Earlier this year I wrote a love letter to the LG C3 OLED TV. It’s a beautiful TV with a lot of premium features. Now that I’ve spent time with the LG G3 OLED, I’m even more impressed by its cheaper C3 sibling due to how similar they are. The G3’s main differences come in the form of higher brightness, a slimmer design, and is ineffably more premium overall. It is expensive, however, and not the right choice for everyone (or every room), but it’s the best pure OLED can be in 2023.
LG G3 OLED first impressions
One thing that I always really enjoy about LG TVs is that they don’t assume how you want to use them. When you’re setting up, it asks if you want the TV to boot to the home screen (for easy access to apps) or free-to-air TV. There are lots of other similar little things that give you more control over how you use the TV, unlike some other brands that assume you’re the typical user.
Otherwise, the setup is a fairly unremarkable experience. You tune the channels, download and sign into apps, and set up the soundbar you’re going to use with it (I cannot stress the importance of a soundbar enough). The main thing is just getting used to a new remote, which always requires a bit of adjustment.
One thing that I did find tiresome is how many ads are built into this TV, which has been an ongoing irritant. This isn’t unique to LG: every brand is guilty of it, but having ads built into the home screen, and on the remote itself (there are shortcut buttons for apps that cannot be reprogrammed, presumably because there’s a financial relationship between LG and the streaming companies). It’s exhausting and frankly doesn’t belong on a TV this expensive.
I mean, sure, if I’ve only paid $1,000 for an extremely fancy TV, these ads would be an understood part of the bargain. But at $5,295, I think this TV is expensive enough that you shouldn’t have to put up with any ads built into the TV. I wouldn’t expect an automatic coffee machine to be serving me in-screen ads for brands of coffee, why do we think it’s okay for TVs that we’ve paid full price for to serve us ads? But this is a rant for another day.
Editor’s note: The time for that rant might be soon, considering the LG Duobo appears to have ad-serving capabilities!
LG G3 OLED specifications
| Display resolution | 4K Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160) |
| Panel type | OLED |
| Dimensions (65-inch model) | With stand: 1441 x 878 x 245mm Without Stand: 1441 x 826 x 24.3mm |
| Operating system | webOS 23 |
| HDMI input | x4 (supports 4K 120Hz, eARC, VRR, ALLM, QMS as specified in HDMI 2.1) |
| Audio codec | AAC, AC3 (Dolby Digital), AC4, apt-X (refer to manual), EAC3, HE-AAC, MP2, MP3, PCM, WMA |
| HDR format | Dolby Vision / HDR10 / HLG |
| Cloud gaming apps | Nvidia GeForce Now, Utomik |
| Price (RRP) | $5,295 |
| Warranty | Five-year Limited Panel Warranty (One-year parts and labour warranty + four years parts warranty) |
| Official website | LG Australia |
I reviewed the 65-inch LG G3, but it’s also available in 55, 77 and 83 inches. The biggest selling point for LG TVs for me is that they have both HDR10 and Dolby Vision, I still think it’s weird that not all premium TVs support both, and it’s great to see them together here.
Aside from that, the biggest headline is how bright this Evo OLED panel gets. It is, without a doubt, the whitest white available on an OLED panel, which can be amazing for HDR. Is that always good? Not really! Read on to learn why, though.
Performance
The biggest difference between the G3 and the C3 LG TVs is that the G3 has much higher peak brightness, which has proven to be a double-edged sword in regular viewing. But, overall, this is the best pure OLED TV I’ve ever reviewed.
Regular TV and movie viewing
I just keep being blown away by how good the colours are. Some TV manufacturers really lean into making colours look as vibrant and bright as possible, but LG goes for realism, and that’s really on display here, especially thanks to the high contrast ratio. There really wasn’t any content I could throw at this TV in medium-light conditions that didn’t look incredible.
The OC? Spectacular. The light looks beautiful on the glittering sea in amongst all the teen angst.
Red, White and Royal Blue? Sure, no one in this movie could act and the script has the same internal logic as an average fan fiction, but the 4K definition and HDR textures really shone in a way the source material couldn’t.
Coyote Ugly? Dark scenes with a lot of movement and upscaling a lower-definition picture seem to be what this TV is made for. The same goes for Good Omens, which is in 4K, but seemingly no one on set could find a light switch for a lot of the last episode of season 2, which lesser TVs really struggle with. I couldn’t watch that episode of Good Omens during the day with the curtains open, but it looked fantastic at night.
Watching the FIFA Women’s World Cup on it was also fantastic, because this 120Hz TV lives for motion. It was a pleasure to watch.
Gaming performance
Gaming performance was even better than standard TV viewing. The Game Mode menu gave the usual options that gamers now expect from premium TVs, and having that buttery smooth 120 FPS was just gorgeous, and the experience was especially helped by that super low input lag. I did find that the brightness dropped a bit in game mode, but not to a significant, or detrimental degree. The G3 also has HDMI 2.1 on all four HDMI ports, so you can plug in all the latest current-gen consoles, like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and get the most out of them.
Viewing in a bright room (and other light blooms)
Here is where I start to get a bit disappointed. Part of the whole point of OLED is that the technology is supposed to virtually eliminate light blooming, but with subtitles turned on, the bloom around the white text on black backgrounds/darker scenes was extremely noticeable. I also found that watching in the afternoon on a sunny day (a rarity in Melbourne winter) meant that having subtitles on was practically physically painful with the brightness, while dark scenes behind the white text were unwatchable. I had to turn subtitles off during the day because the brightness disparity was so painfully bad.
This is extremely disappointing, as there should be better brightness control and uniformity across the screen. If the text is super bright, I’d want dark scenes to also be boosted for daytime viewing, but sadly this wasn’t the case.
Without subtitles on, I was impressed by how bright (non-dark) scenes were, and how few reflections were on the screen on bright days, particularly compared to the C3.
So, while I still wouldn’t say OLED TVs are ready for apartments where two walls are windows, the G3 would work in quite bright rooms, as long as you don’t use subtitles. People who use subtitles, like to watch TV during the day, and don’t want to close their curtains might be better off with other TV technologies, like Mini LED.
Sound
Using just the TV speakers was a tolerable but not ideal experience. This is always the way with super thin TVs: there just isn’t enough room for the audio to move to sound good. This is not helped by not having any of the speakers facing you and instead facing in random directions dictated by wherever there is space on the screen.
As part of this review, I also checked out the LG Sound Bar C (SC9) and I was really impressed by how much sound and directionality could come out of just one bar. There were times when I could have sworn there were rear speakers because I could hear sounds coming from behind and to the side of me. LG soundbars always have really good tuning so I should have not been as surprised as I was.
As a default, when I plugged in the soundbar, the TV’s built-in speakers also played sound alongside the soundbar. This ability is sometimes used to great effect on other TV models, like Q-Symphony on the Samsung QN900C TV and HW-Q990C soundbar, because it takes advantage of all the speakers available to give you a better soundstage. However, on the LG G3 OLED, it just gave a weird echo, and didn’t seem to work as intended, so I just turned it off.
As always, I strongly recommend using a soundbar with your TV, it gives you a much better experience and this soundbar seems to be perfectly paired with the G3.
Who is the LG G3 OLED TV for?
If you have a room that doesn’t get too bright (but still is a bit too bright for the C3), you don’t use subtitles, and you have a pretty big budget, the LG G3 is the TV I recommend. If you have a darker room, I’d probably suggest the LG C3, given they’re so similar, and the main difference is just the brightness and the aesthetics of the TV. The G3 is the best LG OLED TV for wall mounting, whereas if you have it on a stand the C3 would be a good choice.
If you do have a particularly bright living room, and/or you use subtitles on sunny days, I would steer you more towards a different TV technology.
But the LG G3 OLED TV is absolutely gorgeous. It’s the best of what LG has to offer, and it’s perfectly suited to most home environments.
The post LG G3 OLED TV review: the OLED TV you’ve always dreamed of appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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