Svelte set

With the Signature W7, LG has create d so met hing extraordinary. We hang out with the wo rld’s first wafer-thin TV

Could LG’s depthdefying TV be the best we’ve ever seen?

Behold the wallpaper TV. As flat as day-old Cristal, and just as likely to grace Jay Z’s kitchen, the LG W7 is an OLED telly like no other that’s come before.

Given that LG has been curling OLED panels for years, albeit in the privacy of its own R&D labs, perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by this remarkably flexible screen. But to experience it close up, to gingerly bend the 2.57mm panel ourselves and stick it flush on a wall using nothing but magnets is still a mind-bender. But is it really worth the best part of 8,000 smackers?

A design statement

The Signature W7 comprises a 65-inch UHD OLED panel with a separate soundbar/tuner hub. The two of these are linked by a thin flat ribbon cable which carries sound, vision and power.

The TV mounts onto a matching wall plate using magnetic lugs, which snap perfectly together. Don’t think about mounting this set any other way, however. The panel doesn’t have the rigidity to stand upright on its own.

The matching soundbar is a big beast. Unlike the panel it can’t be mounted on a wall. It boasts a Dolby Atmos decoder, but this doesn’t actually perform in the way you might expect.

The soundbar has four HDMI inputs. These are HDCP 2.2 compliant, which means they can all be used with 4K sources, such as UHD Blu-ray and 4K set top boxes. There’s also a trio of USBs (one of which is a fast USB 3.0 port for HD recordings), an AV minijack and an optical digital audio output (although no one in their right mind is going to output audio to a soundbar, from a soundbar). Obviously, there’s dual-band Wi-Fi and Ethernet too.

Features and function

The W7 may look extraordinary, but up and running it behaves much like any other LG Smart TV. It launches with the Bean Bird mascot, holds your hand through the tuning process and leaves you cosseted in LG’s minimalistic but very clever webOS interface.

The set uses the latest 3.5 iteration of the webOS platform. The user experience is much the same as we’ve seen before, albeit with fun tweaks. There’s an OLED gallery, which displays works of art or your own image folders. You can also zoom into recordings and save them to USB (though we struggle to think why you might want to).

Perhaps the best new feature is the ability to play 360-degree VR footage, exactly like you would on a tablet, using the Magic Remote control to scroll around the image.

Don’t let the wafer-thin novelty of the W7 fool you. The image quality of this next-gen OLED is insanely good. We’ve long applauded OLED’s pure black performance, but here it’s augmented with superb near-black shadow detail alongside an array of sumptuous colours.

Crucially, compared to the panels we saw last year, we also noticed dramatically higher HDR (High Dynamic Range) brightness.

LG says HDR can peak at 1,000 nits on the W7, but this would only be for itsy-bitsy sparkles. Larger splodges of brightness are less intense, and a full white screen is power limited to just 150 nits. But these numbers mean little overall. Image dynamics are all we care about, and in this regard the W7 consistently shines.

LG likes to pile its HDR acronyms high. So in addition to HDR10, the static metadata standard everyone uses, there’s dynamic metadata Dolby Vision and broadcast HDR