Is OLED worth the extra?
New research shows that some buyers are choosing OLED in preference to a larger LED-LCD screen. Is that justified? We set up a head-to-head challenge to find out, though not quite the test we had planned — life got in the way...
We’re going to do something a little different this issue with our TV review, by kind-of comparing two TVs from LG. Mind you I was reminded on several occasions by the people looking after these products that they don’t really want them ‘compared’. They point out that the two TVs in question use very different technology. One uses LG’s top-of-the-line LCD technology, and this goes by the name of ‘Super UHD’, while the other uses the very best consumer display technology currently available — OLED.
But it’s odd to say that they shouldn’t be compared. Any consumer looking to buy a premium TV has to do exactly that when perusing what’s available — and in particular whether the more expensive OLEDs are worth the extra. (And might we mention that LG Australia invited us all last year to “take
the OLED Challenge” and “Go in store to compare LG OLED TV to LED backlit TVs and see the difference for yourself”? Case proven. Comparison is not only required, it has been encouraged by LG itself.
Our motivation for such a comparison came, however, from something IHS Markit researcher Paul Gray presented to the recent Global Press Conference in advance of IFA 2017 in Berlin. Recent IHS statistics from Europe show that many consumers not only prefer OLED, they’re even opting to buy a smaller OLED over a larger LED TV at the same price (see below). Choosing quality over size is not necessarily the norm in television sales. So let’s see what’s happening.
Originally our plan was to check a 65-inch Super UHD against a 65-inch OLED and ask, quite simply, is OLED worth the difference? But that idea fell apart when the first of those TVs was mishandled in transit (interestingly this plays to another point raised by Paul Gray about large TVs, see p15). This mishap made the TV unreviewable, and not surprisingly it also made the suppliers leery of sending a $9099 OLED by the same route. So instead this reviewer was brought to the TVs, lodged in LG’s marketing firm’s offices in Sydney.
Equipment
With the poor 65-inch Super UHD TV still damaged, I got to sit down before a 55-inch Super UHD and a 65-inch OLED TV in the same room, actually the reverse of the situation that led us to the review. Other review limitations away from our normal lab included limited control over how dark I could make the room, and the erroneous assumption that there would be an Ultra HD Blu-ray player available. I could have brought one, but I was 300km away by the time I realised the problem.
Still, I had a USB with all my clips on it, and my test patterns. And they had USBs with some additional HDR material and a premium Netflix account, so I could in theory have a go at UHD and Dolby Vision streaming. So think of this as a 90% review. (In practice, the network connection there wasn’t fast enough to deliver UHD from Netflix. Indeed, it would take a while to ramp up from low resolution to full HD.)
Also bear in mind the major discrepancy — price. The Super UHD TV was the 55SJ850T, RRP $3199 and available at the first retailer I checked on the web for $2495. The OLED was LG’s second-from-the-top OLED65G7T, RRP $9099, and the best price online was... $9099. So the larger OLED TV here cost more than three times as much.
But had the 65-inch Super UHD TV been intact ($4799/$3895) and compared with the OLED65C7T ($6899/$5895), things would have been a lot closer all around. Note we’re told that the OLED65C7T has essentially the same picture performance as the OLED65G7T; also that LG’s W and G Series prices include delivery and installation.
Same, but different
So, similarities first. Both use LG’s webOS 3.5, essentially, a brush-up of webOS 3.0 and not a whole different from the first version introduced a few years ago. I like the LG interface. It remains stylish, and it’s easy to use. It’s editable, so you can put the functions you prefer near the start of the bar, keeping your half-dozen most important things right there on the front page. The Magic Remote takes hardly any time to master, and remains the fastest way of selecting things among any brand of TV — forget your touch-sensitive pads; forget pressing arrows on the remote. Just move the remote and press when the arrow is in the right spot.
But the magic remotes weren’t quite the same on the two TVs. The cheaper TV comes with the same one that has been used for a couple of years. It’s plastic, medium-sized, and combined the pointer functionality with a good enough selection of keys to largely avoid one having to resort very often to virtual keyboards on the screen. The G7T OLED comes with the ‘Signature’ version of the remote. It’s more stylish, with a metal-look finish (although I’m almost certain it’s still plastic) and it has a couple more keys: play, pause and also an Info key. Both remotes support voice interaction if you want to do such things.
Contrarily, I preferred the cheaper remote from the cheaper TV. Its scroll wheel at the centre was easier to use for some reason.
Both interfaces worked very snappily, thanks to the much faster processors in use these days. About the only noticeable delay was when it came to invoking the full settings menu. Here the SJ850T took a touch over four seconds, and the G7T just over two, and consistently for both of them, suggesting that the OLED TV has a much faster processor than the other. But even the Super UHD TV is still pretty fast.
Both, incidentally, displayed my UHD test pattern perfectly, including all the colours in the right places, so there is no resolution bottleneck in picture processing. Both also played H.265 clips, Dolby Vision clips, HDR clips, clips with BT.2020 colour space. And you can get them to pop up a line of information showing format information about the clips, so you can confirm what you think you might be seeing.
Does this work with Ultra HD Blu-ray discs? We don’t know. I hope so.
Both also have an unusual capability: support for 360 video — material captured by a camera which records in almost all directions at once. With suitable playback equipment, most commonly VR goggles, one can look in different directions to see what there is in that direction. But these TVs are ‘suitable playback equipment’ too. You can’t just move your head to look all around, but you can use the Magic Remote to point and drag the picture around to a different view. It works surprisingly effectively.
That’s with special 360 content. There probably aren’t formal standards for this kind of thing yet, so likely no formally defined flags indicating 360 content. So you manually invoke it — which means you can manually invoke it for any video content. Non-360 clips distort, producing a kind of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ effect. Rather fun.
One thing that neither TV supports is 3D, which TV manufacturers are dropping from their feature sets like it’s some kind of plague, even though quite a few of the big movie launches still come out in Blu-ray 3D. If you’re a big 3D fan, you’ll need to pick your next TV with great care as this technology becomes ever less widely supported.
All that said, I do wonder if there might be a subtle improvement in regular TV picture performance with the loss of 3D. Perhaps an increase in brightness? LG 3D systems have worked with passive glasses, essentially each alternate line having the opposite circular polarisation to the one above. The left and right lenses of the glasses have appropriate polarisation so that each eye sees the appropriate lines of the picture.
That’s well and good when you’re watching 3D, but when you’re not, it seems likely that a lot of the light is being filtered out by the polarisation layer, which would reduce efficiency and brightness. With the push for higher brightness panels (the Dolby Vision people would like to see 10,000 nits!), there’s a lot of pressure to get rid of anything restricting light output. LED-LCD panel performance Last time I reviewed a top-of-the-line non-OLED LG TV I was quite disappointed. The aesthetics were gloriously stylish, thanks to the astonishingly thin panel. But as a result, the local control of the backlight was fairly mediocre, so dark scenes were lit in the wrong places.
This Super UHD TV has a fairly thin panel for most of its extent, but not that thin: about 30mm, tapering down to a centimetre or so at the edges. This resulted in very good performance with the blacks, thanks to welltuned backlight performance.
There was decent localisation. Using my nastiest test patterns I could easily induce a glow around bright elements on black backgrounds, but it was generally around those elements, not all over the screen in odd places. As a result — and remember, I could not get the viewing room as dark as I would have liked, but it was reasonably well dimmed — the performance with dark scenes was actually rather good, indeed as good as I’ve seen with any TV short of one sporting a full LED grid behind the LCD. And, of course, not as dead-black black as OLED.
But there’s this kind of threshold in our vision, it seems to me, above which blacks don’t look convincing, and below which they do. It is in part influenced by contrast with the bright elements, and this TV went extremely bright, the colours remaining fully saturated all the while. Those combine to push the black levels to the correct side of the threshold. Blacks were subjectively convincing in just about all circumstances.
And I’ve already touched on the other end of things. Superb brightness, and great intense colours. Is it the Nano Cell Technology? I don’t know, but I do know that fine results have been delivered. Sure, despite the IPS display, the snap of the high contrast diminishes a touch at extreme viewing angles. But even that’s at viewing angles so extreme no one would choose to sit there if it could be avoided. OLED panel performance But OLED can’t help but beat this. After checking a little of this and that, I loaded my white-on-black test patterns. I was about to write that the only thing that softened the hard edges between white and black was a little light diffusion through the glass of the screen. But
when I walked over to the TV and masked off the relevant area, voila, the glow around the edge of the circle disappeared. Completely. What I had been seeing was simply my vision coping with the contrast. The TV itself coped perfectly, delivering 100% white to every pixel it was supposed to, while allowing the adjacent pixels to remain truly zero percent, otherwise known as 100% black. This is truly infinite contrast.
The G7T has a bunch of very premium features. For example, the glass-on-glass finish to the screen leaves it visually borderless. And the panel is delightfully thin. There’s also a large sound bar on the underside for much better sound that any TV has a right to produce. (Apparently it can also do things like Dolby Atmos.) Conclusion The original goal with this piece to ask the question: is OLED worth it? All else being equal, are the extra dollars for an OLED panel worth it in terms of performance?
As it turned out, all else was far from equal, as I’ve described. If the panel in the 65OLEDC7T TV performs to the same level as the 65OLEDG7T, and the 65-inch version of the SuperUHD TV works as well as this 55SJ850T, then we’re talking about two TVs which are very similar in all ways except the panel and the price. And does the OLED panel justify a $2000-$2100 price premium? Hell, yes!