I made a gutsy call at the beginning of this year,
and now it's time to find out if I was right or wrong.
Welcome back, everyone.
I am Caleb Denison, and today
we're going to unbox set up and get first impressions of the
LG A1 OLED. Now that gutsy call I was talking about earlier,
we named this TV the Best Tech Of CES 2021.
Now, you have to remember, we were in the midst of a hardcore pandemic.
TVs were hard to come by.
The idea of an inexpensive OLED making OLED available
for more people seemed like something pretty special.
Of course, now things aren't all that different.
Still kind of pandemic out there and TV prices are actually going up.
Also, we have Vizio coming in with the TV at exactly the same price.
So where does that leave the LG A1 OLED?
We're going to find out.
But before we do, we've got to get this thing out of the box, set it up
and see what we're working with.
Before I bust out the box knife and the screwdriver,
let me know down in the comments, is the A1 OLED on your radar?
Are you willing to give up a few fringe benefits for a less expensive OLED TV?
Let's talk about that and while you're down there
click like and subscribe. Because why? Because I asked you to.
Would you just please do it? Do I have to have a reason?
Of course I don't. Just like and subscribe to this video.
Now, et's get to it.
All right, here's everything
that came in the box, pretty expected except for the two feet.
Normally with an LG OLED we see a pedestal style stand. Screws for the feet,
we've got the old magic motion remote making an appearance again.
Bexel batteries.
Nothing beats a bexel. This would be your cable management.
This would hide the cables that you plug into the TV.
And this would be the product literature that we swiftly remove.
Time to install the feet and I like that
they labeled them A and B instead of left and right, because
left and right changes depending on how you have the TV oriented.
You've got two little spikes here that are going to go in,
match up the shape of the foot with the impression on the TV,
and then there are three screws to go in.
So a little more screwing than usual. I don't mind that.
And then two of them are going to actually go up into the center of the foot
and the other one is just outside.
And here we go back in the TV shot.
We've got a little bit of a plastic
to remove from here, which is par for the course.
What I noticed while we were putting the feet in, though, this little cut out
right here looked a lot like the cut out that we saw on the LG CX OLED,
and C1 OLED, and C9 OLED as well.
And as a matter of fact, it is in fact, the entire chassy seems exactly the same.
I double checked that.
We pulled the C1 stand that we have and put it in here and it fit.
So if you wanted to bypass the legs, which let's be honest with you,
is one of the cost cutting measures here,
you could put in a C1 or CX stand, possibly even a C9.
Don't quote me on that. I'm not sure, but they appear the same.
Now, I bet there are a lot of you out there who own CXs or C1s,
you wall mounted your TV. That stand is probably just sitting in your box.
I’d put it on eBay.
Now, keep in mind, this stand is like thirty
thirty five pounds or something like that's going to be expensive to ship.
But when I went on eBay, I didn't see a ton of these
out there for sale, and they were only C9s, no CXs or C 1s.
So I don't know, maybe make a few bucks
for those who buy the A1 OLED and want the nicer stand.
Also, keep in mind,
it has that little scoop in the front that will affect the audio a little bit.
To what degree? I'm not sure. Don't quote me.
LG would not recommend this. I'm almost positive about it.
It's just something I noticed. OK, anyway, moving on.
One thing that is different on the back of this TV is the fact
that there are only three HDMI inputs, and those HDMI inputs
are not full fledged HDMI 2.1 inputs.
There is an eARC port on here.
We will connect an Xbox Series X at some point
and take a look at what the TV can do.
Just keep in mind that another thing that you're giving up with the A1 versus
some of the other alleged that LG sells is one HDMI input.
Other than that, it's all pretty much par for the course.
So we're going to go ahead and put this little
decorative plate on strip of some plastic and take a look at the front of the TV.
Oh, no.
Perfect.
And here we are with the front of the TV shot
and as with most LG OLEDs there's really not much to talk about here.
I guess the feet are the obvious thing, right?
They're not as premium looking as the centralized stand.
Also, the build quality's not fantastic.
They have little plastic pegs on them to help you line them up.
And I broke those off on one of the feet when I was installing them.
So that's not great.
Otherwise, you're talking about an OLED TV, no bezels to speak of.
Absolutely stunning thin profile.
It still looks the OLED part in all other ways.
So with that out of the way, let's turn this thing on.
So we powered up the TV and LG Web OS.
We've seen this before,
but in case you're not familiar, it's going to want to check your location.
You can go ahead and put that in.
By the way, in the background is going to be a computerized voice
walking through all of this until you actually get to shut it off.
At that point, it's going to connect to the Internet and then,
holy cow, the terms and conditions run deep.
Folks, there's a lot to this stuff.
I mentioned this in every unboxing.
Know what you're agreeing to.
A lot of this stuff,
if you turn it off, it's going to turn off personalized recommendations.
So the sponsored content and the recommended content
is going to be kind of random.
On the other hand, your data is a little bit more private,
so make the call that you want to make.
Anyway, from there, it's going to sense the devices that are connected to the TVs
so make sure you've got them connected and turned on.
After that, if you've got cable or a TV tuner, it'll integrate
that into the channel selection that's available.
Talk more about that in a second. LG account, I always skip this.
It doesn't seem to be worth anything.
And then it's going to suggest apps that you can install, which is worthless.
You can do this at any time.
And plus these three apps are preinstalled pretty much anyway.
And then it bounces you to Internet TV.
This is powered by Pluto.
What's going to happen is it's going to start playing automatically
as if you've got free Internet TV channels and you do sort of except for eventually
this preview is going to run out
and you're going to have to download the Pluto app to continue.
I'll let you decide whether you want to do that or not.
But I will say that any of the cable channels
that you may have access to or any of the broadcast channels through
an antenna can be lined up along with all of these free Internet
channels in one single guide.
Now, as part of this process, I expected the TV to update itself and it didn't.
So I went into settings support software update,
automatic updates was not turned on.
So I turned it on, as you see here. And the update is in progress.
This should be done shortly,
but I want to make sure that I have the latest firmware for this TV.
Also, this is a good time to mention that HBO Max
is now available on this TV, whereas it has not been before.
So it's good to see that addition has finally made it to WebOS.
So my position on WebOS is that I'm a little over it.
I don't like all of the sponsored content.
It's basically a gigantic ad. I've talked about this before.
Specifically with the QNED99. But the fact of the matter
is, I still manage to prefer it over Vizo’s Smart cast.
And I mention that because when you're comparing the Vizio
OLED to the LG OLED the smart TV platform is one of the big differences.
And so I would rather have WebOS than Vizio’s Smart cast
to be honest with you, even though it lacks Chromecast functionality.
Now it's time for picture settings.
And, you know, I feel like I just did this because I did with the QNED99 from LG.
But we'll go into all settings, pick picture.
This is a little sluggish.
You're just going to have to bear with me here.
Go down to expert bright space, which is my go to pick
just when getting things started.
I test the TV and both ISF Expert Dark and Bright
by the way. Once we've done that for at least a home screen,
I'm going to go in to YouTube and check SDR and HDR settings.
All right. So I've got an SDR pulled up on YouTube. We press pause.
We'll do HDR here in a second.
Go into all settings.
And even though I picked ISF Bright on the home screen, I'm in standard
mode here. So let's go into that pick up ISF Expert to get things started.
You'll notice the color temperature warms right up.
That's closer to accurate. If you don't dig it, that's OK.
You can use standard if you want.
Now let's pull up an HDR video.
So we've got an HDR video paused on YouTube.
We'll go into settings.
And man, is this sluggish.
This is way slower than most of LG's TVs.
We're in the standard HDR mode. There is no ISF option here.
We have cinema home and cinema.
Now, I mentioned this before.
Cinema at home is going to come with a default motion
smoothing on, whereas cinema will not.
You can actually undo that in other areas of the settings if you want to.
But I'm going to go ahead and go with Cinema Home
because it's a little bit brighter and make the necessary adjustments
so that I can get motion smoothing disabled.
To do that, I'll go into the service menu under general and turn off
a brightness settings.
I don't want that on anyway, but it's also going to let me adjust
some motion smoothing settings that we're locked into cinema
home earlier. So we'll go into advanced settings, run down to clarity,
and we should see that true motion is on cinematic movement,
but it's unlocked so that I can actually turn it off.
Now, cinematic movement is not terrible.
It's the best motion with the least amount of soap opera effect.
But I generally turn that off to get started with my testing.
So we're in Netflix now.
I’ve started an SDR title, one of my favorites, Cocomelon.
We'll pull up the picture settings, and I'm very pleased to see
that it has already picked ISF Expert Bright mode.
So there's nothing that I need to do.
Once I've made a selection on an app for SDR, it's going to carry over.
I assume that we're gonna
see the same for Dolby Vision as we did with HDR in YouTube.
Let's go find out.
Now we've got a Dolby Vision
title pulled up on Netflix, we’ll go into our picture settings.
And man, did I tell you how slow and sluggish this is.
It's driving me crazy. Sorry about that. I just will stop complaining.
It's automatically picked cinema home, which is a nice start.
But I am concerned that cinematic movement is going to be locked in.
And sure enough, it is.
So, as you can see there, it's been disabled. Again to take care of that,
go into general, AI Service, turn off the AI brightness settings,
and I'm also going to turn off auto genre selection.
I don't like any of these AI processers.
They just don't work well for me.
Then we’ll go back to picture settings,
go into Advanced Settings,
go to Clarity, and go all the way down here
and turn this off. Now look, I know a lot of you guys don’t want to turn that off,
again I just do this to see how the TV processes motion without any assistance.
If you like motion smoothing, go for it.
OK, so first impressions.
Well, it's definitely an OLED TV,
I mean, if you couldn't tell from the super thin profile, you’d know
as soon as you turn it on because of the deep black levels.
As far as aesthetic trade offs, I don't feel like they're that significant.
You know, if you save a little bit money because it's not as fancy looking,
that's fine, because, again, it's still an OLED TV.
I'm not a fan of how sluggish it is.
I feel like whatever chip is running WebOS is not doing it justice.
That's a little bit of a slog, but I can forgive it for that, too,
especially if you can just plug
in a Roku device or a Chromecast with Google TV to bypass it entirely.
It's really going to come down to picture quality.
And I think we're going to be picking some nits here, literally and figuratively.
I think we're going to need to look at how it handles
shadow detail and peak brightness for HDR. Little stuff, right?
Ultimately, this is going to be a tough call.
How much more do you get when you step up to, say, the C1
as opposed to saving money with the A1? I can't wait to find out.
So be sure to come right back for the full review.
Thanks, as always, for watching, everybody.
I'm really curious, what is the perfect price for you
for a 65-inch OLED, at which point you just go take my money?
Let me know about that down the comments, like and subscribe,
and here's two other videos I think you'll like.