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Reviews Roundup: Best televisions of 2009

Today, we put on our thinking caps and ponder: what will 2009 be remembered for? Economic woes? Sexually ambiguous pop stars? Been there. Done that.

To us, the year in life and especially in tech was a bit like Back to the Future II - simply a bridge between two better stories. There was no iPhone-like “god” product this year, and even CES 2009 in Las Vegas was lacklustre.

But even if there wasn’t a defining product we still think there were some pearlers this year. While Panasonic will be pushing its 3D televisions in the new year, with the help of Avatar, the company simply had the best television we saw this year: the Viera G10. An incredibly solid TV, and the pick of the company’s three flagship televisions. The V10 was also promising, but expensive, and the Z1 was a very good TV that was burdened by a tacked-on wireless system.

But it was “LED” that had the biggest impact this year, and Samsung has to be commended for inventing a new category that doesn’t really exist. We don’t really care what system Samsung uses to light its LCDs, but when the results are as good as the 8 series we’ll forgive the company for confusing people. Samsung had the most consistent range of televisions this year, and also lead the pack in terms of design and features.

Sony also did its best, with a couple of solid televisions in the Z5500 and the WE5. And while it was also horrendously expensive, the best television we have ever seen is the Sony XEL-1. We cannot wait for larger, higher resolution televisions to come out - it’s very exciting technology. If you can hold off till 2015 it will be the television to have. By then we’ll be re-hydrating our pizzas and riding hoverboards as well.

Lastly, LG deserves props for its Time Machine (no, not the DeLorean) range of TVs - something a little different in a field of piano-black clones.