On Saturday and Sunday, Value Electronics held its TV Shootout event for the 20th time. This year, separate competitions were held for OLED TV and Mini-LED TV, with Sony, Samsung, and LG competing in both categories.
After the nine-hour Saturday competition, Sony emerged victorious as the “King of TV®” in both categories, as a panel of experts judged.
Robert Zohn, the founder of Value Electronics and the event’s creator, emphasized that the balloting was very close.
The TVs in the OLED competition were the victorious Sony XR65A95L OLED TV, the Samsung QN65S95D OLED TV, and the LG OLED65G4PUA OLED TV. On the Mini-LED side, there was the Sony K65XR90 Bravia 9 MiniLED TV, the Samsung QN65QN95D MiniLED TV, and the LG 65QNED90T MiniLED TV.
Sony scored 8.9 overall in the OLED competition, edging out Samsung with 8.8 and LG with 8.4. In the Mini-LED category, Sony had 8.1, Samsung had 8.0, and LG scored 7.3, giving Sony the “King of TV®” title in both competitions.
On Sunday, Zohn told TWICE in an email that a more informal out-of-the-box performance evaluation was held, with Sony’s 77” A95L placing first. LG’s G4 was 2nd, while Samsung’s S95D came in third.
Zohn announced at the event that Value Electronics has obtained a registered trademark for the phrase “King of TV®.” The company received the registered trademark for “TV Shootout®” several years ago.
Sony and Samsung split some individual categories in both Saturday competitions, while Sony was the overall winner.
“They all work so hard to create better TVs every year, better processing, better panels, and they are all in fierce competition to win the TV Shootout,” Zohn said while presenting the awards to Sony. “I am so proud… that the event has made the industry advance so much.”
Other manufacturers, including Hisense and Sharp, had participated in the 2023 competition. Zohn said that Hisense and TCL had elected not to participate this year.
The event has been held at various locations over the years, but this time, it was held where it began: Value Electronics in Scarsdale, north of New York City.
In an interview with TWICE, after the competition but before results were announced, Zohn discussed how, while the first public TV Shootout competition took place in 2004, he had held it privately for a few years before that “because I wanted to know who was the better TV and what the differences were.”
When the TV Shootout began in 2004, competitors included Panasonic and Pioneer, with plasma TVs as the primary technology. Since the arrival of OLED TVs in 2013, that technology has won “every single year,” leading to the new format this year, Zohn said.
When we asked Zohn what the biggest differences were in 20 years of the Shootout, he answered, “TVs are brighter, TVs are far more accurate in all elements of picture quality, and the prices have come down.”
Of this year’s competition, Zohn stated that “it was nice to see how very close each TV is to each other. I created this event for consumers to select what’s the best TV for their use case by looking at all the elements. It doesn’t have to be the one that’s won King of TV® because their use or interest might be different.”
“What has really happened is the event became a competition for the manufacturers,” Zohn said. “And that has helped them make a better and better product because they want to win the TV Shootout® and win the title of King of TV®. So what it really turned into was an event that made the competitors more competitive and improved their TVs every year. So I’m most proud of that.”
Zohn also announced that Value Electronics had reached a deal to become the exclusive U.S. distributor for new projection screens from Liberty Wide Cinematic. These screens feature black screen material and built-in front/left/right/center speakers with nine drivers. He demoed the screens, for those assembled, at a new showroom across the street from the main store.
“The image quality is ridiculously better than any screen I’ve ever seen,” Zohn said.
