LG has just collected the QNED91 75-inch 4K Smart QNED TV it dropped off before silly season. When it arrived, I was overwhelmed with how big the darn thing was, dwarfing the space in my apartment where 55-inch screens have sat before it. Now, me, a former small screen stan, wants to chase down the transport company and throw them $5K to set it back up.
For the first two weeks, I’d repeat myself, “this thing is fucking huge”. Then I swapped that phrase out for, “holy moly the graphics look good”. It was somewhere in the middle of these two comments I realised the TV wasn’t 8K. I had it in my head, for some reason, before I started making review notes which obviously required looking at the spec sheet.
Before I get too lost, let’s start at the top.
LG QNED91 75-inch TV
The model I reviewed is the 75-inch, but it’s also available in 65-inch and 86-inch versions.
The QNED91, as its product name would suggest, is a QNED TV. QNED is the name LG has given its TVs that boast Quantum Dot NanoCell tech. The display is Mini-LED, which, yet again, as its name suggests, a mini-LED is much smaller than a standard LED. This allows more of them to be packed together in a single space, giving you more precise backlighting for LCD panels and an increased number of local dimming zones. This results in a better picture and performance, with deeper blacks, enhanced colour reproduction, reduced blooming, improved brightness and a higher contrast ratio.
Like sands through the hourglass…
The TV is 4K, and although I initially thought it was 8K, the upscaling to 4K is still nothing to scoff at. Old reruns of Law & Order: SVU look clear, albeit they look a little soft and fluffy like a scene from Days of Our Lives thanks to LG’s upscaling AI, but that looks a hell of a lot better than the harsh edges and pixeled nonsense you’d get without it on a screen this size.
Shifting into something made for 2023 viewing, Netflix’s The Recruit was visually stunning. For those unaware, the series follows a CIA lawyer, which, as you can imagine, means action for days. Gunfire and fast moving vehicles that are quickly cut with close-up face shots were all handled with ease by the QNED91, scenes didn’t bleed and I could still see every pore making up the titular character’s face (and the sweat beads peppered along his forehead).
The ability to change viewing mode on the LG QNED91 is there, but it barely got a workout over the month I had the TV, with it smart enough to know what I was watching and the best way to present it to me. Your options are vivid, standard, Filmmaker Mode, APS, cinema, cricket, game optimiser, bright room and dark room, however. Bright room was good for non-HDR content, especially with the floor-to-ceiling windows right next to where my TV cabinet is. Cinema was great for watching Die Hard on Christmas Eve, and it was this exact movie that made me think the TV was actually 8K. McClane looked wispy, elegant, each move considered, colours perfected, bright explosions, contrasted to a fault against the blackest of black night sky. Like poetry, really.
Game optimisation mode actually blew me away. This is a scene from God of War Ragnarök, played through a PS4 and captured on an iPhone 13 Pro.
Of course, there’s no easy way to relay how good picture quality is via a condensed photo slapped into an article, but it’s easy to see just how clear, vivid and smooth the game is rendered on the LG QNED91 TV. The 120fps frame rate is obviously to blame for most of this, and of course the fact it’s a 2022 game, but visually, the TV handles games well. You don’t benefit as much from the 4K scaling here as you would on Netflix content, for example, but the smarts are working real hard in the TV. Also stunning was The Quarry, which, although was too dark at times, given the nature of the game, the blacks were black, and not just coloured black but black black, the absence of light black, and they were contrasted beautifully against bright colours, not bleeding, despite the 4K/75-inch display being huge.
Across all genres, and age of content, the LG QNED91 TV was captivating. Animations like Bob’s Burgers showed colour in a manner that felt like you could brush your fingertips across paper filled with ink.
I’ve been fully sold on the need for a larger TV like the QNED91, but that’s not to say it has fully solved the problem of Australian sun.
Sounds like you need a soundbar…
The QNED91 TV boasts Dolby Atmos and has seven sound modes you can choose from. Opting for ‘cinema’ when watching a movie elevates the sound to appear more important, like the roar you get at the movies. Similarly, ‘music’ mode makes watching a musician’s YouTube ramblings a lot less flat. But these two modes, plus the other five, are nowhere near comparable to what you get out of a soundbar.
For the majority of my time with the LG QNED91 TV, I had the Sonos Beam soundbar with Sonos Sub Mini connected and when having to take the gorgeous, multi-levelled experience away for the purpose of the review, I was a little bummed. That’s not to say the TV sound is bad, it’s really not. It’s not tinny, voices are clear, explosions immersive and there’s a clear distinction between the sound from the foreground of a scene to the back, it’s just not phenomenal and not mentioning so would be doing you a disservice.
The other stuff…
The user interface isn’t terrible, but it’s not the best I’ve experienced. It’s easy to navigate, settings are where you’d want them to be and signing in via your Google account makes the whole process that little bit smoother. Apps are rendered nice enough and the only thing I’ve really taken issue with is this ‘trending now’ box. How sure are you that Die Hard is trending in February 2023? I reckon it’s simply there from when I watched it Christmas Eve.
Until LG changes its remote, I’m going to harp on about how much I hate it in every review I do. Unsurprisingly, the QNED91 TV uses LG’s standard remote. The most annoying tech/tech-adjacent device I’ve ever used in my life. I cannot press the button that selects things. I have long, fake nails. I actually had to use my Apple Pencil to do the pressing for me. It’s great considering my trash Wi-Fi has to be swapped frequently and I’ve set it up to require a password be entered each time and the password is very long, comprising numbers, upper case letters and a god damned hieroglyph. I’m getting hysterical once again just writing this down. Change. The. Remote. I. Beg. You. LG.
Although I love the fact this TV is huge, I was paranoid every night that it was going to be a casualty of two cats playing silly billies at 3 am. I don’t know what the solution is aside from putting bricks on the base. It would simply be too darn heavy if LG were to include such a weight in the design.
Should you buy the LG QNED91 TV?
For $5,000, you’ve got to ask yourself: Do I need a 75-inch TV and do I need it to be from a top-tier brand like LG. It’s likely I don’t need to convince you that LG make good TVs, rather you’re here because you want to know if Samsung, LG, Hisense or TCL deserve your cash. The thing is, they all make brilliant TVs, with similar tech, at different price ranges for different sizes.
The LG QNED91 TV isn’t faultless, but it’s close. The picture is brilliant (despite some glare due to Australian sun), the sound is fine (no manufacturer has perfected soundbar-less TV sound), the user interface is easy to navigate and not hideous and my biggest issues were with the remote and the fact I couldn’t mount it on my wall (that last one is a me problem).
If TV makers keep this up, I’m going to have nothing bad to say in any review.