4K TV Reviews

Setup
The G3 offers the usual range of Picture Modes. I used Filmmaker for SDR and non-Dolby Vision HDR, and Cinema Home for Dolby Vision (Filmmaker mode isn't available in Dolby Vision).

All of the Picture Modes offer 2-, 10-, or 22-point White Balance adjustments, and LG's Fine Tune controls for calibrating each color separately (color management for red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow).

Once you get beyond those adjustments, and the various Brightness and Contrast controls, there's a blizzard of other setup options. I left most of them in their out-of-box settings. Two that I did change, however, were: Power Saving (it's On by default—I turned it Off) Aspect Ratio>Just Scan (I turned it On; other settings added cropping to the outer edges of the image) I used neither the Picture Wizard nor any of the AI settings mentioned earlier.

The setup menus in the G3 are configured differently from those in past LG sets. In their current configuration they're easy enough to use and don't interfere with the readings, but some of them obscure parts of the image, making it tedious to judge the result of your changes without jumping into and out of the menus.

Fortunately our sample required so little calibration adjustment (see below) that this was only a minor concern.

Viewing
Out of the box, the LG G3 measured so close to ideal that an active calibration offered no visible improvements on either SDR or HDR10. However, I did perform both SDR and HDR10 calibrations for completeness (but not for Dolby Vision sources, which nonetheless looked superb).

In regular use following calibration, I did further tweak the peak brightness controls on SDR material for different sources and room lighting—cable and streamed sources aren’t always as consistent as they should be.

That out-of-the-box quality wasn’t totally unexpected. When I reviewed the LG G2 last year, it was similarly spot-on, requiring little or no extensive calibration. Our samples (then and now) came directly from LG. Will your store-bought G3 be similarly near-perfect? There’s no way we can know for certain, but it should be close enough that the controls needed by your friendly neighborhood video calibrator are all readily available in the user menus.

All of the viewing here (and in HDR below), was done via discs played on an Oppo UltraHD Blu-ray player unless noted otherwise.

Samsara is a Blu-ray release from director/photographer Ron Frick. It is a gorgeous-looking Blu-ray. The deep, rich color in scenes ranging from elaborately dressed dancers, Tibetan monks in bright red robes creating an elaborately-hued mandala, and smoke swirling from an erupting volcano against bright red lava, jumped off the screen so convincingly that many viewers might mistake this SDR disc for high dynamic range. The blacks were also superb, but that’s no surprise coming from a top-grade OLED.

On a more conventional note, one of my favorite films on Blu-ray is A Knight’s Tale, a dramedy set in the world of middle-age jousting. It’s beautifully photographed, and the LG retains all of its visual charm. I can’t recall it ever looking better than it did on the G3. And as a bonus, the LG G3 gave the film as close a sense of 3D as I ever expect to see on one of today’s 2D-only 4K HDTVs.

The film Topsy-Turvy is about the theatrical collaboration of Gilbert and Sullivan in the late 1800s. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it was alive with sparkling detail on the LG.

The cluttered, overly decorated environments of the late Victorian era were convincingly reproduced, as were the half dozen or so rich, colorful staged scenes from several of the duo’s works, including a final scene from their most popular work, The Mikado. The result isn’t likely to turn rap fans into G&S junkies, but it could well make them eager to replace even a 2-3 year old TV with a new G3.

For HDR, I first pulled out the HD Blu-ray of Dune Part 1 (Dolby Vision). The LG excelled in making sense of this film's nearly colorless shades of brown. The interiors were uniformly dark and gloomy, as the film intends, but the G3 retained their details and never crushed them.

When the action transitioned to the bright daytime sands of the planet Arrakis, the LG followed the action without clipping, including an early, action-heavy spice harvester sequence. Later, as a night battle erupted, the bright, chaotic explosions pierced the darkness, making vivid use of the G3's exceptional dynamic range.

The animated HDR10 film Trolls isn't nearly as dramatic a demo disc, but offers rich color. However, it was another animated film that most vividly demonstrated the LG G3's high dynamic range. The first 15 minutes of Encanto almost literally jump off the screen. The magic, golden doors, key elements to the story, glow vividly in a way they never could in SDR. A blaze of fireworks follows later, as do flashes of brightness that punctuate Mirabel's pursuit of Bruno in his hideaway.

Trolls World Tour offers even more vivid color, but the original isn't a slouch in the eye-candy department. The LG does more than full justice to it, particularly in an early night party scene, later in Poppy's journey to save her friends, and in the brightly-colored finale.

But regardless of the genre, the LG G3, with its deep black levels, higher peak whites than any previous OLEDs, and superb detail, sets a high bar for its competition.