​Finally! LG 2016 OLED TV range review

YouTube and Netflix 4K

There are plenty of great 4K demo reels available and they all look great on this TV. But the go-to clip is the Costa Rica 60fps 4K show reel which never gets old no matter how many times you watch it.

Read more: ​Kogan curved 4K UHD 55-inch LED LCD TV review

To be fair, this demo looks sensational on everything but sometimes, on really cheap 4K TVs, some of the detail in areas like water can vanish and go all blocky. Nonetheless, the colours are truly exceptional here, especially when used in Vivid mode although it’s fair to say that, in this specific test, Samsung’s Quantum Dot and Hisense’s ULED technology are also incredibly good too.

Lesser TV

Where LG’s OLED TVs have really fallen down in the past is with upscaling – to the point where it was worth swerving from buying them (there wasn’t enough UHD content and the price was high to justify doing so). Now, however, upscaling (which is the process of stretching a low-quality image across a large, high-definition screen without making it look terrible) is much improved.

We watched DVDs, downloaded movies, old low-res clips on YouTube and, well, Father Ted – which is only available at 480p quality whether you’re on DVD or Netflix. Few TVs can rescue the train-wreck quality on offer here but how a TV deals with such appalling quality tells us about its upscaling prowess. Now, instead of an indistinct, blotchy mess, we have a noticeably-yet-uniformly pixelated image along with jagged edges on some lines. We still, slightly prefer the upscaling from Hisense, Panasonic and Sony here, due to their smoother areas of colour, but the best praise we can ever really say is that it was at least watchable. So it passed the test.

We also watched Mad Men in Full HD, a 1988 Guns N’ Roses concert on YouTube, Point Break on Foxtel’s crappy On Demand service (sub-Standard Definition quality), cartoons on a variety of kids channels, a load of downloaded movies and many other types of content.

Perhaps our only real issue here was with vertically-scrolling titles. They were a bit juddery compared with the excellent Hisense. But this is hardly a deal breaker.

Image modes

There are many quick-and-simple ways to tweak the image. Moving from the vibrant colours of Vivid there’s Standard (bit more muted), APS (Auto Power Save – even more slightly-muted), Cinema (warmer picture), Cricket (super bright colours – but no sound change), Game (Bright but with less processing - we had no problems playing Gears of War (turn off image sharpening to play in other modes)), Photo (more-natural and neutral colours), Three levels of HDR effects which tweak the brightness of the picture a little and two ‘ISF Expert’ settings which are intricately-customisable in the main TV Settings.

Next: Handling, Sound and Conclusion