[Music]
hey everybody it's norm from tested and
i got a really interesting video
for you today if you follow the site if
you follow our podcast you know we're
super interested in emerging
technologies
including stuff that's going to
eventually make into our homes
stuff that goes in our televisions now
we've been following
television development over the past 10
years you know going from 1080 tvs to 4k
tvs to different different tv
technologies and we all went on our
different tv quests to look for
new televisions i in my tv quest wanted
to replace my old plasma tv a couple
years ago and i ended up
settling on a 4k oled from lg
the the b6 model and lg in fact reached
out to us
and they're so confident in the
performance of their newest flagship
model the c9
they actually sent us one that's what
this is right now this is a 65 inch
lg oled c9 model not only did they send
us this they also
sent us a competitor's television and
this
is an led lcd tv the q 900r
and yeah it's an 8k television so this
is
a rare opportunity for us to get a look
at something that's right on the horizon
what does an 8k tv look like
today what does content look like on
that and how does that compare
to a top online 4k tv
now of course you're watching this video
through the lens of
our 1080 camera and we're not shooting
this in hdr
so you're you can't really trust exactly
uh these shots behind me we're gonna try
to do our best to show you the details
and the things we're talking about
but this is based on our subjective
testing and
some of our up-close testing but let's
get started
[Music]
well let's start off with the obvious
thing resolution one is a 4k
display and one is an 8k display now you
remember the jump up from
1080 to 4k was pretty significant
1080 panels which ran out for the
longest time have about
2 million pixels behind them 1080 1920
by 1080. and we went up to 4k
that's not a doubling that was a
quadrupling of the number of
pixels we're talking about about 8
million pixels
on a 4k display that's the same thing
that happens when you go to
an 8k panel uh it's a quadrupling again
so for an ak panel you have actually 33
million pixels
now with that comes a couple potential
concerns one is at what size of tv
and at what distance between you and the
tv
do you really notice the pixels at that
pixel
density right so at 4k if i'm sitting at
a standard you know 15 feet away from
the television and it's a 65 inch
the image quality is going to look
pretty good if i have a 4k source
with the ak panel you know what it looks
almost exactly the same now differences
are definitely there when we're going
close
up to the panel and with some of our
macro shots you can definitely tell yeah
there are
a lot more pixels there but for most
people
it's not going to be noticeable now the
second thing is
the image source itself where can you
find the content
to run images on this these displays
natively on the 4k side it's 2019.
almost every single source
streaming source physical media source
offers a uhd option
from netflix itunes to youtube to you
know
your 4k blu-rays well that's about seven
years between when we first saw 4k tvs
at ces
and when uhd really became ubiquitous
and ak tvs they're just coming out
this year so it might be a long time
before
we see true 8k sources and it's not just
the sources this is not just the content
producers the movie studios
formatting their content for 8k it's
also the way
that content is piped into a tv itself
if you're going to want to display ak
content at 30 or 60 hertz
you're going to need hdmi 2.1 which also
isn't widespreadly
available right now now you can do 8k
streaming on your computer if you have
that monitor on like youtube youtube has
8k
playback but that's not available on
this tv because google uses
its own vp9 codec which this tv
can't decode the point is just as when
we were going from 1080
to 4k content we were looking for ways
to make good use of these panels
for 8k all these tvs do is rely on
upscaling that's taking in an image and
then
using its own processing and every tv
manufacturer has
its own separate processor to up convert
that low resolution image into the
native resolution
of the full tv let's talk about
upscaling
so for upscaling tests we ran a bunch of
content
through these televisions from all
different sources
whether it's 1080p youtube videos to
4k video streams on services like
netflix and itunes
and amazon prime to physical media 1080
and uhd
blu-rays and something that we noticed
pretty immediately on
the 8k television was that its upscaler
can be pretty aggressive now it needs to
be because
it needs to fill up a lot of pixels that
aren't there
in the source image and it does a good
job of doing things or removing
color banding or smoothing out some of
the noise in
in the background but that's smoothing
out from my opinion
got a little aggressive especially
combined with their default sharpness
settings
in fact when we look at some of the
details of faces
and some of the the edges the sharpness
setting here
even at a default of 10 out of 20 was
really kind of adjusting almost the
geometry
of the hard edges it's almost like when
you have your iphone portrait mode and
the phone can't really resolve the
difference between what's in the
foreground and what's supposed to be
blurred out in the background and it
kind of blends some of
the hairlines weird that's what we saw
this tv doing
with some of its image processing some
of the naturally
uh blurry bouquet images that you get
from shallow depth of field
you were seeing unnatural hard edges in
there
and some places where you do get hard
edges on like the rims of glasses
we saw that the smooth curves actually
geometry was being
distorted so we quickly turned down the
sharpness setting
from 10 all the way to zero and even
then some of those images i felt just
look
a little bit unnatural almost like if
you're running the image through
a photoshop filter like a posterized
filter almost like they were vectorizing
in some way it's kind of really weird
once i saw it i couldn't
unsee it on the lg side it does
upscaling
as well and i think it's less aggressive
like a 1080p
source on the 4k tv i could getting up
close
noticed some of the pixelization but i
also didn't notice
any geometric distortion the sharpness
here
default was 10 out of 50 and of course
we tried all the way up to 50
all the way off and while there is some
sharpening happening you see
more like wrinkles and some of the
contrast increase
it wasn't distorting geometry which we
like but in the end we turned down
sharpness
on both displays all the way down um and
it looked great here what we found that
was
more important of a difference between
these two models ended up
not being the resolution at all it ended
up being
the other features something that you
should also shop for which is
hdr now the lg c9 supports hdr10
as well as dolby vision and the q900r
only supports
hdr10 hdr10 plus we found
going direct head-to-head on something
like netflix which offers both
dolby vision look remarkably better
if you have netflix i recommend you pull
up the show godless it's a western
it's a great show i love this show it's
aggressively
made for hdr showcasing i think they
have some beautiful vistas
with hard highlights in the skies there
are scenes where you go
from these uh dark barns so the lights
peering through
and hdr if you haven't seen it in person
it
is a game changer i think bigger than
resolution change the images
look strikingly more real the the
highlights
look like you know look like light
bouncing off the sun
as opposed to just the brightest white
you can get
on a flat sheet of paper and in
comparing the two it really reinforced
to me
just how good the dolby vision version
of hdr is and so thankfully the c9
has that which also lets us talk about
the fundamental differences between the
panel technologies themselves
of course lg is known for their oleds
and this is an old television that's
what gets it really
thin and behind all 8 million of those
pixels
each organic led is its own lighting
source
while on the q900 this is a more
traditional led
lcd in fact using a va lcd
panel you know what i mean vertical
alignment there are two different types
of lcds primarily use ips
and va if you play on a gaming monitor
for example you
it might be an ips panel or even a tn
panel
va panels used for tvs typically have
better contrast and that's why tv
manufacturers choose that
because lcds have less contrast compared
to oleds
but at the cost of viewing angle now
what was interesting here with the
q900r is the viewing angles are pretty
good
much better than i was expecting for an
lcd
led lcd and it turns out that's because
the company has put an extra layer this
extra wide viewing angle prism layer on
top of
the lcd panel which then helps the
backlight focus
in on those pixels and prevent some
bleeding prevents the washing out effect
that you get
from other va panels the cost for that
is diminish
contrast modulation values i also
noticed that up close
i could almost see some kind of hatching
effect in the gradients
a noticeable screen door effect and in
fact this is a good time to take a
closer look at the actual
pixels in the panel under a digital
microscope we could clearly see some
stark differences between the oled and
lcd panels
starting with the oled we see the lg is
using a
rgbw stripe arrangement with red
green and blue and white sub pixels
activating
and combining to show a pretty wide
gamut of colors with
rgbw stripe the pixel fill here is
pretty good
and as a consequence the pixels look
full
on the lcd the sub pixel arrangement is
a little more complicated
in the past the qled technologies have
achieved wider viewing angles
using a dual pixel structure each pixel
being split into two
areas that are lit differently in the 8k
panel
the pixels look to me to be subdivided
even more to a point where
if you look at a solid red or solid
green or solid blue image
there is variable luminance between the
sub pixels the solid green
isn't really solid green and as a result
i could see this unusual moire
or screen door effect on native 8k
images
something difficult to unsee once i
noticed it combined with that prism
layer
the pixels themselves look less discrete
or complete you can see that when we put
up
an 8k image with text square pixels
don't actually look square so it's
definitely not an ideal
8k implementation the oled though has
just
stupendous color representation the
brightness is great on both of these
but the black levels is so good on all
types of content
and because hdr is independent of
resolution
even if you're running you can get hdr
on 720p
content i found i got most benefit out
of
the c9 watching content in hdr and
watching content in dolby vision
so the long and short of it is that it
really is in apples to oranges
comparison because not only are we
talking about different
panel resolutions 4k and ak we're also
talking about fundamentally different
panel technologies oled versus lcd
and on the resolution side i think the
jury is still
out on 8k and i think it's going to be
out for a long time because
one we just don't have native 8k sources
even the way to get those ak sources
onto the tvs today are fairly limited we
need to
wait and see how good hdmi 2.1 how
widespread how cheap those
cables are going to be for that to work
uh
but in terms of the ak content today
what you can
watch in quote unquote 8k it's going to
be
varying from manufacturer to
manufacturer i mean lg is going to have
their own 8k tv eventually and they're
going to have their own
upscaler and their own way of processing
4k infinity images and so the more app
comparison
would be for that the more interesting
comparison
is with panel technologies i think today
you're going to get the most bang for
your buck looking at a 4k tv over
an 8k tv and in the 4k realm i don't
think you can beat
oled i stand by the the deep black
levels on
lg's oled the dolby vision support which
i think
offers the best quality hdr right now
i'm really glad i was able to get a
direct comparison between oled
and top online led lcd because led lcd
does great hdr the brightness is great
i just think that the black levels the
contrast
isn't quite up there with the lg
oleds and because there is widespread 4k
content today
that's what i would go and stick with so
that's my recommendation
we'll be doing more comparisons in the
future and if you have questions about
what content looks like on either of
these displays post in the comments
below and we'll try to answer them as
best as we can but thanks for watching