is a senior reviewer covering TVs and audio. He has over 20 years experience in AV, and has previously been on staff at Digital Trends and Reviewed.
LG OLEDs are consistently some of the best TVs you can get, and I’ve lost count how many times I’ve recommended them to family and friends. Add the LG G5 to that list. It’s LG’s high-end gallery-style TV, designed to look refined and sleek mounted on the wall — which it achieves thanks to its slim profile and flush mounting. Its black levels are deep and inky, and color and grayscale accuracy are spot on. It delivers a gorgeous, engaging image that makes a normal movie night something special.
Most impressive about the G5 is its significant bump in brightness over last year’s G4. Over the last few years, quantum-dot OLEDs from Samsung and Sony have offered brightness comparable to LG’s WOLED (or white OLED) designs, but with better color volume at high brightness. LG needed an update to compete, and with a new type of OLED panel, it does. It’s an impressive leap forward.
Adding a layer
The panel technology that gives the G5 this leap is Primary RGB Tandem OLED. It has four emissive layers (red, green, and two blue) instead of the three layers (yellow and two blue) used in LG’s earlier WOLED TVs. The extra layer allows for more light without using as much power, and the dedicated red and green layers help improve color purity. The G5 still has a white subpixel, as do non-Primary RGB Tandem OLEDs, for added brightness.
LG Display (the company that makes Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels for LG Electronics and others) claims the technology can get up to 4,000 nits, which rivals some high-end mini-LED TVs from TCL and Hisense. The 65-inch LG G5, in my testing, didn’t achieve that lofty number, but it still measured over 2,400 nits from a 10 percent window. That’s nearly 1,000 more nits than the G4, and as good as mini-LED TVs just a couple of years ago. So specular highlights — a streetlight or the reflection of the sun off of the sea waves — are brighter.
But it’s not just about the high brightness. The major benefits of OLED over LED TVs are its pixel-level control and perfect blacks. Those perfect blacks paired with the impressive brightness of the Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel equal an incredible level of contrast. The G5 maintains the blacks in a bright room well, too. It’s a significant improvement over the G4; the MLA layer would reflect the ambient light and cause the screen to have raised black levels.
Reviews from earlier in the year pointed out that the G5 exhibited some issues with HDR content, specifically in darker scenes. Just-above-black levels were a little elevated, there was some posterization (blockiness) in shadows, and it occasionally had what are referred to as floating blacks, where the black levels in a scene shift depending on what’s on screen.
All model sizes come with a wall mount, and the 55- and 65-inch models have an optional table stand (shown here).
Thankfully, firmware updates have addressed those issues. I didn’t see any posterization or floating blacks in shadow scenes in Blade Runner 2049 or Fellowship of the Ring. There’s a minor issue coming out of black, where instead of a totally smooth fade in, it jumps from black to a dark gray. I could only see it happen when the room was dark (any ambient light covered the effect), and it only happens in those fade-in moments, so I’m being incredibly critical. I don’t expect most will see or be bothered by it.
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