Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let me start by saying I am an avid videophile who regularly uses top-end CRTs and plasmas. I have had my eye on OLED for over a decade and with both CRT and plasma extinct there is a lot riding on OLED. This television shows a lot of promise for the technology, but its implementation unfortunately is not up to par with older display technologies in certain key areas that are important to me. Black level is perfect much of the time (if there is enough contrast on the screen), but at mid-APL (average pixel luminance) levels some unusual vertical banding artifacts occur that cause the center of the screen to produce cloudy grey bands instead of pure black. This makes a very dark movie like Eden Log a rather unpleasant experience at best; the black level is constantly shifting for large vertical strips of the screen, something that does not happen watching this film on a good plasma or CRT. Motion clarity is also not what LG wants you to believe. It is true the pixels respond quicker than even plasma, but the display uses sample-and-hold, and as such it actually looks worse than plasma (whose pixels are not the same brightness for an entire frame) in many situations. This manifests itself as ungodly amounts of judder in film-based content, which can only be corrected if you enable motion smoothing. If you are used to LCD displays this might not bother you, but I am used to plasma and CRT, and the quality of motion on this display is downright disgusting on content below 60 FPS. Do not expect to play contemporary PS4 or Xbox One games on this TV, at 30 FPS (the current norm) judder is unbearable in most games I have tried; a good plasma is what you need for games at that frame rate. PC gaming works great, however, if you have a machine that can sustain a solid 60 FPS (but to do this at 4K you need a GPU with HDMI 2.0 output, HDMI 1.4 is only capable of 4K @ 30 Hz at full PC RGB color range). Image retention is a very real problem on this display and LG includes neither a pixel orbiter feature or a scrolling bar to prevent/reduce it. Fortunately it is not as bad as it is on most plasmas, but you still do not want to run games at full contrast because their HUD will be retained after long sessions. It's not all negative, thankfully! Energy consumption is absolutely stellar for such a high-contrast display; it uses about 1/3 as much power as my 55" Panasonic VT60 while producing an image many times brighter. Further, it generates next to no heat compared to any comparable plasma and of course no buzzing. Screen curvature, which I thought would be a nuisance, has actually turned out to be a blessing. If nothing else, having a curved screen significantly reduces the amount of visible glare and puts this TV far ahead of even the best light filtered plasma. You will not notice any actual image warping because the amount of curvature is so little, you actually have to remind yourself that the TV is curved most of the time. Color is accurate enough out of the box that I have nothing positive or negative to say about it. UHD Blu-Ray content still does not exist, so there is very little content that can actually be used to properly test the expanded color gamut OLED is capable of producing. For cable and traditional Blu-Ray, the TV has no trouble at all and the TV does not try to incorrectly apply a wide color gamut to broadcast television as I have seen Samsung plasmas do when set to "auto." The speakers are so-so. They're pretty respectable for built-in, but not at all what you expect when a venerable name like Harman/Kardon is involved. I have an actual Harman/Kardon stereo soundbar underneath this TV, ironically. The soundbar is quite possibly the best sounding on the market, the speakers in this TV on the other hand are far from it - my 11 year old SONY 34XBR960 CRT has better built-in speakers. WebOS 2.0 and this year's updated remote control are also a sign that LG's ready to be taken more seriously as a player in high-end televisions. Samsung still has the best smart TV implementation by far, but I would go as far as to say LG has produced a more intuitive smart TV than Panasonic VIErA. However, the choice not to include an SD card slot seems a little unusual - this is standard equipment on all other comparable smart TVs. The bottom line, and the reason I am not giving this TV 5 stars, is that my old plasmas still beat this television in certain image quality metrics. For the price of this TV and the fact that plasma is no longer manufactured, this should be superior in every measure. LG needs to abandon sample-and-hold and work out their black uniformity issues before I will give any of their OLEDs 5 stars. This may sound like sacrilege, but unless you have money to burn, I would suggest picking up a used 1080p plasma (ideally Panasonic's last model year) instead of this or any other LG OLED TV. Contrast will not be as good, but black uniformity and motion clarity will make watching movies on them a much more pleasant experience. Wait a few more years before adopting OLED, LG has a few issues that still need to be sorted out.