LG G1 Gallery OLED TV
The new LG G1 Gallery OLED turns things up to 11.
The LG G1 OLED is the follow up to the sleek Gallery OLED model that debuted last year, but a host of improvements – including a shot in the arm to brightness – make the G Series a more tempting proposition than ever.
Adding a new high-efficiency ‘Evo’ panel design and enhanced colour system allows the G1 OLED series to boldly go where no LG OLED has gone before. It means, after all, that the spectacular black level and local contrast talents that LG OLED TVs have always boasted can be partnered with more of the raw brightness and colour reach that’s so important to a true HDR experience.
Design
The LG G1 OLED’s design isn’t called ‘Gallery’ for nothing. It’s designed very much with wallhanging in mind – so much so that it even lets you display digitised artworks on it, turning it into a Louvre exhibition when you’re not using its primary TV function.
The LG G1’s ultra-slim design is incredibly flat, with no awkward protubing sections to spoil the slender profile. The wall mount that ships with the TV is even designed to fit into a recessed area on the TV’s rear, making the LG G1 sit as flush as flush can be against the wall. Add to all this an extremely trim bezel, and it’s hard to imagine how a 65-inch TV could make less of a dent on your living room.
Of course, most people don’t hang their TVs on a wall. So if you want the G1’s extra picture quality but don’t want to wall-mount it, you will need to purchase desktop feet for the LG G1 OLED as an optional extra. LG does its own reasonably robust and attractive options, as well as a striking new Gallery floor stand that fits the TV onto a tripod-style pole – but you won’t get a countertop stand out of the box (do make sure any feet you get you get are pretty robust, as the screen is unusually heavy by today’s standards).
Despite its slim profile, all of the LG G1 OLED’s connections and speakers are built into the screen’s casing, and the input support is pretty outstanding. All four of the HDMIs support full HDMI 2.1 feature sets – complete with cutting-edge gaming in 4K at 120Hz, with HDR and variable refresh rates. In fact, the LG G1 even supports all three current variable refresh rate ‘variants’: Nvidia G-Sync, AMD Freesync and the standard HDMI 2.1 system.
The G1 also provides three USBs for multimedia playback or
recording, as well as the nowubiquitous Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity options.
LG has revamped the design of its ‘Magic’ remote control for 2021. It’s longer and slimmer, and features a pronounced recess in its rear side that helps it feel very balanced and comfortable to hold. There are now direct app access buttons for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, but it happily retains both LG’s distinctive ‘point and click’ navigation option and a dial to help you spin rapidly through menus.
Smart TV
The LG G1 OLED ushers in LG’s most substantial revamp to its renowned webOS smart platform since it launched nearly a decade ago.
The most immediate change comes with its home screen, which now occupies the whole screen, rather than just superimposing a neat row of app icons over the picture’s bottom edge as previous webOS systems have.
We were pretty hostile to this change at first. Partly because it means you can no longer keep watching TV while you browse for new content to watch, and partly because full-screen interfaces with icons all over the place can be a bit overwhelming for some. It doesn’t help, either, that webOS 6.0 doesn’t seem to make the best use of its new full-screen real estate. Many screen-filling icons seem unlikely to figure much in most household’s day to day use – though the now prominentlyplaced search function takes you to a remarkably comprehensive and well-presented search result screen, showing why LG gives the search engine so much home screen weight.
Picture quality
The LG G1 OLED’s Evo panel is the first really substantial OLED TV hardware revision LG has introduced for years. That’s not to say there haven’t been lots of small, iterative hardware improvements along the way. But the differences here are big enough to prompt LG to actually shout about it through the ‘Evo’ branding exercise.
The Evo panel isn’t a jawdropping overhaul, but the change is definitely noticeable, and improves things for the better.
The Evo panel uses new materials that enable it to run more efficiently, meaning it can hit higher brightness levels without either ramping up power consumption or, crucially, increasing the chance of its screen suffering permanent screen burn. Our own measurements yield a peak brightness reading on a 10 percent (of the screen) white HDR window of just over 870 nits. It’s a small but notable improvement over the 754 nits of last year’s GX range – and the peak brightness reduces by 100 nits or so when you shift from the (inadvisable) Vivid picture preset to Standard. The extent of the G1 brightness improvement versus the GX, though, tends to be between 10 percent and 20 percent across all picture presets, and that’s always enough to make its presence felt in two key ways.
The way the LG G1 OLED combines a bit more brightness with OLED’s renowned black level and local contrast prowess – without, so it’s claimed, increasing the chance of OLED screen burn – makes the LG G1 OLED easily the best OLED TV LG has ever made. And given the quality of LG’s previous OLED TVs, that’s really saying something.