LG OLED55C6V review
WHAT IS THE LG OLED55C6V
The OLED55C6V is the first TV we’ve seen from LG’s 2016 OLED range. Costing £3,000, it's a 55-inch model with a curved screen, and it arrives packing new support for Dolby Vision’s high dynamic range technology as well as – according to LG – a significantly improved picture performance compared with LG’s already classy 2015 OLED models.
LG OLED55C6V – DESIGN AND FEATURES
Let’s get the divisive bit out of the way first: the OLED55C6V's curved screen. The curve is fairly shallow as such things go, but it’s there and it can, as usual, lead to some distortions and onscreen reflections if you have a bright light source opposite the screen.
On the flipside, the OLED55C6V’s curvature adds a little extra glamour to what’s already a stunning design – not least because curving the left and right edges gently forwards makes it easier to appreciate the incredible thinness (barely 3mm) the OLED panel enjoys over around 50% of its rear.
This view also serves to highlight the gorgeous, glinting silver trim applied to the screen’s outer edges. Basically any LCD screen with aspirations of trying to out-design OLED might as well just pack up and go home.
Connections on the OLED55C6V are effective rather than exemplary, on account of including only three HDMIs when ideally there would be four. Two support Ultra HD and HDR streams, though, and you can playback your multimedia collections via either a trio of USB ports or via the TV’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connection options.
The integrated Wi-Fi can also access a decent set of online apps and video streaming options, including Now TV, Netflix and Amazon Video. In past years, LG has fallen a little short when it comes to offering the UK’s most important catch-up TV apps. However, the Korean brand has put that right for 2016 by introducing support for the Freeview Play catch-up platform via a firmware update rolling out to its latest smart TVs as we speak.
All of the OLED55C6V’s smart features and sources are predominantly accessed via the latest version of LG’s webOS platform, which has undergone a few changes. The scrolling "launcher" bar is now longer, so it can host pretty much every app you have. Plus, there's now a new My Content section, into which you can bookmark favourite content to make it easier to return to.
The main point about webOS, however, is that LG appears well aware of the fact that it’s best not to mess too much with something that already works extremely well.
With regards to the OLED55C6V’s panel technology, the key point here is that every pixel in an OLED screen produces its own light level, independent of its neighbours. You don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to figure out that this means OLED TVs have the potential to deliver far superior contrast, much deeper black levels and far more accurately positioned, localised light than their LCD counterparts.
The sort of pixel-level light precision OLED can deliver has become even more important, it seems to me, now that HDR content has arrived on the scene. After all, as LCD TV after LCD TV is proving this year, nothing highlights the shortcomings of using external lighting systems shared over groups of pixels more than the extra light intensity and variation associated with HDR footage.
What’s more, LG claims to have introduced a raft of improvements for 2016 from its already exciting 2015 OLED TVs. Particularly intriguing is new support for the Dolby Vision take on HDR, which adds an extra layer of dynamic metadata for scene-by-scene optimisation. It also introduces a degree of optimisation based on the particular screen being used. LG is the first brand to adopt Dolby Vision in the UK.
The company has also greatly increased the brightness it can achieve in its 2016 OLED TVs – critical when it comes to delivering HDR – while simultaneously claiming to have reduced the issues with light "banding" and sudden black-level loss suffered by many of its 2015 models.
Other features of note are support for 3D, using the passive 3D system; sufficient picture setup tools to earn the endorsement of the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) as a TV that one of its engineers could come and professionally calibrate; and, last but not least, Ultra HD Premium status.
If you're unfamiliar with the latter term, it means the OLED55C6V delivers deep enough blacks, bright enough brights, sufficient resolution – with its Ultra HD panel – and enough of the DCI-P3 digital cinema colour spectrum to rank as a top-quality HDR performer, according to standards defined by the AV industry’s Ultra HD Alliance working group.
LG OLED55C6V – SETUP
To get the best out of the OLED55C6V will involve some tweaking of its settings.
The single most important thing to bear in mind is that you really shouldn’t adjust the TV’s main brightness setting – as opposed to its "OLED Brightness" setting – any lower than 49 or any higher than 52. Slip below 49 and shadow detailing in dark areas starts to become crushed. Push higher than 52 and the trademark ultra-rich black levels of OLED suddenly start to plummet.
I’d also urge care with LG’s rather messy motion processing. I found I achieved the best balance between judder reduction and distracting processing side effects by choosing the TruMotion User mode and setting both the judder and blur compensation to level two or three.
Make sure noise reduction is turned off for all native 4K feeds and good-quality HD feeds, and avoid the "Vivid" picture option when watching HDR, since it leads to excessive "bleaching" of colours and white areas.
Personally, I'd also avoid the HDR Effect mode LG provides to try to convert standard dynamic range content into HDR, since it doesn’t represent colours convincingly – and the set does superbly with SDR content in its native form.
LG OLED55C6V – PICTURE QUALITY
With no other brands offering serious OLED TV ranges, it would be easy for LG to just tootle along in its own little OLED world without feeling the need to change things much beyond making its OLED TVs ever cheaper.
However, the OLED55C6V proves emphatically that LG isn't twiddling its thumbs between OLED generations, for it really is a terrific improvement on any television that’s gone before.
For instance, LG has tackled the light banding and sudden black-level loss issues of 2015. Both crop up very, very occasionally when watching HDR footage, but so rarely and so much more subtly – so long as you haven’t pushed the brightness setting too high – that they're now a small price to pay for the huge advantages that OLED brings elsewhere.
LG has delivered this big improvement in light control, moreover, at the same time that it’s greatly increased the brightness it can obtain from its OLED panels. And this brightness increase comes without any compromise on the stunning black-level response that’s OLED’s trademark.
This has a transformative effect on the OLED55C6V’s handling of my nascent Ultra HD Blu-ray collection, since it essentially means you no longer have to think of OLED as performing well at the dark end of the expanded HDR light spectrum.
For while it’s true that premium LCD TVs can deliver HDR’s bright highlights far more emphatically and dazzlingly than the OLED55C6V (more on this presently), the OLED screen certainly gets bright enough with its light peaks – which hit around 550 nits in the TV’s HDR standard mode – to sell HDR’s benefits more effectively than last year’s screens.
In fact, I can readily imagine many serious AV fans feeling that the OLED55C6V sells HDR’s all-round benefits better than even the best LCD TVs, thanks to its peerless handling of the dark half of HDR’s luminance range. For as well as being capable of hitting black levels of a depth that’s simply beyond the reach of LCD TVz, the OLED55C6V also places inky black pixels right alongside punchy white or colour ones with essentially zero light pollution between the two.
The impact this degree of light control has on dark HDR scenes is mesmerising and beautiful. And since you’re not continually being distracted by the light "towers" and blooming effects seen on LCD screens, pictures are spectacularly immersive. The latter is one feature serious AV fans crave above all from a TV.
The OLED55C6V’s extra brightness means there’s less chance for dark areas in predominantly bright HDR scenes to look like mere shadows, while OLED’s sensational black level response also proves a stellar foundation for the rest of its colour palette to "bounce off".
The result is nothing short of an assault of colour when watching the wide colour gamuts that are part and parcel of current HDR content – and I mean that in a good way.
The range of colours is as wide and expressive as anything I’ve seen from a flat TV to date, yet alongside the stunning dynamics you'll also see subtle tonal differences delivered with a degree of finesse not previously seen on any LG TV.
The excellent colour performance joins with the screen’s native UHD resolution, too, to enhance the sense of detail and depth in the delivery of good-quality Ultra HD Blu-ray pictures.
While I’m on the subject of HDR, it’s worth quickly comparing the set’s Dolby Vision HDR presentation with its handling of the standard HDR 10 format. Unfortunately, Dolby Vision content is extremely hard to find in the UK – in fact, the only content out there right now is Marco Polo on Netflix. Luckily, I had a clip of Pan encoded in Dolby Vision on a USB stick, and was therefore able to compare the look of this against the Pan Ultra HD Blu-ray release. The results were striking.
The most immediately obvious difference is that the Dolby Vision presentation is far less bright than LG’s HDR 10 presentation. This may be enough, I guess, to automatically turn some viewers towards the HDR 10 approach where a choice is available. However, if you look a little deeper then the Dolby Vision take on things turns out to be pretty compelling.
For starters, its colour palette is markedly richer in terms of both the saturations and subtleties it contains. Even better, there’s far more visible light and shade detail in the image’s very brightest and darkest areas than you get with LG's HDR 10 approach.
All in all, so long as you can get beyond the idea that HDR is simply about brightness – and you’ve probably already made this leap if you’ve bought an OLED TV rather than an LCD one -– then Dolby Vision appears to give you a much more refined and, for want of a better word, "cinematic" image.
However, for now we’ll be spending the vast majority of our time watching standard dynamic range material. To that end, the OLED55C6V is superb at handling SDR’s more limited light and colour demands. So much so that, as noted in the Setup section, I’d strongly recommend you let the TV stick to showing SDR in its native form rather than applying LG’s HDR Effect mode. The latter simply introduces forced and unbalanced colours, and "flare outs" in the brightest areas of the "upscaled" SDR picture.
The OLED55C6V fares a little better when it’s upscaling only resolution – as in, HD to UHD – rather than colour and brightness too. Pictures look detailed, without looking more noisy, even if the results aren’t quite as crisp as the upscaled images of LG’s big-name 4K rivals.
For all their many stellar and unique traits, however, the OLED55C6V’s OLED-driven pictures aren’t perfect.
The biggest issue is the very occasional appearance of a peculiar glowing effect over the very blackest parts of HDR images and, more rarely still, over detailed, darkly coloured backdrops.
The noise pretty much completely removes detail and light subtleties from the affected areas, and draws further attention to itself by breaking down into quite defined blocks and blotches that stand proud against the infinitely more refined picture information around it.
Less extreme dark scenes also sometimes suffer with subtler speckly colour noise over background areas, which can occasionally be aggressive enough to drag your eye away from the main action.
he OLED55C6V’s relative shortage of brightness also leads to a noticeable loss of subtle detail in areas of bright colours and whites, compared with the bright LCDs that are capable of getting up to around the 1,000-nit mark to which many of the Ultra HD Blu-rays released to date are mastered.
One final area in which there's room for improvement is motion handling. As suggested in the Setup section of the review, a fair amount of judder is visible when the TV’s motion processing isn't engaged. However, putting the default motion processing modes to use results in images that suffer with quite distracting processing side effects.
On a positive note, the OLED55C6V’s niggles don’t amount to much at all in the overall scheme of things. It delivers a really impressive step up from the previous OLED generation and it’s the first TV I’ve seen so far that actually makes dark HDR scenes look right.
LG OLED55C6V – 3D PICTURE QUALITY
I’ve long been a fan of the way LG’s passive 3D solution works on Ultra HD TVs, and the OLED55C6V does nothing to dent my enthusiasm.
There’s none of the tiring, distracting flickering often seen with active 3D TVs, and while 3D images aren’t completely free of cross-talk ghosting, there’s far less of it than you tend to get with active 3D solutions.
Detail levels are decently high with 3D, too, while the OLED55C6V’s spectacular colour and contrast performance helps the TV to delineate a profound and believable sense of 3D scale.
LG OLED55C6V – SOUND QUALITY
The OLED55C6V sounds slightly better than you might have expected given its super-skinny design – but that’s not to say that it's much better than average by the standards of the LCD TV world at large.
Its best audio qualities are the surprising width of the soundstage, some reasonably clear and convincing vocal handling, and a solid amount of treble detailing.
On the downside, bass is limited and can succumb to a distinct thumping effect under pressure; the set can’t go particularly loud; and at high volumes those treble details can begin to sound painful on the ear.
OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER
As usual with premium LG TVs over the past few years, the OLED55C6V ships with a "Magic Motion Remote" that lets you control the TV just by pointing at the right part of the screen and pressing select. Others have tried to achieve the same thing, but for me, LG’s take on the technology is by far the most intuitive.
If you fancy finding out how good your video game collection can look on an OLED TV then there’s more good news. Measurements of the OLED55C6V's input lag – the time it takes the TV to render image data received at its inputs – put it at just over 30ms on average. This is pretty much as good as it gets for UHD TVs currently, and shouldn’t have a major negative impact on your performance in twitch-response games.
SHOULD I BUY AN LG OLED55C6V?
So long as you don’t mind its curved screen and can stretch to its £3k asking price, the OLED55C6V simply has to be on your list. It isn’t quite perfect, despite all the improvements on last year’s OLED efforts, and the best LCD TVs – such as the Samsung UE55KS9000 and Sony 75XD9405 – continue to hold an advantage when it comes to delivering the brightness attributes of HDR.
However, when it comes to dark SDR scenes and especially HDR, the OLED55C6V makes OLED’s advantages look even more emphatic than they were before. In doing so, this TV delivers the more consistently immersive viewing experience that many AV enthusiasts crave.
VERDICT
Some sporadic noise in dark scenes and detail clipping in bright picture areas mean that the OLED55C6V isn’t the perfect TV. That said, it delivers huge improvements over LG’s previous OLED efforts, with pictures that look nothing short of mesmerising for the vast majority of the time.
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