I understand the reasons not to go for OLED. I had similar concerns when it came time for a new TV. I had done the plasma thing a few years before and came a cropper because my wife is hard of hearing and needed to use subtitles. In roughly a year there was a nice maroon-coloured scorch mark in the footprint area where subtitles generally sat. This was despite me knowing how to set up a TV to minimise the risk of screen burn. If I had been gaming occasionally or these were onscreen logos then it wouldn't have been an issue.
In the fifteen or so years since I got rid of that TV I've had a succession of LCD-based TVs. It has been the safe choice, but all have been disappointing. My main bone of contention has been the trade-off between acceptable black levels and wide-ish viewing angles. It has always been a compromise. This is something that you never experienced with plasma. The picture looked just as good whether you sat directly opposite it or 20 degrees off centre. Not so with LCD; and they're all LCD regardless of the fancy monikers such as LED, NanoCell, QLED, mini-LED. They're just ways of illuminating the panel. It's backlighting.
LCD TV panels fall into two categories. There's IPS and VA.
IPS has the sort of wide viewing angles you've been used to with plasma. The colour saturation and contrast doesn't really change that much unless you're viewing from an extreme angle. The trade-off for this though is that the blacks look grey no matter how you adjust the set, and black backgrounds take on a patchy look (poor uniformity). These things contribute to a general lack of contrast.
VA is the inverse of this. Decent blacks, good uniformity (subject to the type of backlights; more on that later) but crap viewing angles. If I move a couple of seats to my right on this sofa then the picture looks pants for contrast and colour by comparison. I knew it would be like this when I bought the telly, but it still doesn't make it any easier to live with.
There are some other considerations with LCD-based TVs. The type and direction of the backlighting is important to he final result. The cheapest method is direct lighting. This is where the LED lights sit in strips directly behind the panel. That doesn't sound so bad until you realise that the lights are always on. They lack any ability to dim with changes in the picture content. Next up is the edge-lit panel. Here the lighting is usually a strip at the bottom edge that casts light across the back of the panel. Here you'll often find there's a dimming capability of sorts, but it's limited to working in columns. That's not ideal if you have say a shot of a bright full moon in the middle of a night sky.
The better solution is lighting behind the panel but that can then dim in zones, and the ore zones then the more controllable the lighting. This is called Full Array Local Dimming - FALD for short. This in turn led to the development of mini-LED, a new technology still finding its feet. In theory it should knock-for-six FALD and everything below it. In practice it's not that straightforward. Plasma and now OLED are the ultimate expressions of lighting control. When each pixel is individually addressable for light output it doesn't get any better than that.
I have made mention of lighting because it's an area where manufacturers cut corners, particularly as sets get bigger and there's more pressure on price. It's a little too easy to slip down a couple of levels in performance as you look at whatever the next size up happens to be, especially if the prices are fairly close.
OLED isn't right for everyone, but you do tend to find that it has all the things that make a TV a great TV.
The native refresh rate of the panel is often 100Hz rather than 50Hz, and that feeds in to better motion handling for clearing images when stuff gets busy onscreen. (There is an exception in the cheaper A series LGs which are 50Hz, but that's their only concession.) The panels are capable of displaying proper 10-bit colour without resorting to fudging it with 8+2 bit dithering. There's wide viewing angles with little in the way of colour or contrast loss, and the black level will make even plasma look 2nd best. Those black levels help give OLED its massive contrast ratios. You also get support of all the HDR formats including Dolby Vision and Dolby IQ.
I know you said you were looking for 75"; just be aware that even if you push your budget out to the maximum £1500 you're still looking at a fairly pedestrian LCD TV. A good example of that is the Samsung
QE75Q80A (Rtings review link - UK price £1499 from RS). It's one of their QLED models. You get the 100Hz panel but not the 10-bit colour or DolbyVision support. Something else that's missing is proper local dimming. This is where you have to be really careful picking through the marketing B.S. that's designed to bamboozle you. Samsung refer to the backlight dimming as Supreme UHD Dimming, and it makes it sound like something special. If you read Samsung's marketing blurb about it they make a big play about how the system reads thousands of light points in the picture and then applies just the right level of dimming. What they're really doing is averaging and then applying one dimming level to the entire image. It's direct backlighting - the one I said was cheapest - but with average light level dimming applied. There are no individually dimmed zones, and not even the columns of dimming with edge lit local dimming. The only positives for me on this set are that it's bright (suits a brighter room) and the it has VRR mode support for gaming.
Now contrast with the 65"
LG OLED65B16LA at at £1280 from Richers. Okay, it's a smaller screen, but far better quality. 100Hz, 10-bit, per pixel dimming, Dolby Vision and Dolby IQ, hughely better picture quality. Good motion. Game modes including VRR support. It doesn't have it all its own way though. LGs don't support DTS audio via Optical or a standard ARC connection. Also, being OLED means it's not as bright as an LCD TV so it suits rooms with some light control.
Which would I have - even considering subtitles? - the OLED
