LG G5 vs TCL X11L - 97-Inch OLED or Mini LED?
Quick Verdict
- Best for a bright room: TCL 98" X11L ($9,999) -- 10,000-nit Mini LED, 20,736 dimming zones, and you keep roughly $8,000.
- Best for a dark theater: LG 97" G5 ($18,000 street) -- perfect blacks still win with the lights off, if the price does not stop you first.
- Best value: TCL 98" QM8K (~$3,500) -- most of the X11L's punch for a third of the money. The X11L is the flex. The QM8K is the buy.
At 97 to 98 inches, buy the TCL. The LG 97" G5 is the better panel, and it still costs around $18,000 on the street ($24,999 at list). The 98" TCL X11L is $9,999, and in a room with windows it is the more watchable TV. That gap is roughly $8,000 to buy perfect blacks you will only notice in the dark.
The part nobody puts in the title: at 97 inches, the OLED is not even the bright one.
Rob's Take
For years my answer to "OLED or LED at any size" was OLED, full stop. The 97-inch tier is where I stopped. LG drops the Micro Lens Array panel on the 97" G5, so owners measuring panels on AVS Forum peg it near 1,137 nits, about half its 65-inch sibling. When the cheaper, bigger TV is also the brighter one in a sunlit room, the OLED tax stops adding up. I would still put an OLED in a blacked-out basement. Not on a sunny wall for $18,000.
The 97-inch OLED is not the TV that got reviewed
Every glowing G5 review quotes a number near 2,270 nits. Tom's Guide measured the 65-inch at 2,268 nits on a 10% window, a staggering figure for OLED. It comes from LG's four-stack MLA panel, and it is real.
It is not the TV you buy at 97 inches. LG does not put MLA on the 97-inch G5. It uses the same conventional WOLED panel as the 97" G4, landing around 1,137 nits, roughly half the size everyone reviews. The panel is not uniform across the range, and 97 is the size that quietly gets the dimmer glass. Same lesson as going 77, 83, or 85 inches: the biggest sizes change the math the marketing does not advertise.
Bright in the light, black in the dark
The X11L is a claimed 10,000-nit TV. Ignore that number, it is a tiny-window peak. What matters is that RTINGS measured real-scene highlights around 1,300 nits, and being LCD, it holds that across the whole screen. OLED cannot. Every OLED, the G5 included, dims itself on large bright scenes to protect the pixels, so the 97" G5 starts lower and gives brightness back on exactly the daytime content that fills a bright room. With 20,736 dimming zones, the most on any TV, the TCL is the one you can watch with the blinds open.
In the dark it flips. A switched-off OLED pixel emits nothing, so black is black, with no bloom around subtitles or a candle flame. The X11L blooms less than any Mini LED before it, but 20,736 zones is not 33 million pixels, and you will spot it on a letterboxed movie. Once your eyes adapt to a dark room, 1,137 nits on absolute black reads as plenty. Contrast, not peak brightness, is what sells HDR in a cave. Our Mini LED vs OLED explainer covers the mechanism.
Bright rooms: TCL X11L wins. ~1,300 nits real-scene with no dimming vs the 97" G5's ~1,137 nits that drops further on full-screen content.
Black levels and contrast: LG G5 wins. Self-emitting pixels hit true zero. Even 20,736 zones bloom a little around bright objects on black.
Size for the money: TCL X11L wins. 98 inches for $9,999 vs 97 inches for roughly $18,000.
Gaming: A draw. Both run 144Hz with four HDMI 2.1 ports and single-digit input lag.
The price is the whole argument
$9,999 versus about $18,000 on the street, or $25,000 at list. That gap buys a genuinely good speaker system, or most of a dedicated theater.
One catch worth naming: the X11L is the brightest consumer TV made, but it is not the value play. TCL's own 98" QM8K lands near $3,500 and gets you most of the experience, and the r/hometheater read is that the jump up to the X11L is where diminishing returns bite hardest. One owner running a 98" QM8K there says he can barely tell it from an OLED. If you are set on OLED, the 97" G4 uses the same panel as the G5 for around $11,000. The real choice is a ladder from $3,500 to $25,000, not two boxes.
So which goes on your wall
Bright room, big windows, mixed daytime viewing: the TCL X11L, or the QM8K to bank the savings. This is most people. When this exact question hit r/hometheater last month, big room and a wall of windows, the thread talked the poster out of the 97" OLED inside a few dozen replies, with a pointed warning that direct sunlight on an OLED panel is a real degradation risk.
Dark, controlled theater: the OLED, either the 97" G5 or its cheaper-panel twin, the 97" G4. Two alternatives worth a look before you commit: the 98" Sony Bravia 7 II floats around $9,000 with better motion and upscaling than TCL, and the Hisense 110UX goes even larger on the same Mini LED premise. One honest caveat: I have not metered a 98" X11L myself. RTINGS measured the 85-inch, and the 97" OLED figure comes from owners, not a lab, so read the last hundred nits as directional.
Buying the TV is step one. The CinemaConfig builder matches a 97 or 98-inch screen to an AVR and speakers that can fill a room that big. A 100-inch picture with a soundbar is a room half-finished.
Prices current as of July 2026: TCL 98" X11L at $9,999, 98" QM8K near $3,500, LG 97" G5 around $18,000 street against a $24,999 list. Big screens move a lot on Prime Day and Black Friday. Check current prices on CinemaConfig.
The uncomfortable part for LG is that Mini LED got good enough at exactly the sizes OLED cannot reach for a sane price. Until there is a 97-inch OLED carrying the MLA panel from the 65, the biggest, brightest screens belong to the backlight.
Rob Teller
Founder, CinemaConfig
15 years in consumer hardware and software, mostly on the product side. NZXT (cases and cooling), Asetek (liquid cooling, global sales), a short run advising on Alienware's roadmap at Dell, then four ... More about Rob · Affiliate disclosure
