LG spent the last 10 years enhancing it. The B5 OLED is the culmination of 10 years of hard work and engineering.

In our lab testing, the B5 OLED delivered a near-perfect color accuracy score and color volume, nearing 100% in the two most common color spaces, UHDA-P3 and Rec. 709. For gamers it comes with four full HDMI 2.1 ports and incredibly low input latency of 9ms. In terms of performance, the LG B5 OLED is a well-oiled machine.

For those reasons and more, it's worth the extra $50.

Does that mean it's perfect? Not exactly. See, despite supporting Dolby Vision playback, the B5 OLED maxed out at 632 nits in HDR. That's above the recommended level of 600 nits set by the HDR Alliance, but just barely.

If you plan on putting this in a light-controlled space, it's not something you need to be concerned about. However, if you've got a room with a ton of ambient light that you just can't control, you might want to opt for the Samsung or even a mid-range Mini-LED TV like the Hisense U8QG.

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