hey everybody its Lon Seidman and we're in my living room right now because I just
picked up a new television this is the LG c7 this is the 65 inch version and
there's also a 55 inch version available this is powered by OLED technology which
means that all the pixels on screen light themselves and this is different
than the many LED sets that are out on the market which require a backlight or
a side light these don't have any of those lamps on board so when you have
something black on screen like you see right here it truly is black it really
has the best contrast ratio in the business you can find right now and one
of the things that was really bugging me about my last set was that when I was
watching a science-fiction movie like Star Wars or something in space you
would often see these little glowing areas peeking out from the corners of
the TV and it was just driving me crazy this has been a big improvement I'm
gonna tell you all about this TV in just a minute from a consumer perspective not
too much of a techie review here but I do want to let you know in the interest
of full disclosure that I paid for this television with my own funds all the
opinions you're about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review and no
one has reviewed this content before it was uploaded so let's get into it and
see what this TV is all about now as I mentioned at the outset this is the 65
inch version of the LG set here this was selling at the time that I bought it for
2696 dollars on Amazon in the 65 inch
configuration they also have a 55 inch for 1696 dollars now if you are looking
to spend a little bit less they have a b7 this is the c7 the b7 costs two
hundred dollars less in either configuration that one has the same
exact panel the same guts inside the same connectors on it but it has a
different bezel on it has a silver bezel around the front where this one has a
black bezel and that's really the only difference if you're saving looking to
save 200 bucks maybe the b7 might be the way to go but some folks might not like
having that silver bezel around the corners of the set whereas this one kind
of just blends into the background especially when you have a black scene
up like this now the thing about this TV that struck me right out of the gate was
the fact that it is really thin it's about maybe the thickness of a pane of
glass it's ridiculously thin there are some electronics that are
on the bottom of the set that you need for of course plugging things in and
powering all of its system-on-a-chip functions like the apps and everything
and they do make a more expensive version that is just the pane of glass
that you can hang on the wall with detached electronics but nonetheless it
really is quite thin it will definitely be a showpiece of your living room for
sure and it really does look pretty nice sitting there but the most important
thing is what do the images look like and I have to say I've been running
through some demo content here it's pretty remarkable just how good this
image quality is the color is awesome the brightness is really very very nice
in fact it's every bit as bright as the LED set I had before and again the big
standout thing for me on this one is the fact that it does have those true blacks
that I was not getting on my LED set the last TV that I had that was very
satisfied with was my pioneer plasma from years and years ago was a 720p set
that one was close to this but this is better when there's something black on
the screen you don't see anything else and that has really been the most
dramatic change for me here with this new set was just just how much better
the image quality was over the LED set that I bought only about two and a half
years ago it supports HDR not only the 10 bit HDR but also the Dolby vision HDR
which I believe is 12 bit and what HDR means that you're going to get a more
dynamic range of color for films and other productions that support it so you'll
see better contrast between light and dark areas and richer color than you
might on a non HDR video it also of course supports 60 frames per second 4k
like this video I shot with an iPhone in tuck Nantucket over the summer this
television is powered by an operating system called web OS this is the same
interface that LG has been putting into their TVs for quite some time now you
can see it running here I've got a bunch of apps already installed including
Netflix Amazon and YouTube that I can jump to very quickly I can also play
media off of a USB Drive I have installed here with their photo and
video player you can see there's a bunch of other options including plex it's a
little bit clunky of an interface from the standpoint of organizing things cuz
there's a lot of these little tabs that are default on the screen here that you
may want to organize you can go over here to this edit thing and then scroll
over to the app that you want to move you click on
it you move it over drop it in and then hit the back button and then you've got
things where you want them so you might spend a little time just getting
everything configured for your liking when you get it all installed and then
of course you can go in and place and stuff this is a video currently playing
from my youtube channel on here at 4k at 60 frames per second now one thing I do
suggest that you do with this television after you get it up and running is to
adjust the motion controls on it because if you are a movie watcher as I am most
movies are shot at 24 frames per second but all these televisions now have some
software controls on them to basically convert that 24 frames per second into
60 and it makes movies look like soap operas in fact they call it the soap
opera effect it drives me nuts and there's a way to turn all of that stuff
off but it's on by default so just know that that's what you want to do here
with the remote control is hit the little gear icon here to pull up the
settings screen what's neat about the remote control is that it has a
gyroscope onboard so it's got a little mouse function to it just by waving
around in the air here you can move the pointer around on-screen and I would
suggest going over to the all settings feature here and going over to the
picture mode and scrolling down to the picture options and turning off this
thing called true motion now for 60 frames per second content it will still
look smooth on your set because it is smooth because it has that many frames
per second but other stuff will look more natural when you do turn off that
true motion so I would strongly suggest doing that just because your movies
especially your blu-ray movies are not going to look as good unless that is
turned off that might be some point of disagreement among some in the audience
but I know that the true film buffs will want to turn that off
and it kind of drives me crazy that manufacturers continually rely on having
those things on there's a ton of other calibration that you can do on this set
to get the right color that you're looking for there's a lot of great
videos on YouTube I'll find a few to link to in this video in the video
description so you can get some idea as to maybe how to get this thing tweaked
to your liking but I've largely been leaving it on the default at the moment
just so I can get used to the set and then I'll start tweaking and calibrating
as I go but just out of the box to me at least it looks really great as I
mentioned earlier now the TV does have four HDMI ports on it they
support the latest copy protection standard hdcp 2.2 so if you have a
streaming box that supports 4k it will work on this television on any port some
TVs out there only supported on a couple of ports this one works on all of them
now if you have a audio receiver that also has HDMI inputs you need to make
sure that that receiver supports that hdcp 2.2 standard or you will not get 4k
video coming out of your receiver that's a problem I have right now because my
receiver does not support that standard I'm going to have to buy a new audio
receiver at some point to make use of the extra HDMI ports I have on there but
I think these days we're finding a lot of multi-use kind of boxes and I think
four ports should probably cover it for you there's also three USB ports on
there for attaching remote storage devices I have a hard drive plugged into
it right now to play some of those sample files I was looking at a little
earlier you can also plug composite video in the old standard that you might
see from your VCR days you could plug your old VCR into this thing if you want
but there is a little cable that it comes with that you need to plug in to
be able to do that and in addition to that it also has Ethernet built in along
with wireless AC for connecting up to all of your favorite applications and
whatnot so I haven't had any connectivity issues with it I do plug
mine in via ethernet just to get the best possible performance especially
when I'm streaming 4k video and the viewing experience on the television has
been very nice so far I've got The Tick here streaming from Amazon it's coming
in at 4k and also enabled the HDR color so you get a better contrast and a
better depth of color here overall really looks nice even from streaming
services and again you can't beat the contrast ratio on here so that's been
pretty nice on this let's take a look at some blu-ray movies so the blu-ray
experience on this set is really really nice and quite pleased with how nicely
it upscales 1080p content to its native 4k everything looks nice and sharp again
you've got that awesome contrast ratio great color great brightness even decent
sharpness which is surprising given that we are up converting from a lower
resolution it really just does a fantastic job with these movies one
thing I did do though was I turned down all of those motion settings that I
mentioned earlier because I was noticing when you have pans
of the camera like at the beginning of Star Wars after that opening crawl and
it kind of pans down with all the stars to whatever planet is beneath it you'll
see some jaggedness unless you turn off those settings and it often has a hard time
getting everything to line up properly with the movies native 24 frames per
second framerate but once those motion controls are off
I found the movies looked spectacular on here and I am looking forward to
spending a weekend doing a little movie marathon here catching up on all the
movies that I haven't watched in a while the best part about this is the fact
that in a letterbox movie like this one I am not seeing glowing coming off the
bottom and top of the display because we're getting a true black now and
because there's no visual information in those black areas of the screen I've got
a true black image now which is just awesome and even the main image here
even in bright scenes looks better than it did on my original LED set I was
running up here before so all in spectacular blu-ray quality and I think
you're going to have a very nice experience playing back your old stuff
too I also found the gaming experience to be
pretty nice on this TV this game is called super Lucky's tale it's running
on the original Xbox here at 1080p but it looks great even at that lower
resolution of course the Xbox One X might be a better pairing for this television
but I haven't upgraded my console just yet but overall the gameplay experience
looks nice the image doesn't look too bad even though it is a 1080p image and
all in a pretty decent gaming experience now I also tested the input lag on this
set using my analogue NT mini here this is a NES clone console and why I like to
test with this one is that it doesn't have a lot of overhead between its HDMI
output and a button press coming from a wired controller like this so what I
usually do is i hook this thing up to a display and then I record the screen at
240 frames per second with my iPhone and measure how long it takes for a button
push to get registered on screen and this thing recorded among the lowest
latency scores I have seen on a television to date 40 milliseconds from
the time that I pushed the button on this controller to the time that
something happened on screen so overall the TV does not look to be putting in
too much overhead for image processing but you do need to make sure you switch
the television into game mode and I'll show you where to do that right now so what
you want to do is pick up the remote click on the gear icon on the remote and
go down to the all settings thing once again and this time what you want to do
is make sure that the picture mode settings are set to game and that will
turn off a lot of the extra processing that the television is doing to reduce
the amount of input lag that you might be getting on screen what I haven't
tested yet though is the newer consoles that do support the HDR resolution so
I'll have to I maybe get one of those that's a good excuse to get one I guess and try
out a game and see what happens in HDR mode but at least in normal mode here
with 1080p it seems like the input lag is very very minimal and I think you'll
have a very good gaming experience this is actually every bit as good as my
Samsung LED television I have downstairs which was the lowest input lag device I
had in the house for televisions this one does just a little bit better but
within the margin of error of that particular display so before where I've
been reading about OLEDs not being so great for gaming this one feels like
it's pretty nice there isn't too much blurring of the image here as I'm
running around as well so all in I'm pretty pleased with the overall gaming
quality of this television and a couple other things to look at before we wrap
up here and that is the viewing angles on the set one of the things that we
found with a lot of these LED televisions is that they don't always
look good depending on where you sit in the room this one did very nicely
actually I didn't see any real change in the image quality no matter where in the
room I was sitting so if you have a larger living room this will look good
to everyone in the room no matter where they are sitting in front of the
television some in the past as I've mentioned didn't look so great if you
were off to a side or something this one really I think will do well in a larger
living room so overall I am beyond pleased with this television I really
can't find anything to complain about here the image quality is just
absolutely spectacular a big part of that spectacular image quality is the
fact that you get a true deep black in scenes like you're seeing here where
there's a lot of dark areas on-screen but also even in well-lit scenes you get
at just a tremendous contrast between dark and light that you really can't get
on an LED television there is just no glow when you've got something black on
the screen it is just black the way it should be and it looks
spectacular so I'm really pleased with this it looks better than the plasma I
had a couple of years ago the HDR modes look great on it as well you got Dolby
vision support of course and the regular HDR modes as well so all in just a
spectacular purchase and I'm so happy to see that these TVs have come down to a
price point that more consumers can afford so you can get in the door now
for just about $1,600 or less with an OLED television at 55 inches that's
spectacular and the image quality I think is light-years beyond what I've
seen on LED TVs including some made by LG you just can't get around the fact
that there's no backlight here to lighten things up on screen and just in
its default mode it looks spectacular and I think once I start tweaking it a
little bit more I'm going to be even more pleased with it it does have a
decent speaker on board it's got these 20 watt speakers good range of sound
actually not home theater quality perhaps but good enough for watching
television and movies and stuff if you don't have a home theater receiver
installed and great viewing angles super-thin looks really nice sitting up
on the table here I am actually happy I went with the c7 because I even though
it has a bezel I don't see it as much here especially when you've got some
darker images on screen I think that a silver bezel of the b7 would have
distracted me which is why I ended up going with this one so all in I just
can't find anything to complain about here actually this is just a really good
television and I am looking forward to catching up on some movies now that I've
got something that won't bug me with backlight bleed the whole time while I'm
watching a film so overall I can really wholeheartedly recommend the c7 here if
I missed anything do let me know in the comments below maybe I'll do a follow-up
because I like to do these TV reviews more from the standpoint of a general
consumer because although I am a techy kind of guy televisions and displays
really aren't my area of expertise so I I just want to give you my experience as
just watching this television for what you might experience as a consumer and
let me know how I did in the comments below this is Lon Seidman thanks for
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