LG G5 OLED TV review: taking OLED performance to another level

LG OLEDs are consistently some of the best TVs you can get, and I’ve lost count how many times I’ve recommended them to family and friends. Add the LG G5 to that list. It’s LG’s high-end gallery-style TV, designed to look refined and sleek mounted on the wall — which it achieves thanks to its slim profile and flush mounting. Its black levels are deep and inky, and color and grayscale accuracy are spot on. It delivers a gorgeous, engaging image that makes a normal movie night something special.

Most impressive about the G5 is its significant bump in brightness over last year’s G4. Over the last few years, quantum-dot OLEDs from Samsung and Sony have offered brightness comparable to LG’s WOLED (or white OLED) designs, but with better color volume at high brightness. LG needed an update to compete, and with a new type of OLED panel, it does. It’s an impressive leap forward.

The panel technology that gives the G5 this leap is Primary RGB Tandem OLED. It has four emissive layers (red, green, and two blue) instead of the three layers (yellow and two blue) used in LG’s earlier WOLED TVs. The extra layer allows for more light without using as much power, and the dedicated red and green layers help improve color purity. The G5 still has a white subpixel, as do non-Primary RGB Tandem OLEDs, for added brightness.

LG Display (the company that makes Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels for LG Electronics and others) claims the technology can get up to 4,000 nits, which rivals some high-end mini-LED TVs from TCL and Hisense. The 65-inch LG G5, in my testing, didn’t achieve that lofty number, but it still measured over 2,400 nits from a 10 percent window. That’s nearly 1,000 more nits than the G4, and as good as mini-LED TVs just a couple of years ago. So specular highlights — a streetlight or the reflection of the sun off of the sea waves — are brighter.

But it’s not just about the high brightness. The major benefits of OLED over LED TVs are its pixel-level control and perfect blacks. Those perfect blacks paired with the impressive brightness of the Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel equal an incredible level of contrast. The G5 maintains the blacks in a bright room well, too. It’s a significant improvement over the G4; the MLA layer would reflect the ambient light and cause the screen to have raised black levels.

Reviews from earlier in the year pointed out that the G5 exhibited some issues with HDR content, specifically in darker scenes. Just-above-black levels were a little elevated, there was some posterization (blockiness) in shadows, and it occasionally had what are referred to as floating blacks, where the black levels in a scene shift depending on what’s on screen.

Thankfully, firmware updates have addressed those issues. I didn’t see any posterization or floating blacks in shadow scenes in Blade Runner 2049 or Fellowship of the Ring. There’s a minor issue coming out of black, where instead of a totally smooth fade in, it jumps from black to a dark gray. I could only see it happen when the room was dark (any ambient light covered the effect), and it only happens in those fade-in moments, so I’m being incredibly critical. I don’t expect most will see or be bothered by it.

The LG G5 is available in five different sizes — 55, 65, 77, 83, and 97 inches — and all sizes except the biggest use Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology. LG loaned us a 65-inch model with an MSRP of $3,399.99, although it currently can be found for $1,999.99. The G Series, which used to stand for Gallery Series, is just under an inch thick and is designed to hang flush on the wall. And while LG included a stand mount with the 55- and 65-inch 2024 G Series TVs, it’s gone back to only including a wall mount. A table stand is available for the 55- and 65-inch G5 for $99.99.

The G5’s connection ports are in an L-shaped cutout in the back panel with enough space to route them toward the middle of the TV and down to your sources and power. It allows you to collect all of the cables together and run them down your wall in a single bundle, but you’ll still want to have a cable trough to keep everything looking tidy, or run them through your wall.

The back panel includes four HDMI 2.1 ports (one with eARC) that support up to 120Hz variable refresh rate and Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) — which automatically switches to low-latency game mode when a gaming signal is detected. It also has three USB 2.0, 100Mbps LAN, optical digital audio out, and an ATSC 1.0 tuner. (LG stopped including an ATSC 3.0 tuner for over-the-air 4K broadcasts a few years ago, and it doesn’t look like it’ll start again anytime soon. Adoption of the technology, also called NextGen TV, has been slow, although TCL, Hisense, and Sony TVs still ship with ATSC 3.0 tuners.)

If you want to get full performance out of the LG G5 (or any TV, for that matter) without a calibration, it’s vitally important that you switch it out of the default picture mode — Auto Power Save, in this case. Not only will it cause the picture to look very blue — affecting both grayscale and color accuracy — its brightness is limited significantly.

Filmmaker Mode is the most accurate, with excellent grayscale tracking in both SDR and HDR and great color. Measurements with our sample showed HDR tended a bit blue as the image got brighter and SDR was a little red, but those inaccuracies didn’t show in actual use. I’d recommend it for everything you watch. Also, the first time you put on something in SDR, HDR10, or Dolby Vision, make sure to set your picture mode to Filmmaker again, as choosing it for one doesn’t set it as your preference for the others.

Watching movies and shows on the G5 is an absolute joy. The multitude of explosions in Mad Max: Fury Road are vibrant and bright, punctuating the action of the chase through the desert. On other TVs, they can get too oversaturated and look fake, but the reds and oranges on the G5 look realistic. The specular highlights are even more impressive as the chase enters the storm and lightning illuminates the sky.

Beyond the test discs, the G5 excelled with everyday family viewing. While I love to draw the curtains, turn off the lights, and immerse myself in a movie, for the majority of our TV watching, the lights are on. Thanks to the G5’s brightness capability, the image still pops. Pastries, breads, and cakes on The Great British Baking Show look detailed and tasty. F1 liveries during race weekends are dynamic and detailed as they speed down the track, especially the red of the Ferrari and papaya of the McLaren. And the G5 handles reflections well, with light from lamps dispersing enough that it isn’t too distracting — unless there’s a dark scene, where a purple hue from the anti-glare coating can be seen.

Even in SDR, the G5 can get bright enough to watch with no problems in a lit room. Without changing any brightness settings, the TV maintains around 330 nits from a 2 percent window to a 50 percent window before it lowers to 284 nits for a full white screen. That’s above the SDR professional standard brightness target for a dark room (which is 100 nits) used when mastering content, but since most of us watch with some level of ambient light, it’s a good level. If you need more, you can turn off Energy Saving Step in the General menu, which allows you to adjust the OLED Pixel Brightness setting. With it set to 100 and Peak Brightness set to High, the G5 can reach over 900 nits in SDR.

Why am I giving the G5’s performance such praise when it came in dead last during this year’s Value Electronics TV Shootout? Two reasons. First, many of the issues the G5 showed at that event have since been addressed with firmware updates. For instance, grayscale color shifts present at the event have significantly improved on my model. Second, the TV Shootout’s purpose is to see how well the calibrated competitors measure up to the $38,000 Sony BVM-HX3110 reference monitor used in postproduction, not to test the overall performance of the TV in multiple real-world viewing conditions. I’ll also reiterate that I did not calibrate the G5, as it’s not something the majority of TV owners do.

The G5 is a great gaming TV, too. It supports 4K/120Hz gaming on a console and up to 165Hz with a PC. There isn’t any perceptible input lag; just make sure you have Game Optimizer enabled. Using the Game picture mode will make sure that’s the case, but it is very blue (as game modes tend to be). For more accurate color, go to Picture -> Advanced Settings -> Color -> White Balance and change the Color Temperature to Warm 40.

If you don’t have the space for a soundbar or, better yet, a surround sound setup, the LG’s sound will suffice. But it lacks excitement and didn’t draw me into what I was watching. The TV will get plenty loud, and dialogue intelligibility is good, but its low-end response doesn’t deliver the boom.

With the G5, LG has removed support for DTS audio codecs (which often have less compression than Dolby), including DTS:X. Most streaming platforms support Dolby, with DTS mostly relegated to physical media, so it’s not a major issue, although Sony, Hisense, and TCL still support DTS. But for those that route their disc player audio through the TV, don’t expect the G5 to pass through any DTS audio to your speakers.

LG’s webOS interface works well enough, but as with all TV OS platforms, the majority of the screen is used for sponsored content or ads. I spent my time on the homescreen selecting which streaming app to use and ignoring the rest. LG isn’t alone in the proliferation of ads on TVs, but it isn’t doing anything to limit it, either.

I’m also ready for LG to retire the magic wand functionality of its remote — which allows you to control a cursor on screen by waving the remote around — or at least let us turn it off. I have always found it frustrating to use, and the cursor pops up when I don’t want it to. All it takes is a little jostle as I (or my dogs) accidentally knock it on the coffee table or the couch. The remote also isn’t backlit and lacks an input button. Instead you need to hold down the Home Hub button — which is above the Home button — to call up the input select.

The LG G Series has always been an impressive OLED TV, but with the introduction of the G5 and Primary RGB Tandem technology, it’s reached new heights. Its image quality stands alongside the QD-OLED Sony Bravia 8 II, although I find the Sony’s Google OS interface easier to use than webOS. The G5’s specular highlights sparkle, blacks are deep, there’s great shadow detail, and color is beautifully accurate. When a TV looks this good, the minor drawbacks — webOS, the remote, and the sound — are merely footnotes. The LG G5 has pushed the boundaries of OLED’s abilities and delivers a beautiful, engaging image.

Photography by John Higgins / The Verge