(blows whistle)
- It's a play we've seen many times over the years.
Your competitor catches you completely by surprise
with a vastly superior product.
There's no time to develop something new
so you reach for the nearest heat sink,
slap it on the back and overclock this snot out of it.
That's essentially what LG's done here.
By adding an aluminum heat sink layer to the second gen
OLED panel technology we saw them introduced last year,
they claim they've managed to boost up
peak brightness by up to 30%.
It's actually not a bad move.
OLEDs biggest problem is its low brightness,
but is it enough to win a place
in the family room of my new house?
I guess it doesn't really matter
unless I can pay for it somehow.
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- The brighter you run an OLED panel,
the better the HDR experience.
But this also comes with a downside: heat
and the hotter the panel gets,
the faster the diodes burn out.
So LG is under pressure from two sides.
They have to push brightness up in order to compete,
but if they fly too close to the sun,
they're gonna get burned... in.
Get it?
'Cause customers are gonna return their TVs if they burn in.
The brightness booster heat sink, as LG is calling it,
appears to be an attempt to manage this heat
in direct response to Samsung's much brighter QD OLED TVs
and from our initial tests, it seems to work as expected.
We weren't able to measure some of the 1000 plus nit claims
that we've seen from other reviewers,
but after finding and disabling
the buried energy saving feature,
we did manage to hit a respectable 930 nits
in luminance stability testing,
despite only hitting 880 nits in a 1% to 10% window.
The problem though, is that while it's a good idea,
it's not exactly a new idea.
Sony's A90J OLED from last year features a similar approach
and also still gets whomped by Samsung's new QD OLED lineup,
which has a couple of other key advantages:
much better color saturation from not needing
a white sub pixel and much better efficiency,
thanks to using quantum dots rather than color filters.
Oh, and if you've been paying attention,
you might already realize that better efficiency
means that you can boost your OLEDs higher
without them heating up as much,
reducing the risk of burn in.
We'll talk a bit more about that later,
but first let's see how much LG has managed
to improve over the last years flagship.
Unfortunately it's pretty obvious which one is which
because the bezel is so much skinnier on the...
Wow, it's also a lot brighter.
- [Cameraman] Right?
- Huh, okay.
Even, well I guess especially in a lit room,
with all the studio lighting, that's very noticeable.
Both of them support all the latest bells and whistles.
G sync, auto low latency mode, variable refresh rate,
HDMI 2.1, actually the G2 has two eARC ports
which is kind of cool if you have multiple
audio setups for whatever reason.
But the main difference is immediately apparent
sitting in front of them.
The G2 is noticeably brighter.
Similar color accuracy out of the box
but the brighter you go,
the more vibrant colors are perceived to be,
at least all other things being equal.
Are they both in filmmaker mode?
- [Cameraman] Yeah, they should be.
Well when they go to this,
they're in theater home or something.
The brightness does make a difference though.
- Oh for sure. - [Cameraman] Yeah, yeah.
- It makes it feel less like he's standing in a gray space
and more like he's standing in overcast
with the sun shining through the clouds.
It really is, really is a very noticeable difference.
Oh wow.
- It's huge, you can see a ton of detail
on this that just gets kind of lost here.
Like if you pause it.
- Oh yeah. - Yeah.
- For sure, yeah, night and day.
- But compared to the QD OLED, this is brown.
It should be yellow and red.
It's hard 'cause the glare from those studio lights.
- And it doesn't have trouble hitting the highlights either.
The highlights are brighter and the blacks are deeper
and they're both Dolby Vision capable.
LG has, I mean, it might not be elegant,
but LG has certainly improved over last gen.
I do wonder if part of this is LG just improving
the color profile and then not doing it for the old one.
- Maybe, maybe.
- 'Cause that's really overcooked in terms of the blues.
It doesn't change the end result.
Whether it's software or hardware,
it looks much better on the new set.
As for out of the box color accuracy,
our G2 in filmmaker mode got a respectable Delta E average
of 3.6 in SDR and 7.2 in HDR without luminance errors.
That's pretty good for a display
that we got off the shelf at the local Visions
and that doesn't come with a calibration report in the box.
With that said, the S95BQD OLED from Samsung
that we just reviewed beat it handily,
both with and without their calibration app
that only requires a newish smartphone
to get a shockingly accurate picture.
Oh and it comes in at $200 less than the G2.
It sounds like you should just get the Samsung then, right?
Well that's what we thought
but when we took delivery of our G2,
the visions rep mentioned that they've actually avoided
putting the two models next to each other on the show floor
because apparently compared to LG,
the Samsung's blacks look downright gray
but I haven't had a chance to look at them and confirm.
That is, until now.
Oh wow, I see it already.
- The gray?
- Holy crap, it's gray.
- Yeah and when you turn off the lights, it looks black.
But side by side, it does look super gray
by comparison, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Honestly, I don't even think it looks as good
as Samsung's latest Quantum dot (indistinct).
Is it just an anti-glare coating?
- I don't know.
- Because the glare is much less.
So if you get the perfect blacks in the blackness
and less glare, I wouldn't say it's a disadvantage.
See what I thought when the Visions rep said,
oh it looks gray by comparison,
was that the pixels were not turning off enough.
- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
- But that's not what this is.
This is, what I think it is, is a light reflecting
and scattering anti-glare layer.
- Turn the lights off.
See now they're almost identical.
It looks black on the bottom.
- You know what else is almost identical?
The performance of these two TVs to my bare eyes.
If you told me that these are the same model of TV,
I would believe that this was simply
a batch to batch variant.
- Yeah.
- Now that particular movie, we're using
the same HDR grade between the two, right?
What if we pick something that supports Dolby Vision,
does the LG have an advantage?
- It might to the extent that Dolby vision will give you
a wider range technically until HDR 10 plus is improved.
The problem is we can't really do that
with our splitter. - With our splitter.
You know, I wonder if LG is juicing
their greens a little bit.
- It looks greener on this, right?
Just a tiny but
- To compensate for WOLED 'cause it does seem
like a bit of an unnatural green.
- Yeah, the LG looks just a little bit more Costco-y,
but it's not necessarily a bad thing, right?
Like it looks good. - It looks good.
If I didn't see this next to it,
I wouldn't pick it out as,
oh they've just got the vibrancy cranked.
Vivid mode, you know, it's not like that.
- No, but in testing, I mean,
this did do significantly better.
We're talking really minor amounts,
like if I looked at a 3.7 Delta E average
and then I looked at a 2.7 Delta E average
I'm probably not gonna be able tell difference.
- And a lot of these differences could easily
come down to filmmaker creative vision,
as opposed to just this one is definitely more true to life
because films are not necessarily graded
in such a way that they are true to life anyway.
But if this was the mood they were going for,
this is a different mood.
- Totally, this is more colorful, joyful
and it's 1917, it's a war movie.
So you kind of think that the Samsung with this not muted,
but somber yeah, looks a lot more accurate or correct.
I still like the Samsung more
but they are almost identical.
- I see why Visions didn't want them next to each other.
- Right?
- And it's not in a deceptive bad way,
in a being fair to the Samsung way.
Interesting.
All other things being equal,
choosing between these two is gonna be really tough.
The speakers are decidedly better on the S95 B,
but the remote and interface is as much better on the G2,
while both of them have very similar input leg,
in the neighborhood of 18 to 18 and a half milliseconds.
There are some other bigger factors to consider though
when choosing between OLED and QD OLED.
Color fringing on text and burn in.
Let's start with text.
Because of the Pentile layout of the sub pixels
on Samsung's new flagships, if you look closely enough,
you can see some small amounts
of color fringing when hard edges meet.
Samsung actually responded to similar complaints
when the AW3423DW QD OLED gaming monitor
launched back in March.
They said that this issue can also be found in LCDs
and OLEDS using RGB Stripe on the right and left sides
of high contrasting hard edges.
But they said, because QD OLED has such a wide color gamut
and superior contrast ratio (coughs) and pentile layout,
it's easier to spot.
They went on to say that this layout was chosen
to optimize color gamut, brightness and durability,
which brings us back to our image retention discussion.
The panel type that LG has been marketing as OLED
is actually WOLED or white OLED.
It works by taking a blue emitter
and coding it in a yellow phosphor to produce white light.
That light is then punched through a color filter
to produce the final image with the filter
absorbing any unwanted light, reducing the brightness
of the entire display in the process.
The harder you drive the pixels,
the more light can get through that filter,
but the faster the panel will die
because the organic material, the O in OLED?
Well it decays.
To increase perceived brightness while avoiding
over driving their color pixels, LG uses a white sub pixel
alongside the RGB, but it's not a perfect solution.
Regularly watching TV or even playing video games
is unlikely to damage your panel,
thanks to technology like pixel shift and automatic static
or screen brightness limit, or ASBL for short.
The former shifts the image around by a few pixels
every so often while the latter limits brightness
on static elements so anything stationary doesn't get
driven as hard, leaving a little outline for you.
However, I have personally experienced temporary
image retention using a 48 inch LGC 10
as my office monitor and Wendell from Level1Techs
has experienced permanent burden on his.
With QD OLED however, this may become a non-issue.
Samsung's TV only has a basic warranty of one year,
but Dell seems confident enough to give
a three year warranty to this technology,
as we saw on the A3423DW.
This is thanks to Samsung's use of a blue
self emitting layer and quantum dots.
Since there's no color filter to pass through,
we don't need a white sub pixel in order to boost brightness
and bright colors are now achievable
without driving the panel so hard.
Quantum dots are crazy efficient when it comes to
converting light from one color to another.
Samsung is also able to monitor each of the three layers
in QD OLED display, red, green, and blue
and adjust the output accordingly to ensure
that one layer doesn't wear out faster than the others.
Is it perfect and is burn in a thing of the past?
Probably not.
Organic LEDs, in fact any LEDs, really do degrade over time.
It's just that at least on paper,
it should be much less noticeable now,
especially since QD OLED is also taking advantage
of pixel shift and pixel refresher technology
like what we've got in the G2.
Now that the lab is gearing up,
we're excited to bring you guys long term burn in testing
on OLED, QD OLED and all different kinds of panels
but it's still gonna be a little while.
So in the meantime, pick up a Wan hoodie
and get subscribed on Floatplane for a ton
of behind the scenes content that's not on YouTube,
like Anthony's recent rant about trains.
Gotta pay for the lab somehow.
Back to these panels though, if in regular TV use,
each of them is unlikely to end up with burn in,
which one do you buy or more accurately,
which one should I buy?
I actually bought both of them
so it's more like which one should I return
and which one goes into my living room?
I might end up returning both.
LGS last gen G1 is nearly a thousand dollars less
than either of these and if you have any semblance
of light control in your room, it gets pretty darn bright.
Furthermore, the next step down from the G2
in their current lineup, the C2 is only a few hundred bucks
more than that last gen G1 and is supposedly so similar
in performance to the G2 that LG only differentiates
them by the onboard speakers on their website.
I suspect there are other differences.
If you want an even better bargain and you don't need
that many nits in your mom's basement, at the time
of filming a 65 inch C1 is just $1,600 with the C series
also coming in a much wider range of sizes.
That 42-incher is looking mighty tempting
and I'll be checking it out for myself soon.
We're gonna have links to where
to buy all of these down below.
To be clear, even budget OLED TVs are very expensive
compared to a TCL LCD, but thanks to competition
from Samsung and soon others, it seems like in
the not too distant future, we will all be able
to afford to move on from LCD.
As for me, I've got one more that I've got my eyes on
before I can make a final decision.
Sony's QD OLED, the A95K.
Then I'll be ready to make my move.
Just like I'll be ready to make my move
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- If you enjoyed this video, check out our S95B coverage
to get ready for the upcoming finale with the Sony TV.
I can't wait.
No, actually I can't wait.
My family room doesn't have a TV in it.
It's just a blank wall.