I've been dreaming of a TV deal, and the Amazon Prime Early Access Sale is my next chance at it. Like many, I see the biggest sales of the year as the time to get one of the best TVs. And unfortunately my eyes are wider than my wallet at the moment, because this is a TV I've held off on buying because it's current price is too dang high.
Unlike many (or so I hope), I've spent the last months staring at burn-in on my own OLED TV (make sure you turn on anti-burn in settings on your OLED). But since that TV is such a large, bright and colorful beast, it's had me spoiled on what I should replace it with.
My choice? The 55-inch LG C2 OLED, $1,346 at Amazon is the hot new TV to get. I thought I'd be buying its also-great predecessor, but I didn't understand how TV prices and availability work.
Why the LG C2 TV is the set for me
Why this TV? Well, as always. I sought advice from my colleague Kate Kozuch — who wrote our LG C2 OLED TV review — and she started off by saying it's fantastic for gaming. As someone who owns the limit-pushing PS5 and Xbox Series X, I am happy to see that all four of its HDMI ports support variable refresh rate and auto-low latency modes.
On top of that, its Game Optimizer has a new Dark Room Mode, plus it supports NVIDIA G-sync and AMD FreeSync, too. All that with an excellently low-lag time of 12.9 milliseconds? This seems like the TV that should last me the next decade.
In her review, Kate highlighted how the C2 has an "impressively wide color gamut, producing 134.45% of the Rec 709 color space," and noted how the C2 made the "the mirror dimension scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home" look fantastic, with "the colors of Peter’s suit and Dr. Strange’s cape looked exceptionally rich."
Just as impressive, if not more, is the motion clarity, as she notes Top Gun: Maverick looked amazing on the TV, with "the motion handling of the speeding fighter jets" where "no details are lost."
Outlook: Wait too long and the TV you want will disappear
Kate's review also noted the C2 doesn't have a huge brightness advantage against the C1 I had my eye on before, but that's not a TV I can really get confidently right now. As you may know, TVs basically have a year-plus range of availability, as they get discontinued.
Right now, the C1 is not sold by any of the big retailers, and just sold from some place called "Beach Camera" in Edison, NJ via Amazon. And no disrespect to them, but for a purchase this big, I want to buy it from Amazon or Best Buy, not a company I have no real awareness of.
That C1 had gone as low as $1,099 since early April 2022 (according to CamelCamelCamel). And so that's my current target. I'd love to see the C2 at $999, and since this is much earlier in its shelf-life than the C1 was at April 2022, I'm probably willing to hit 'buy' at $1,199.
Next: October Prime Day is here! But what time does the sale actually end?
