Sony’s most affordable OLED TV is now available to pre-order

Call me a good ol' fashioned capitalist, but competition is a good thing. It makes manufacturers produce better goods at lower prices. Sure, there's the whole thing about earning a living wage, but c'mon, CHEAP GOODS PEOPLE!

Take, for example, OLED TVs.

Sony has just announced the final pricing of its 2018 A8F OLED TVs – the new 55-inch A8F will run you $2,799/£2,800 while the 65-inch variant will come in at $3,799/ £3,800. (Sony has yet to announce pricing or availability in Australia, but we'll update this story when it does.)

For those of us who buy our TVs during Black Friday or Cyber Monday for, oh, roughly the cost of a Blu-ray player, this number might sound shockingly high – but, considering that the Sony A1E OLED, the flagship TV from 2017, launched at $4,000 for the 55-inch iteration, the 2018 price isn’t looking so bad.

Dropping prices like they're hot

So what's the deal? Why is Sony selling a 2018 TV at half-price from last year?

As we mentioned in our preview of the TV from CES 2018, the Sony A8F OLED is almost exactly the same screen as last year’s model, which would explain why the 55-inch A1E OLED and the 55-inch A8F OLED are the same price on Sony's website.

For comparison, Sony’s A8F will be a bit more expensive than LG’s mid-tier C8 OLED, which is currently set to launch at $2,499 for a comparable 55-inch screen, while Sony's A8F will be substantially more than the equivalently sized Samsung Q8FN QLED, which is available in 55-inches for $2,199.

While Samsung's TVs are currently some of the most affordable screens of the year, it's important to keep in mind that they're all LED versus LG and Sony's OLED – a technology that's more expensive to manufacture but overall looks better.

If you have some deeper pockets, and are inclined to go for Sony over equivalent sets from Samsung and LG, the Sony A8F is available to pre-order on both Best Buy and Amazon.