do you like money do you hate spending
big on TVs well come on down to skyworth
electronics we've got LG OLED panel TVs
for hundreds of dollars cheaper than the competition you can fit so much TV in
here the only question is how's that even possible what's the catch and who's
our sponsor are you running into poor quality video meetings use glassware and
instantly see what apps are wasting your bandwidth during your meeting and block
them get 25 off today using offer code Linus at the link in the video
description
this TV retails for anywhere between 1400 and 1800 US Dollars which is
actually more than LG's based here A1 OLED TV the difference though is we've
seen the skyworth 55 xc9000 on sale for
as low as 950 US dollars that is
considerably cheaper than an LG even though it contains what is as far as we
can tell exactly the same OLED display
panel as an lga1 but how could that
happen How could a third party buy a
panel from LG display who manufactures literally all large format OLED panels
right now and then undercut LG Electronics on the price well there are
a few factors at play here one is that while LG display and LG
Electronics are obviously related companies they are not the same company
and they have very different goals LG Electronics is in the business of
selling premium consumer goods for high margins that means they don't
necessarily want to compete in the lowest price brackets LG display on the
other hand is focused on high volume manufacturing and will happily sell to
non-lg Brands if it helps keep the manufacturing facilities running at Full
Tilt the second major factor is political going back to my days as a
product manager for an Electronics retailer my goals were twofold one was
to make money obviously but the second was to generate hype and excitement
around our store and one of the best ways to achieve that is to heavily
discount a popular product but believe it or not it's not as simple as just
marking down whatever you want most people have heard of manufacturer's
suggested retail price or MSRP but what
you probably didn't know is that many major brands at least in the us also
have a second lower price called map or
minimum advertised price and this exists for a number of reasons but the most
relevant one right now is that it protects the manufacturer's brand you
see in the long term nobody wants to be RCA a once popular electronics brand
that now scrapes by selling cheap Android tablets and refurb projectors
but it's a snowball effect that can happen very easily much more than you'd
think consider this scenario without your knowledge your partner retailer one
sends out a customer newsletter on a Saturday with your product discounted to
an unprecedented level retailer 2 sees
this and immediately reacts by matching that price to ensure that they're not
going to lose out on valuable weekend foot traffic when you get into the
office on Monday you've got two things to deal with one is the big restocking
orders from your two major accounts that's fine on the surface but the
second is the email from retailer 2's owner to your boss complaining about the
unfair advantage that you gave to retailer one I mean you didn't do
anything wrong retailer one hit that crazy price on their own but retailer 2
won't care and usually they'll be looking for you to make it right in some
way and they'll demand anything from and after the fact rebate on the units they
sold over the weekend to a lower price on their restock order to a special deal
on a different product so they can hit back at retailer one on the following
weekend often they'll ask for all three now you can refuse but you'll probably
miss out on that order that's sitting in your inbox and in the longer term you're
going to risk damaging that relationship which could incentivize retailer 2 to
give up Prime shelf or promotional space to your competitors
so you give in to their demands even though it means that you've lost money
on the transaction the good news is that as a one-off it's not the end of the
world businesses lose money all the time the bad news is that now that customers
have seen that price once many of them are going to hold off on their purchase
until they see that price again so now your Retail Partners are putting
pressure on you to Discount again to help them sell the slow moving inventory
on their shelves and then the really bad news is that you don't really have a
choice because you've got somewhere between three and six months worth of
inventory usually that you have already paid for that's on a ship ready to hit
the port and you've got to sell it so your choices are suck it up and sell it
at a small loss now to generate the cash flow that you need to operate your
business or wait for people to hopefully
forget about the promo and risk not being able to sell it at all because
maybe one of your competitors is going to come up with a killer product that
totally blows it up the water so you strike a deal with retailer one and two
fine you say take the darn things at the promo price but don't expect to make a
ton of margin on these things because it's your fault we're in this mess in the first place they take the deal
they're happy they've got a wonderful promo item that they can ride for the
next few months and you've solved your cash flow and your inventory problems
but now you have an even bigger problem if your products can't really be sold at
a profit you're going to have a really hard time attracting new top tier
Partners to carry them which means now you're stuck with those idiots at
retailer one and two which means that this whole mess is probably going to
happen again eventually the only way to return to profitability is to cut costs
on your product which usually means that your quality suffers which reduces the
desirability of your products which forces you to cut prices which forces
you to cut costs and so on and so forth death spiral one that will never come by
the way for LTT Store because our products are great and our pricing is
consistent buy a beanie or a water bottle today anyway coming back to TVs
you know what this video is about LG Electronics has no desire whatsoever to
go back to the Lucky Gold Star days so they're going to carefully maintain
pricing in the channel so that it's profitable for them and for their
Partners but retailers still need products that can be deeply discounted
without stirring up a bunch of drama so LG display is happy to participate in
that space indirectly by supplying panels to other brands and then letting
them duke it out Brands like Skyward
let's talk about who these guys are for a moment founded in 1988 skyworth is a
relative newcomer to North America but according to Andy they're extremely
popular in China and they are actually one of the top three Global providers
for Android TV so that means that the Deep discounting we're seeing here can
mean one of two things either they are
halfway down the death spiral or they're
a scrappy newcomer who's looking to buy market share from the incumbents like
Samsung LG and Vizio and their intention
is to eventually raise their pricing and their brand perception later now right
out of the gate I am really happy to see that it runs Android TV natively
not the most responsive Android TV
experience I've ever had oh wow you really got to point that boy
another unusual thing is that out of the box the TV seems to be configured to go
into screen saver mode after just one minute and then go into power saving
mode where the screen turns off entirely after about another minute that's
extremely aggressive and we have to assume that skyworth is trying to
preserve the lifespan of the panel now one of the things that Rob from AV rant
noticed about this TV is that as you scroll through content it's not the most
responsive Android TV experience that we've ever seen and that stands to
reason we were talking with Tyler from portrait he said it's pretty common for
these budget TVs to use lower grade socs than ones from the top tier Brands and
this can affect any number of things from the responsiveness of the interface
to actually the quality of HDR tone
mapping and HDR processing so while the xc9000 series does support HDR including
Dolby Vision it might not be the
greatest HDR experience and another thing that's going to affect that is the
peak brightness of this set we measured it at 500 nits but that was only within
a 10 window so this is on the low side
even for a basic OLED there could be a
couple of reasons for this one is that maybe skyworth is trying not to drive
the pixels too hard and wear them out which could generate returns but I think
the more likely one is just that it's using cheaper electronics and it cannot
provide that kind of power over a sustained period of time in a dark room
this is still going to look freaking outstanding to be clear it's still an
OLED you still get those those perfect blacks but you know these specular
highlights look nothing like they would on say a C1 or a G1 one thing that's not
as visible to my eye is the inaccurate colors though because while an average
Delta e of 7.9 and a maximum of 16.3 is
not impressive for artistically rated
content like films it could just as easily have been the
director's intention you know although I do see a little bit too much
green and it's especially noticeable in the scene like this one of the other
things Rob pointed out is that oleds in the first place have a little bit more
trouble with judder or that like kind of appearance to panning shots like this
one and particularly more inexpensive sets tend to handle it worse and that's
definitely the case here the last big thing to note regarding picture quality
is that while there are a number of picture modes available the only one
that seems to save any kind of user preferences is the user mode so that's
probably the one that you're going to end up using and if you calibrate it
should be noted that another feature of Cheaper socs is that they tend to have
smaller lookup tables for calibration let's fix this up a little bit here okay
here we go maybe we bring down the green gain a little bit
wow a lot better let's bring it down a
lot boys oh my God that is like immediately
noticeably way better there are a couple of immediate things
that we want to note for gaming one is that this is a cheaper set it is locked
at 60 hertz in fact it only has HDMI 2.0 ports so even if you hooked it up to a
PC and you've tried to overclock it to 65 Hertz we guarantee you will not have
any success with that the second is that while the TV does have a game mode it
doesn't appear to do anything in terms
of reducing latency or changing the processing that's being done so don't
expect to get any sort of bonuses from that
oh right the TV sorry I was playing video games I mean the TV is good enough
that I forgot that I was supposed to be evaluating it and started playing video
games so that's a plus man it is not very bright
another innate characteristic of oleds that you're going to enjoy as a gamer is
the low pixel response time so as you're panning around whipping around it's not
as noticeable it doesn't make as big a difference as if we were running at 120
FPS but it definitely means you see additional Clarity in the image as
you're as you're panning the camera compared to an LCD and that's just an
inherent characteristic of the tech one other bit of good news is that even
though game mode doesn't seem to do anything the input lag on the TV is
respectable even outside of game mode so we saw about 60 milliseconds of click to
Photon latency in CS go running at 180 frames per second remember this is a
60hz TV so that's not too shabby CEC
seems to work correctly so we powered up our NVIDIA shield and boom now we're
looking at The Shield's Android TV interface boom okay so plugging in an
add-on device HDR Dolby Atmos there you go but on the subject of audio there's
some kind of weird quirks of this set if
you're using the built-in Android TV so the built-in apps you can pass through
Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby Atmos to an
outside receiver using Arc but if you plug in an external device we
had trouble getting Dolby Atmos to pass through to an external AVR so it's
getting kind of lost in the mix somewhere it'll still work as long as
you use the kind of poo poo integrated speakers but not from another device to
an AVR to your surround speaker setup the good news is that I don't think most
people who are going higher than sound bar or you know home theater in a box
are going to be making this TV the centerpiece of their setup so I think
it's one of those problems that is unlikely to really crop up in the real
world especially because audio pass-through does still work it's just
limited to two channel PCM or vanilla it'll be Digital or DTS leaving only one
major question should you buy this thing over an LGA one at the listed retail
price absolutely not but if it's on sale and you're not a huge video file but you
want to jump on the OLED train it's honestly not the worst buy out
there just maybe keep it in the basement
because it ain't that bright ask for where to get one skyrift might not be a
tier one brand just yet but until they become one you can pick up your 55
xc9000 at fine retailers like ABC Warehouse Cowboy Maloney's London Drugs
Canadian Tire Andre's electronics and
cons home plus thanks to NZXT for sponsoring today's video with NZXT build
getting a custom-built PC is easier than ever just set your budget see how your
PC will perform in your favorite games and build takes care of the rest their
recommendation engine provides Benchmark data for the expected performance of
your build at 1080P and 1440p and their
FPS estimates are guaranteed to be within 10 accurate you can customize and
upgrade your build from various NZXT case options with RGB lighting and all
that good stuff they feature transparent pricing with a flat 99 assembly fee in
your local currency and it will be built and shipped within 48 business hours
with all your PC's components covered under one warranty plan and 60 will
manage any problems you have and you can contact their live chat for real-time
help in troubleshooting so go check them out they've got 13 years of experience
developing PC components we're going to have them Linked In the video description if you guys enjoyed this
video on the most basic OLED you might enjoy our video on 2nd gen OLED
technology to give you an idea of what this can do at its best