The 2025 TV Shootout went down over the weekend, and the results are shocking: yes, the Sony Bravia 8 II won the overall competition and my personal award for silliest name, but the LG G5 came in last place by a huge margin. I was one of the judges, and I think I have a sense of what’s going on.
If you’re not familiar, the TV Shootout is an annual event hosted by Value Electronics, a boutique and high-end home theater store started by Robert and Wendy Zohn in 1998. They’ve been holding the event for 21 years now, and Robert proudly begins the occasion by holding up his framed registered trademarks for “TV Shootout” and “King of TV,” which is the title bestowed on the winner. I’ve been following the results for years, so it was a real thrill when Robert asked me to judge last year and equally exciting when he asked me back again this year.
Value Electronics President Robert Zohn. Photo: Nilay Patel / The Verge
(As Vergecast and Decoder listeners know, I’m out on parental leave for a few months, but Value Electronics is 15 minutes away from my house and staring at TVs in a dark room for several hours with other display nerds is my personal heaven, so I made a tiny exception.)
The event is pretty straightforward: the flagship 65-inch OLED TVs from Sony, LG, Panasonic, and Samsung were each professionally calibrated as closely as possible to reference standards by Dwayne Davis, a professional ISF calibrator familiar to AV forum nerds as D-Nice. The TVs (and MSRP) this year were:
Robert had asked many more manufacturers to participate, and most declined, knowing they could not compete. He also excluded mini LED TVs this year after they didn’t stack up to the OLEDs last year; he plans to have a separate shootout for those later.
The judges: The Shootout judges were all professional display experts who work in and around the film industry. Many of them have been judging the Shootout for years now. They were: Ilya Akiyoshi, a cinematographer who’s worked on The White Lotus and Captain America: Civil War
Todd Anderson, a certified THX calibrator and host of the Home Theater News Review podcast
Chris Boylan, an ISF-certified calibrator and editor-at-large of eCoustics
Jason Dustal, an ISF calibration instructor and co-chair of the CEDIA standards committee
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