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 GlassWire 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. [Music] This TV retails for anywhere between 1400 and 1800 US Dollars, which is actually more than LG's base-tier 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 LG A1. 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 two 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 an 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 out of 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 Skyworth. 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 LG.

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 screensaver 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. 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 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. 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 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. All your PC's components are covered under one warranty plan, and 60 will manage any problems you have. 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.

We Bought the CHEAPEST OLED TV… How Bad Could It Be? - Skyworth XC9000

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
