My question for you is, how do you feel the Sony measures up against the LG in terms of picture quality and general ease of operation? My wife is not a techie and tends to not want to leave the TV environment to stream from my Apple TV. And, finally, perhaps I've missed something but it appears the Sony remote does not allow one to select channels by direct entry. Can you clarify this for me? Are there others ways to do this other than requiring a second remote control from my cable company?
I too wanted to know how the Sony XR-42A90K 42 inch OLED compares to the LG C2 42 inch OLED in terms of picture quality, so I bought both, and connected them to my Dish Network's Hopper via a 4K HDMI splitter, using 4K cables, so I could compare them side by side in real time, rather than walking back and forth between display units in my local stores, where they show different content on each.
My overall evaluation, after using the settings for both TVs to maximize their brightness, contrast, resolution, etc. (but without using their "Vivid" setting, which makes things look like a comic book), is that while the Sony is considerably dimmer, and with poorer contrast, it displays better detail than the LG C2, and the Sony's colors are also more accurate, especially with skin tones. Bright areas displayed on the Sony, including shiny reflections off of people's heads, including their hair, retain more detail, so that they look less like shiny bowling balls. The loss of detail on the LG C2 makes things and people often resemble the kind of heavy-handed cartoon-like smoothing that some computer retouching software imparts. Something that aggravates this though, is that Dish's "broadcast" network quality is lower than some other satellite and cable providers, though the Hopper's streaming content contains all the detail that should be there, and watching content from my Apple TV, on the LG C2, has better detail than broadcast network content, but it's still not as good as I was hoping. I suspect the lesser detail in the LG C2 is due to its electronics rather than its display, but at the moment I don't know for sure. I'll find out how well the LG C2's detail improves once I switch to another provider like DirecTV, which in my experience delivers significantly higher network broadcast resolution than Dish.
A factor somewhat unique to my viewing is that I have the TV about three feet from my left side so I can view it while seated at my desk, while using my computer, by just turning my head a bit or swiveling in my chair, and this close viewing makes the loss of detail on the LG C2 particularly noticeable--I found that when I viewed the LG from further away, its loss of detail was less annoying or even noticeable. But generally when you're buying a smaller TV, it's because you're going to be watching it from a closer distance than a larger TV.
The room where I usually watch TV is nearly always dimly lit, so the Sony's lesser brightness is less of an issue for me, and usually my eyes are able to adjust to it to the point where I find the Sony's brightness to be acceptable, but it did detract from my enjoyment when I saw, side by side, how much brighter, and with better contrast, the LG C2 is. Not watching them side by side doesn't remind me how much dimmer the Sony is. I wouldn't recommend the Sony to anyone watching TV in a brightly lit room, or even one that's normally lit.
The Sony remote control doesn't have a numeric keypad, but I didn't find this to be a problem since I don't tune to different channels using this remote, since I use the Dish remote instead, which does have a numeric keypad. The LG C2's remote has a full numeric keypad. For some functions you'll need to juggle two remotes, like when you adjust the Sony TV's settings, but for regular viewing, using just the Dish remote to change channels and volume is fine.
For now, I can't figure out which of these two TVs to keep. The display Sony uses in their 42 inch and 48 inch OLED TVs is supposedly made by LG, but apparently it's not LG's brightest small OLED display, so I'm hoping that this year, LG will allow Sony to use the brighter LG evo screens (which LG uses in their own TVs) in their 2023 model A90K TVs (or whatever model number Sony uses for their next series of 42 inch OLED TVs), but we'll see.
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