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LG 88-inch 8K OLED TV costs $30,000, impresses friends and neighbors

Now rich dudes can buy biggest version of the best TV ever.

David Katzmaier Editorial Director -- Personal Tech
David reviews TVs and leads the Personal Tech team at CNET, covering mobile, software, computing, streaming and home entertainment. We provide helpful, expert reviews, advice and videos on what gadget or service to buy and how to get the most out of it.
Expertise A 20-year CNET veteran, David has been reviewing TVs since the days of CRT, rear-projection and plasma. Prior to CNET he worked at Sound & Vision magazine and eTown.com. He is known to two people on Twitter as the Cormac McCarthy of consumer electronics. Credentials
  • Although still awaiting his Oscar for Best Picture Reviewer, David does hold certifications from the Imaging Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology on display calibration and evaluation.
David Katzmaier
2 min read
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Sarah Tew/CNET

If you thought Samsung's 8K QLED TVs were expensive, wait till you get a load of the first 8K OLED.

LG's OLED88Z9P, an 88-inch behemoth that's both the largest and highest-resolution OLED TV available, is now available for pre-order at price of $30,000.

TVs based on organic light emitting diode display tech deliver the best picture quality CNET has ever tested. The latest we've reviewed, the OLEDC9P series, has 4K resolution and starts at $2,100 for the 55-inch size. Expensive, but hardly high-end enough to impress the Bentley-owning neighbors.

8K resolution, meanwhile, promises a sharper picture with 4 times as many pixels as 4K, but there's myriad reasons we recommend avoiding 8K TVs this year. They're crazy-expensive (the cheapest right now, a 65-inch Samsung QLED, costs $4,500), there's no actual 8K content available, and offer minimal image quality improvement over 4K TVs -- and any improvement you might see requires sitting very close to a very large screen. 

But if you've got 30 large to drop on a TV, do you really care? The 88-inch OLED is in a class by itself, with an absolutely colossal size that makes 77-inch OLED TVs, the previous OLED size champ, seem puny in comparison. And of course LG throws in all of the image quality goodness and features we liked on the C9, including next-gen Alpha 9 Pro 2 processing, HDMI 2.1 inputs (robust enough to handle 8K at up to 120fps) and the latest measures to prevent burn-in -- which would be a real bummer on a TV this expensive.

Before you reach for your Amex Centurion, however, remember that Samsung and Sony are selling 98-inch 8K TVs starting at $70,000. They're not OLED, but they are bigger. And maybe you'd rather hold off for a smaller, rollable OLED instead. Decisions, decisions.

LG's 2019 OLED and LCD TVs get 8K, Alexa and more

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