Rob Sabin

A little more than a year ago, I reviewed LG's 47LG60, a 47-inch LCD HDTV that I recommended primarily for its outstanding color, crisp and noise-free picture, and unique "Scarlet" styling. That set had a street price of $2,600, admittedly expensive even for its day.

AT A GLANCE
Plus
HDR10 plus Dolby Vision HDR
Great color
Wide viewing window
Minus
Middling black levels
Backlight artifacts

THE VERDICT
LG’s midpriced 65UH8500 delivers good image quality with a super-wide viewing window, and it’s one of the few sets around that plays both predominant types of HDR content.

A year ago, I tested the LG 65UF9500, an LCD Ultra HDTV that retailed for $2,999, and I criticized it for offering no future-readiness for soon-to-emerge high dynamic range (HDR) content. Since then, Ultra HD Blu-ray has come to market, bringing HDR along with it, and there’s a growing library of HDR movies available for streaming. To LG’s credit, their line of so-called Super UHD LCD TVs for this holiday season, including the midline 65-inch 65UH8500 tested here ($1,700), recognizes both predominant types of HDR—namely, HDR10 (used currently on Ultra HD Blu-rays) and Dolby Vision (still only available via web streams). LG is one of only two TV makers to support both formats on a single chassis (in both their LCD and OLED models), the other being Vizio, which updated their Dolby Vision sets for HDR10 in mid-2016. So how does this wellfeatured, attractively priced set perform? Let’s have a look.

In what appears to be an ongoing trend, LG took top honors Thursday at this year's TV Shootout at CE Week in New York. This marks the 4th consecutive year that LG's current top OLED model, this time the 65-inch E7, was declared the annual "King of TV" — a title even more deserving than in year's past thanks to the set sweeping all three of the judging categories.

But despite what by now seems like a familiar or expected result, this year's event was more competitive and interesting than in recent years, with at least one set that very nearly equaled the LG, and others that failed to come as close as we'd have expected.