Top TVs for Smart Homes: Sony, Samsung and LG

With so many options available, choosing a TV for your home can be mind-boggling. New technologies, new sizes, new ways to incorporate the displays into dwellings keep TVs as a category fresh and homeowners inquisitive about the best brands. Creating a great viewing experience will hinge on factors beyond the brand of the display—variables like the size of the room, the lighting conditions, and the types of content you plan to watch should all be considered, as well. However, knowing which brands professional installers prefer may help you narrow down your choices.

CE Pro conducts an annual survey of the nation’s top 100 home systems integration firms to find out which brands are trending in categories including home automation, lighting, multiroom audio, and more. Here, we highlight their favorites in the TV category.

Sony continues to be the most popular TV brand among the largest smart-home integrators in America. The brand is specified by 92% of the nation’s 100 largest integration firms as identified by CE Pro in its annual Brand Analysis report.

Samsung takes the second spot in the 2018 brand survey, followed by LG Electronics. The three big brands are followed by Seura, a niche manufacturer of specialty displays, including mirror TVs and outdoor displays. No. 5 Planar edged up a couple of percentage points since last year, demonstrating the propensity of the CE Pro 100 to install very large display systems typically found in commercial venues.

All five of the top TV brands kept their same positions as last year. Back then, LG was called out for being a “Bullet Brand” with strong growth over the previous year (2016). LG soared even higher from 2017 (58%) to 2018 (64%) as more Top 100 dealers picked up the line. The loser for 2018 was Sharp, which tied last year with Planar.

Other Brands:

• Sharp: 9
• Bang & Olufsen: 4
• Vizio: 3
• Aquavision: 1

 

Top Picks For Outdoor TVs

As for outdoor TVs, SunBriteTV and Séura are the top brands carried by CE Pro 100 dealers, as they have been for the past two years. Some integrators as revealed by the survey continue to install big-CE brands like Samsung and Sony in environmental outdoor enclosures. The emergence of Samsung and Sony, plus Peerless-AV and Planar just outside the top five may indicate the use of larger commercial-oriented displays in residential applications.