At that level it doesnt make sense to look at locales again. But at individual screens.
Factory lines in china might be newer for example yielding better quality screens as a result. A screen coming from korea is not a sign of quality per se, just price (indicator of value). Screens in general are produced in accordance with certain quality criteria (color space, black level, uniformity, ...) that is actually indicated to manufacturers who are looking to buy them (as such LG and Samsung may also buy chinese panels for certain product lines) - but not end users. So looking up where your panel was manufactured, has actually little value. (Except for maybe if you are buying them from korean manufacturers, who at the same quality level would use their own panels (better economics), so would mostly buy cheaper panels from china?)
Thats long for saying, even chinese panels can be superb.
Now the general "message" was 'buy chinese' for the cheaper, smaller screens, not many people are testing. Not panels, but manufacturer. (Japanese or Korean manufacturers will buy chinese panels, then add an electronics package and a price premium.)
In every case where tests (people meassuring the panel for end consumers) exist, go by individual TV model and tests, and forget brand entirely if you can - if you can get down to the specifics, brand or locale stops to matter at all.
Where a panel actually was manufactured is very hard to find out. You usually need to lock into service menus, and go with online databases, just to find out, that one TV model may have two different panels supplied (as in your case), and for how hard it is to find out, it tells you quite little, because you dont get to see the pricepoint the end manufacturer has bought it for.
I had a Sony TV about 5 years ago that had a panel that was manufactured by AOC (Taiwan), and beat every other TV in the next two price classes in terms of calibrated color accuracy. Great TV. Low price. (Chinese manufacturers werent in western markets themselves back then.) Thats also part of "you are buying blind" if you have no one testing the cheaper models, you actually cant tell what quality panels they are using.
A little higher up in the price range you can filter by 60Hz VA panel, and by then you actually can look at all the relevant models within a year (Sony, Samsung 7 series if you are lucky, sometimes just the 8 series'...), but in the price segment below that its actually very hard to buy 'the right TV', because you simply dont know.
So going with a chinese manufacturer (of the entire TV - so TCL, Vizio, Philips, ...) is the best value bet there.
Last edited by notimp,
