LG's CX OLED TV
Our new favourite telly! Plus iPad Pro 11 & more
The OLED65CX is gorgeous. The star of the show, as usual with OLED TV technology, is how incredibly thin its screen is: for around two-thirds of its rear area it’s insanely skinny - just a couple of millimetres deep. Though of course, unless you’re fond of looking at the back of your TV rather than the front, you probably won’t notice this much once you’ve installed the set for the first time.
The bottom third or so of the OLED65CX’s rear sticks out quite a bit more than the rest. But the design still wears this pretty well - and the set’s speakers, connections and processors do have to go somewhere.
The screen attaches to one of the centrally mounted metallic sheet stands we’ve seen for a few C-series generations now. This is nicely finished and well built, but perhaps looks a touch chunky compared with the incredible slimness elsewhere.
Connections on the OLED65CX are plentiful and well specified - especially when it comes to
HDMIs. There are four, all capable of handling 4K at up to 120Hz in 10-bit HDR with 4:4:4 chroma sampling. Something which might become important with the next generation of games consoles.
One of the HDMIs can also support ARC/eARC (audio return channel), so that the TV can output Dolby Atmos from streaming services or 4K Blu-rays to compatible soundbars or AV receivers.
One last design point worth mentioning is the OLED65CX’s remote control. This is one of LG’s so-called Magic remotes, meaning you can point it at onscreen menu options rather than having to use cursor buttons to navigate all the menus. There’s also a spinning wheel in the remote’s center that lets you quickly cycle through vertical menu lists.
The point and click approach can be a bit imprecise, and the stiffness of the scrolling wheel can cause you to accidentally press it (for select) rather than just spinning it. But it’s still overall a winning remote control design.
Design TL;DR: The LG OLED65CX’s mind-bending slimness makes it a stunning addition to any living or home cinema room.
Smart TV (webOS with ThinQ AI)
Like the rest of LG’s OLED TV lineup, the LG OLED65CX inevitably deploys LG’s WebOS interface for its smarts. As usual, this is mostly a very good thing. The economical, no-nonsense home screen, with its row of icons connected to different content sources, is instantly accessible and easy to use and customise.
Highlighting one of the main content apps usually brings up a second tier of icons containing direct access to shows or films
from the app you’ve highlighted. Though this feature only works with apps that have worked with LG to enable it.
I guess the sheer volume of content apps available these days could make WebOS’s long scrolling bar of apps a bit unwieldy for some content-hungry households. But this is a small negative against all the good stuff.
It’s worth adding, too, that LG also leads the way when it comes to voice recognition, with the OLED65CX supporting LG’s own ThinQ AI platform, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Support for all these is built in, too, which means there’s no need for an external listening device.
In terms of supported apps, you’ll find relative new additions to the streaming landscape such as Disney+ and Apple TV+, as well as all the usual suspects like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime.
HD/SDR performance
OLED TVs have always being particularly well suited to standard dynamic range (SDR) technology. So it’s no surprise to see the OLED65CX looking stunning with every SDR Blu-ray or broadcast we threw at it.
Colours are rich and vibrant, but also nuanced and balanced. Contrast is pretty much perfect, as OLED’s ability to have every single pixel produce its own light brings out shadow details and dark tones with a degree of intensity and authenticity LCD screens can’t match.
The colour and contrast performance are both founded on a spectacular black level performance that’s free of the greyness and localised clouding problems you get with pretty much all LCD TVs. Just as importantly, bright highlights of mostly dark images retain a consistent level of intensity. There’s no sacrificing of any of their brightness to keep the dark areas around them looking neutral, as you often see with premium LCD TVs that use local dimming.
In short, the OLED65CX’s deft touch and per-pixel light reproduction ekes out every drop of quality from SDR content. And with high quality SDR sources such as a good Blu-ray, you may well be amazed at just how much the limited colour and light range of SDR can deliver when a TV is good enough to unlock it all.
4K/HDR performance
Great though the OLED65CX is with HD SDR images, it’s the improvements it brings with 4K and HDR images that really count in the premium TV world.
For starters, the OLED65CX’s black level performance improves on 2019’s LG C9 OLEDs in two ways. First, black levels get even deeper, and retain that depth and neutrality more consistently. Just occasionally a really extreme dark shot can suddenly appear infused with a low-level yellowish-grey tone. This is faint though, and doesn’t occur very often at all.
Second, the CX combines its improved black levels with more shadow details and dark colour shading subtlety than last year’s B9s (which actually delivered deeper blacks than the more expensive C9s). So basically the CX’s handling of black level and dark scenes combines the best bits of both the B9 and C9. And the results are beautiful.
LG OLED TVs have always been good – great, even. With the new LG CX OLED, though, LG has truly outdone itself, as a host of small but important improvements add up to a TV experience movie fans will struggle to tear their eyes from. John Archer