I have purchased LG 55EC9300 OLED. In this small review I'll try cover all the areas that have worried me prior to purchasing it, and clear up the questions that I've never seen fully answered (re. judder for example)
I've had the tv for several days now and put it through some paces and tests. I believe overall this is the best TV on the market right now, especially if you want to use it to play games and watch BluRay movies, as in both those cases 4K doesn't add anything useful, and just adds extra upscaling lag for console games. The colors and image fidelity are really incredible on this TV, especially when playing 60FPS games in a dark room. I've really never seen anything like it before. When you have a black scene with something floating in the middle of the screen, it's like looking at some glowing object in your room, as you can't see the TV itself at all. This is especially the case with 3D movies. Watching Gravity on this in a dark room in 3D and with motion smoothing on is like watching a hologram projection of some kind, especially in the space scenes with astronauts in the middle of the screen. It is a shame that if you want to sit closer to the TV so that it could take up more of your view, and 3D become even more immersive, the interlaced effect becomes too pronounced. The TV is using passive 3D method, which means you watch it with simple polarizing glasses, and the image is incredibly stable with no ghosting or any weird motion anomalies - but it has an interlaced effect due to halving of vertical resolution. By interlaced effect I don't mean flickering - again, the image is incredibly stable - but that the image appears as combed. This largely becomes a non issue at normal viewing distances, but is very evident if you try sitting very close to a TV. The TV was quite hard to calibrate to my liking, but I think I may finally be happy with what the settings. I'm talking just about the brightness/white balance/shadow detail calibrating btw, I didn't even touch the color correction calibrations yet.
I have two viewing settings:
- PS4 set on RGB Full / TV set on High Black (these two settings must go hand in hand, otherwise, you get either super-crushed black or completely washed out image). I have PS4 on HDMI 1 input, which is set to PC mode. This enables the 4:4:4 color mode, I've confirmed this by observing some color text artifacts that otherwise exist, but the same text renders perfectly in this mode. I swap between the Game mode and Expert 1 settings, which I've calibrated more or less the same, except the game mode has stronger oled light and slightly cooler white balance.
game mode:
oled light 80
contrast 95
brightness 52
white color W35
gamma low
expert mode:
oled light 60
contrast 95
brightness 52
gamma 1.9 (low)
All the other image settings I kept at default and all the extra/processing settings I kept at off (or they were already off because of PC mode). I had to select Low Gamma because otherwise, there's notable loss of shadow detail on this TV, which is very evident in darker games even when played in a pitch black room. It's not that the detail is not there (it's not crushed completely), but it becomes very hard to see when using medium (2.2) default gamma. With 2.2 gamma this can be combated by upping the brightness above 60, but by doing so, the pure black stops being completely non-light emitting, which I didn't want to happen. So keeping the brightness at 52 with gamma at Low (1.9) you get more or less the same image as with brightness at 60-65 and gamma at 2.2, but with my settings, the perfect non light emitting black is preserved, while the shadow detail becomes very good, and the gradient ramp overall very uniform. This is still just a byproduct of poorly implemented brightness control on LG's part. They should have made it so that the brightness control never affects pure 0 black, and it's mind boggling that they didn't make it that way. Ironically, when you have brightness at 60 and the black is nor longer pure black, if you pull up one of the tv settings overlays, you can see that the overlay appears as pure black, with your image behind not being so. So it's not a panel flaw, but rather poorly implemented brightness control.
In this mode, I have not observed any unpredictable judder that would be induced by the TV itself. Locked 60FPS games appear at perfect 60FPS on this TV, as well as locked 30FPS games appear at perfect 30FPS. 24FPS movies appear with predictable 3:2 pulldown judder (in this mode PS4 decodes the movies with 3:2 pulldown and sends 60hz signal to the TV) and nothing unexpected or out of ordinary ever happens during motion scenes. The motion blurring is pretty minimal IMO, and probably less noticeable than green trails on contrast colors on my plasma. This means that the motion juder that seems to happen unpredictably on this TV that some people complained about, must only exist if you don't use the PC mode, and is due to some video processing misfiring.
- Second viewing setting is PS3 set on RBG Full / TV set on High Black. Settings same as above. This is on HDMI2 input, which I've set to be "Game Console". In this mode color artifacting is evident in some texts in games (but mostly not in your face obvious) due to lack of 4:4:4 mode. Keep in mind that for bluray movies, the lack of 4:4:4 doesn't matter, as the movies are already encoded in 4:2:2 color mode, so there won't be any color artifacts on them. Something very important to mention is that on PS3 you need to switch the DVD/BD color space setting to "RGB" (not the default "Auto") if you want to watch movies with Full Range RGB / High black setting combo. Otherwise black color shows as gray and image is washed out. On this input I'm able to enable the "True Motion" and "Real Cinema", so I use it for watching 3D movies mostly, where I pretty much have to enable the tru motion. This has nothing to with this TV btw, I just don't consider 24FPS to be enough for good 3D viewing, as the low framerate jitter is extremely magnified with 3D (this goes for theatrical 3D as well for me). With Tru motion set on smooth, I haven't seen any terrible image artifacts watching Gravity, but as typical with this kind of processing, it misfires from time to time when the motion get too complex to be properly interpolated, so the scene moves smoothly and all of a sudden the judder appears and goes away. Again, this is unavoidable with any Tru Motion interpolation I've seen. With tru motion off, in this mode the PS3 sends 24FPS signal to a TV, where if the "Real Cinema" setting is enabled, you get the 5:5 pulldown so the frame pacing is even for film material, thus removing the consistent 3:2 pulldown judder. It is this mode (which is supposed to be the gold standard for 24FPS movie watching) that people complained about saying it introduces the unexpected judder during certain scenes. I have not seen it happen yet because I haven't tested it enough, but I'll make sure to do so over the next few days. I have to say that I'm perfectly happy with how TV performs in PC mode however, and don't really care if the 5:5 pulldown doesn't work perfectly.
Input Lag:
I have used the incredibly unscientific SingStar (the singing game) auto lag measuring test. This test while I suspect is not providing accurate measurements is providing a repeatably same measurements under the same conditions, so it can be used for comparisons at least. So don't use these numbers as correct, but just as a ratio of how much more lag is in one mode vs. another. It also rounds measurements to 10. For the record, I suspect this measuring always measures ~10ms more than it should, due to microphone lag or whatever.
- Testing my 2010 Panasonic Plasma, I've got the 50ms lag, as a reference.
- EC9300, in PC mode, with Game picture mode, 60ms. A bit more than plasma. Ah well...
- in PC mode, with Expert picture mode, 60ms. Expert picture mode has very reduced options when running in PC mode though. For example there's no tru motion, or 20 point calibration (well there is but it does nothing)
- in Game Console mode, with Game picture mode, 60ms (surprisingly, not much extra lag when not using PC mode, but Game mode already disables tru motion and bunch of other things) Also, lag measurements on a professional review site linked above have shown that there should be less lag in PC mode on this TV (
here they measured 46ms,
this review says it's just 34ms ). So I hope the new firmwares didn't ruin that. But again, I think SingStar test adds ~10ms, so 46ms on this TV vs 41ms on my old Plasma, which I think I read somewhere, seems reasonable.
- In Game Console mode with Expert picture mode - 140ms. This is obviously mode that can only be used for movie watching as the games becomes comically unresponsive if you try to play them in this mode, with or without tru motion enabled.
My TV thankfully doesn't have any dead pixels, and the uniformity is great. There's slight shift in white balance tone towards the screen edges left and right that can be seen on pure white screen only, but it's very, very mild and very gradual, only worth mentioning academically tbh. I think this is typical of this TV, and they generally don't exhibit uniformity problems beyond that. Generally, I've heard the QA is very good on this TV, and they are not sold if they have dead pixels near the middle of the screen. I've heard reports of people having one dead pixel on a side and that was about it.
If anyone has any questions or want me to test anything on this TV, I'll gladly answer / test it.
