Sod’s law is often viewed as the only guarantee we have in life. And my recent experience keeping track of the OLED TV market is proof why.
Specifically, mere months after penning an opinion piece asking why there still aren’t any “cheap” OLED TVs, there’s been a sea of amazing deals arrive hinting one may appear in the very near future.
This started during Prime Day in July, when, against all the data we’ve collected covering past events, and my gut instinct as a journalist who’s covered more deals than I care to count, LG radically slashed the price of its new OLEDs.
The deals were so good they left the What Hi-Fi? team, myself included, flabbergasted, with LG’s store letting you grab a 65-inch LG C4 for £1500.
Is that actually cheap? No, £1500 is still a lot of money. But that’s a massive saving considering the TV had only just launched with a heftier £2700 price tag mere weeks before. Then the company pulled the same trick with its LG G4 and Samsung reacted by dropping the price of its S90D to its lowest price ever.
To put it in context, in the near two decades I’ve covered OLED TVs and sales events around them, I’ve not seen any set get such hefty discounts so quickly after launching.
Normally you have to wait a year, or at least until Black Friday in November, for any deals of note to appear on new OLEDs. Even then the best discounts are usually on outgoing older models from the year before, as stores look to clear stock.
Maybe an LG exec pushed the wrong number while inputting the deal price, maybe OLED justice warriors hacked the system and dropped it so low intentionally – whatever the reality was, I’d pegged this as a freak event, like a lightning strike, that wouldn’t repeat any time soon.
But then retailer Very pulled the same trick this week, with LG's even cheaper B4 OLED. Specifically the price of the 55-inch LG B4, which we sadly haven’t yet reviewed, dropped to £749, a huge 56 per cent drop on its RRP.
While this once again doesn’t make any OLED hit our definition of “cheap”, which we reserve for sets under £500 / $500, the drops are so aggressive, we can’t help but think something is in the air and one may appear before the year’s end.
Most industry analysis suggests TV sales and shipments were lower than expected in 2023. The latest data from research house Trendforce lists 2023 as the worst for TV makers in quite some time, with shipments at record lows. It also predicts this won’t pick up more than 0.2 per cent this year. So companies likely have stockpiles of old sets to clear.
If accurate I can see these atypical price drops continuing, especially during Black Friday and any remaining 2023 models with stock left getting particularly hefty discounts.
Which is why I’ll be keeping a particularly close eye on the smaller sized variants of key sets including the five-star LG B3 and still excellent Philips OLED808.
At the time of publishing many of these are already floating at the £800 / $800 mark. Given how hefty the discounts during Black Friday are, with some getting as much as 40-50 per cent shed from their price, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility at least one will drop to the hallowed £500 / $500 milestone. Here’s hoping at least…
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