A Showdown between Samsung QLED TV and LG OLED TV

The QLED TV group led by Samsung Electronics and the OLED TV group represented by LG Electronics, Sony, and Panasonic will have a duel to find out which group offers the highest image quality.

According to the TV industry on June 21, an interesting TV evaluation test will be held on July 15 at Harefield Academy in Lodon. Organized by HDTVtest, an HD-TV test website in the UK, and Crampton & Moore, a UK retailer of electrical goods, the event will evaluate TVs from the world’s top producers.

The participating products are a QLED TV of Samsung Electronics and OLED TVs from LG Electronics, Sony, and Panasonic. The four companies will all present a recently launched 65-inch UHD model.

The evaluation will be conducted by experts from Portrait Display, a company specializing in the development of screen color correction software. They will compare and assess picture quality according to ambient brightness, performances when playing games and high dynamic range (HDR) and Dolby vision performances. In addition, a team of ordinary citizens will evaluate the products and award the honor of "the best TV of 2018" to the product with the highest points.

"Samsung QLED TVs will take on an OLED TV army," said Forbes, an American economic magazine, about the event, adding, "AV experts and consumers will make hard choices in the event." The evaluation results will be released online.

According to market researcher IHS Market, Samsung Electronics accounted for 34% of the global TV market in the first quarter, beating LG Electronics (23%), Sony (9.9%) and Panasonic (4.1%). If the category is narrowed down to 60-inch or larger TVs which will be evaluated in the event, Samsung Electronics recorded a bigger market share of 41.8%, followed by LG Electronics (24.4%), Sony (16.4%) and Panasonic (4%).

Samsung Electronics plans to increase its line-ups to six in the second half of this year by adding larger-than-70-inch products to secure leadership in the European TV market, where consumers are picky. In the UK, Samsung Electronics launched a campaign to promote the strengths of QLED TV. It hired football star Thierry Henry as its ad model.

LG Electronics is also focusing on the European market, pitching its artificial intelligence-based OLED TVs in Cologne, Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt from the beginning of this year.

One advantage for LG Electronics is that European consumers are familiar with OLED TVs as such European companies as Philips, Grundig, Loewe, Metz and Vestel have all released OLED TVs.

In the TV industry, experts are predicting that image quality software and design will determine the winner and loser, as all of the four companies use state-of-the-art technology. "The competition between Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics will continue for the time being," a TV industry observer said.