When you say your debut OLED TVs are the best thing ever — and when we happen to agree — you sell quite a few of them. But how do you then convince people that your newer OLEDs are better? LG’s got a few upgrades underneath the hood that it thinks are a significant enough improvement to tempt new buyers.
OLED has been a sales boon for LG in Australia — after Sweden, we buy the most OLED TVs of any market in the world. But the initial success of OLED was based on one key advantage versus competitors’ LCDs, one advantage that LG couldn’t improve on. Even its first OLED TVs had perfect black levels, displaying zero light during a fully dark scene in a TV show or movie. You literally can’t get any blacker than black. So why buy a newer OLED?
With perfect black levels ticked off the shopping list, LG has had to look elsewhere to make improvements. They’re not as obvious as the difference between an OLED and a LCD, but they’re an iterative improvement. The new screens are brighter, for one. LG’s B6T OLED, for example, can hit a peak brightness of 700 nits versus the EF950T’s 420 nits. The top G6T is even slightly better at 750 nits. Where older OLEDs — like our favourite EF950T — hit around 88 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour space, the 2016 OLEDs are closer to 99 per cent.
Those differences aren’t as foundational as the quantum leap in contrast that any OLED can achieve with its pure black levels, but when you’re actually watching a TV show or movie, you can notice an improvement. LG showed us a 2015 panel next to a 2016 one, the $6799 65-inch B6T, and the improvement in colour representation when displaying the same content was significant, enough so that we’d pick the newer screen every time. You also get the improvements that LG has made in the newer OLEDs’ WebOS 3.0 operating system, previously only available to its Super UHD TVs.
The new 2016 OLEDs, too, have Dolby Vision HDR support, and use a hardware chip to run a far more advanced version of HDR than competitor screens. Regular HDR-10 high dynamic sets screen brightness at one static point per TV show episode or movie, but Dolby Vision is optimised for each scene. It requires a lot more work from , but the payoff is greater. When you’re watching a Dolby Vision title on Netflix, too, you’ll get Dolby Vision HDR even at lower resolutions — important, since not many of us have fast enough ‘net to stream crystal clear 4K.
With Dolby Vision titles being released on Blu-ray in 2017, a catalogue of HDR titles already available on Netflix and Dolby Vision titles — especially Marvel series — and the two main gaming consoles having HDR variants in the Xbox One S and the PlayStation 4 Pro, there’s more reason than ever to pick up a new 4K TV. LG’s confident its OLEDs, ticking more boxes than ever, are the choice you should make.