We Re-Tested Our #1 OLED After a Year of Firmware Updates. It Still Wins, and Here's How.

Rankings have a quiet failure mode: a product wins at launch, then a year of firmware updates and panel aging quietly changes the thing you recommended. We don’t love recommending something and walking away, so we pulled our #1 OLED back onto the test bench a full year later.

We re-ran the same panel: peak brightness in a lit room, near-black shadow detail, and — the one owners actually complain about — whether motion handling had regressed after updates. We compared the numbers against our original review, not against our memory.

The good news, and the reason we’re writing this: it held. Brightness was within our margin of the launch figures, the shadow detail that won it the top spot was intact, and one firmware update had actually improved its handling of 24fps film judder. The ranking we published a year ago is still the ranking we’d publish today.

We’re sharing the re-test partly to brag and mostly to explain what “accurate” should mean for a ranking: not just right on launch day, but right a year into ownership, when you’re the one living with it. A recommendation you can’t defend twelve months later wasn’t a recommendation, it was a press release.

If a future update ever knocks it off the top, we’ll tell you that too — with the same before-and-after numbers. That’s the deal.