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The year 2023 began – like every year – with the big Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where the latest products for this year were announced. As already mentioned, this year was again less than previous years and manufacturers mainly focused on one or a few premium models and improved technologies. In the area of images, two key words took center stage; Brightness and 8K. The first word in the positive sense, the second in the negative sense.
This year, brightness was the factor that manufacturers wanted to use to differentiate their televisions from one another. They give it all sorts of terms and names, but it’s all about the highest possible brightness for the best viewing experience, of course combined with terms like HDR, HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision and Dolby Vision IQ. LG is doing it with new OLED panels, which have tiny lenses and Samsung has further improved the QD-OLED technology for higher brightness. The other manufacturers buy panels from these companies, for example Panasonic uses the new technology from LG. The Japanese manufacturer introduced the MZW2004 OLED TV with these tiny lenses, an integrated Dolby Atmos audio system and My Home Screen as a smart TV platform.
Apart from the higher brightness and improved image technologies here and there, there wasn’t much special to report in the TV sector in 2023. We see a clear trend that manufacturers are relying on ever larger models. We are now over 100 inches tall, which is quite a challenge in the average Dutch or Belgian living room. And these larger models are also becoming increasingly affordable. In particular, smaller manufacturers such as Hisense and TCL have released extremely larger LCD televisions that can be purchased at relatively affordable prices.
This trend also poses a challenge for stores. After all, it’s not easy to carry a 100-inch TV out of the store, let alone make sure it fits in your car and you can install it yourself. Nowadays, stores often offer a (free) installation service for these types of models, for the simple reason that the TV would otherwise not be for sale. We recently saw a 110-inch HelloTV television being lifted into an apartment via a cherry picker. That’s quite a contrast to the “big” 42-inch TVs we installed in our living rooms 10 years ago.
Speaking of smaller manufacturers; They are also slowly gaining more market share in the Benelux countries. Parties like Hisense and TCL are working hard and offering ever better specifications at an attractive price. And that in itself is not surprising, since TCL supplies almost all of the LCD panels behind the scenes for LCD TVs from other, better-known brands, such as Samsung.
Last September it was time for IFA 2023, the largest European trade fair in the consumer electronics sector. We were a bit afraid of it before, but the IFA really seems to have lost its luster now. Just like in 2022, the 2023 version was nothing special. The number of manufacturers presenting themselves decreases from year to year, there are no longer any big announcements and more and more events around the IFA take place outside of the exhibition grounds.
Will the IFA finally disappear from the scene? Probably not, because we tech journalists are of course not the only target group at the trade fair. The fact that there is relatively little for us to see and describe does not mean that consumers cannot marvel at the beauty and that manufacturers, importers and retailers cannot connect. So the IFA will continue to exist for a while, but it will become less interesting for the press every year.
All in all, we can consider 2023 as a gap year in television. There were few exciting announcements, due to chip problems the real top models only came onto the market late in the year and most manufacturers gave up this year. This in itself is not surprising, as various studies show that consumer demand is declining and will continue to decline for the time being. We don’t expect this to be much better in 2024, but we’re still hoping we’ll see more revolution rather than evolution during CES 2024 in January next year.
Curious about our experiences with all the new TVs coming to market in 2023? Then read the detailed reviews in our reviews section.
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