I never thought I wanted another “Smart TV” again. I’ve bought a few of them over the years, only to be utterly disappointed by the lack of any functionality even remotely resembling anything “smart”, software updates languishing, features not working after a year, and generally just utter disappointment. On top of that, the user interfaces I had experienced with Smart TVs were… anything but.
This summer, though, I had to suffer through getting a Smart TV in order to test the Dolby Atmos functionality of the new Sonos Arc soundbar. Turns out the only HDMI switch box I could get that would pass Atmos signals is baked inside of a Smart TV, so I asked myself, “who makes the best OLED TV?” and quickly found myself selecting something from LG.
Sure enough, when the 65″ LG OLED65CXPUA arrived, it functioned spectacularly as the necessary HDMI switch box and I was finally able to experience Atmos sound as Sonos intended. It was glorious. What happened next was the biggest surprise, though.
This LG TV is actually smart. webOS turns out to be a very mature, up-to-date, cared-for platform that truly stands on its own. On top of that, the TV’s support for AirPlay 2 is the most reliable video AirPlay implementation I’ve experienced yet, and that includes working with various models of Apple TV.
Oh, and the TV has its own, built-in Atmos support, too, which was another pleasant surprise, especially if you don’t have a Sonos Arc to test.
webOS
LG’s webOS app store is robust, and includes apps for all the services you’d expect: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, and countless others. Among those countless others were some lovely surprises: Apple TV, Plex, Xfinity Stream, and, once it was released, NBC’s Peacock. Almost without realizing it, we stopped using the TV as a switch box, not because there were any problems with that, but because we didn’t need to feed much of anything into the TV other than an Ethernet (or Wi-Fi) signal. From there we could basically watch anything we wanted, all in glorious 4K (where available) and, of course, with the aforementioned Dolby Atmos sound.
Sure, we occasionally fire up the TiVo to watch something it has recorded, but we just as frequently let our (mandatory-to-have-with-our-plan) Xfinity X1 box record something and just watch that via the webOS Xfinity Stream app directly via the TV. Live TV is also supported that way.
The only time I turn on my Apple TV now is when I want to use an app on there that’s not available on my TV itself: the WWDC app for videos, Testflight to test something for a developer, the “Apple Events” app to watch special events (though YouTube has those, too, now), and the occasional Apple Arcade game on Apple TV.
For most of our viewing, though, the TV quickly became our preferred streaming device, which made things super-simple. Smart TV for the win! At least when that Smart TV is from LG.
What about Samsung?
Because of the pandemic, we didn’t do any “normal” vacation travel to cities or other places-of-interest. We did, however, want to get away with the four of us, which simply meant renting an AirBnB in some (other) remote corner of New England and enjoying some lockdown time together “over there”. The scenery was different. We had a lake outside our back door. But TV was still important for those evening wind-down activities… like binging a show together or watching a movie.
The AirBnBs we wound up in both had new Samsung TVs. “Perfect,” I thought, “I get to test and compare.” Samsung’s Smart TVs also have the Apple TV+ app in their stores, but they don’t have Peacock. They also don’t have anything close to the simplicity of the user experience of LG’s webOS. Managing apps on those came with a much more difficult learning curve for us, and this was all just a few weeks after we adapted to the webOS on the LG TV. It was all still fresh in our minds.
You can make ’em both work, but the Apple-esque simplicity of LG’s webOS beats Samsung’s offering for us every day of the week.
AirPlay and HomeKit
Speaking of Apple-esque, the LG Smart TV supports both AirPlay 2 and HomeKit. We’ve always had hit-or-miss experience streaming from our iPhones to our Apple TVs. Streaming to the LG TV is frictionless, and we find ourselves using AirPlay for those quick little, “hey, let me show you something” moments when we’re all in the living room.
As listeners of Mac Geek Gab know, I’ve recently dug back into using HomeKit proper (HOOBS is great for those devices which don’t natively support HomeKit!), and having the LG TV as a first-class citizen on my HomeKit network is stellar. Volume, power, input source, and more can be controlled and automated along with everything else.
It’s always delightful to find a non-Apple device which integrates with my Apple “network” like a native. LG’s webOS makes their TVs do just this.
Let’s not forget that OLED Screen
Some would accuse me of burying the lede, but hopefully you understand that my path into this world here meant I had different priorities. Of course, I chose LG because of all the great things I knew to be academically (and anecdotally) true about their OLED panels. Experiencing one in its 65″ glory at home, though, is another matter entirely.
We came from a decade-plus of Panasonic Plasma displays (LED’s viewing angle just doesn’t work for our living room), and were quite spoiled in that world. The first week or two with the LG OLED screen was almost distracting because of the increased realism. Yes, there’s a quality difference, of course, but the effect is that everything just looks that much more real. It’s almost as if the perceived depth looks more three dimensional because of the enhanced clarity and contrast of the OLED screen.
To this day, months later, I’m still often amazed when I turn this thing on and see the image again. You definitely won’t go wrong selecting an LG OLED panel for your next TV, that’s for sure.
Realistic Affordability
Our family goal was to coast through on the last of the Panasonic Plasmas until OLED came down into our price range. At $2,300 for the 65-inch version (or $4,000 for the 77-inch version), these prices are realistic and affordable if this is what you’re looking for.
And I highly recommend you take a look!
You can still buy an LG IR remote ($12 on Amazon?) that works just about everything and doesn’t have the mouse style pointer.
If not using any other 3rd party control system, I always give one of those IR remotes to my clients for free as I know the LG mouse style remote will drive many of them crazy sooner or later.(Cheaper to give it to them then have to go back out in the future on another service call)
@doitforme-solutions
Now why didn’t I think of that!? Of course there would be a replacement remote for our tv on Amazon… Thanks!
We have a very nice 65″ LG and the only complaint I have is the darn pointer! It’s way too jumpy for me. But then I am 70+ years old and my hands are not as steady as they used to be.
I have Samsung OLED display and it work perfectly with my new PS5.
Some of the games 4k look amazing.
A TV for the price of a sports car is too much for me.
I also had Panasonic Plasma. They were super great.
DO
NOT
HESITATE
OLED IS INCREDIBLE.
However stuck you are on plasma because of it’s awesomeness, you will be a notch more stuck on OLED. Only advice is to not get the B models (the lowest end model of LG). The next tier up are the C and I forget they have 2 tiers even higher than that.
Sony are the other great options. Sony’s usually use LAST YEARS glass from LG. That generally is not a problem because there was a BIG difference between OLED from 2015 to 2016. 2016 IMO was the first really good year for LG OLED. Each year since 2016 there were improvements, but not that huge. HDR has improved, Atmos I think was added in 2019, but the delta in actual on screen has been very incremental. So a sony this year would use the 2019 LG glass, but meh, it looks great.
Sony’s scaling tends to be a little bit better than LGs. Sony uses AdroidTV which has it’s own privacy issues. But I would just unplug that too.
The 77″ models are now down that you can find them around $3800. I bought mine during last Black Friday for 3599. I suspect it will be even lower this Black Friday. If you can spring for it, I highly recommend it. Great set. The bezels are so tiny space wise if feels not much bigger than the 65″. The 65″ is so small I put it in the bedroom, it works well there.
The sony has one cool thing in that it uses the entire surface of the screen as its speaker. I hear it’s pretty good. I hate audio off most sound bars, they are all awful because only like 4 movies are encoded well enough for the sound to be properly broken up, so the software is always trying to guess where the ‘middle’ is, and thats why you get crazy loud sound effects and voices you cannot hear and everything goes from too quiet to too loud. So I got a pair of KEF LSXs and hooked up the TV to that. SOOOO much better. YMMV.
The sony tends to be around 500-700 more than the comparable LG. Considering LG drives the core tech, I tend to go with them, but the Sony’s go on sale from time to time, and are super compelling too.
Most other OLEDs relatively suck. The exception is there is a Panasonic model that is not in the US that I hear is SUPER FANTASTIC. However, it’s limited to only 65″, no larger. Which might not matter.
Anyway, hoping this is of some help.
TLDR: DO IT. GET AN OLED.
I love LG OLED’s also. Just a minor clarification – The OLED panels are made by LG Display, a different company than LG. (The Korean business model of intertwined and cross-owned conglomerates is unique and hard to decipher)
LG Electronics and Sony both use LG Display OLED panels. The TV’s are quite different because everything else is designed by the respective companies – the processors, control systems, upscaling, and of course the SmartTV software and features.
The reason OLED’s are different are because they are self-emissive technology that generates their light. LCD, in all it’s variations including QLED, requires a backlight to shine through and provide the light for the image we see.
The backlight has gone through many iterations from actual fluorescent tubes, to a small set of LED lights, to a large array of LED lights (so called “local dimming zones”), and now a massive array of LED lights – the new “mini LED” TVs. But all of these are hacks to fix the inherent technological problem that LCD’s themselves don’t emit light.
This is what confuses most consumers – the majority of TV’s on the market today are LCD TV’s with LED backlights. The companies market them as “LED TV’s” but that is misleading. The LED is only the backlight and not the actual image generation method.
OTOH, the microLED’s that have been mentioned are a true different technology than OLED or LCD. MicroLED’s are very small LEDs which are self-emissive and built in modular building blocks, so multiple modules can be used to cover an entire wall.
This is not sci-fi. MicroLED’s covering walls have been built and installed. Just the matter of the cost being $500,000 to several million dollars so they are only in wealthy Hollywood producer’s homes or special business applications. But the price will come down and eventually be more affordable – just takes time.
I have the 65″ and the 77″ and once you have OLED there is no going back. It’s the SSD vs HD feeling. Once you experience it, you know you cannot go back. QLED all the other bs names out there for LED, nothing can compete with per pixel lighting.
Maybe someday microLED (not miniLED which more BS and doesn’t have per pixel lighting) might get there, but it’s likely years off. Until then, nothing compares to OLED.
As for webOS I generally like the UI. However, it’s crap compared to Apple TV imo, more over, webOS is explicit in telling you they are totally f***ing your privacy. Audio samples, and everything you watch, is taken and sold/resold etc.
As such, I never use webOS, and I only plug the TVs in like once a year to get a software update, and otherwise use the TVs as dumb devices, splitting my actual viewing between TiVo and AppleTV.
For those that dont care about privacy, webOS is fine. But it’s a privacy disaster, so pass. Keeping the wifi off and the ethernet port unplugged.
Interesting comment about plasma TVs.
We have 10+ years experience with Panasonic plasma TVs and I have been reading a lot about OLED and keep hesitating to buy.
We are very happy with our 50-inch TV in the living room and find the wide-angle viewing to be useful during dinner production. The largest OLED TV that we could get would be 55 inches.
Sounds like you’re on the same track we are, @davebarnes. You’re going to be amazed when you make the jump to OLED. And your viewing angles will be preserved. 🙂
Ordered a LG OLED55CXPUA and a Sonos Arc today.
My local AV company will be doing the install on October 26th. Yes, we get to wait 5 weeks. Cost is MSRP + tax + $200 removal/install.
My neighbors will be replacing their 32-inch 2010 TV with our 50-inch plasma.