LG 2017 OLED TV range full review: W7 Signature Wallpaper, G7, E7 and C7 UHD TVs
Did the best 4K smart TVs just get better or worse?
Pros
- Gold standard image quality
Cons
- Mandatory sound bars can be annoying
Bottom Line
The best TVs just inched slightly further towards perfection. But the built-in sound bars are awkward, expensive and unnecessary. Our pick is the base-level C7 which avoids the trimmings.
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Price
$ 4,099.00 (AUD)
The Range
While we’ve focused on the G7 Signature in this review, all of this year’s TVs are essentially the same but with different garnishings and cosmetic finishing touches, so expect usability and picture quality to be the same…
LG Signature W7 “Wallpaper” 65-inch OLED – $13,499
LG Signature G7 65-inch OLED – $8,995
LG E7 65-inch OLED – $7,999
LG E7 55-inch OLED – $5,199
LG C7 65-inch OLED – $6,899
LG C7 55-inch OLED – $4,099
The Signature W7 is like a GT3 variant – you pay more for less. It’s a super thin panel that sticks to your wall like a window. It also comes with a large, separate Dolby Atmos sound bar worth $1,700. It’s connected to its input box using a small, thin ribbon cable. It sure looks great but at this price? Just wow. A 77-inch variant is being made but availability in Australia hasn’t been confirmed yet.
Our main issue is that if people are paying this much for a TV they can disguise as part of the wall, why would they want a TV stand just for a sound bar?
The Signature G7 is the model reviewed here. It has a thin, glass-mounted screen and very-bulky base with built-in sound bar. As with the W7, there’s a 77-inch variant but we’ve no word on price or availability.
The E7 has a regular stand plus a much thinner sound bar. It too is glass backed.
The C7 is more of a regular TV with no sound bar and is much more affordable. The back is plastic and ugly, but hey, it’s the back! It’s still very thin for a TV.
It should be noted that LG is calling this the C-series despite there being an older LG OLED C-series that used to mean curved. However, LG has stopping making curved screens due to a lack of demand from the public. At just over $4,000 it’s by far the most affordable model and we’ve already seen it for $3,600. It’s also still very thin indeed and has the exact same picture as its more expensive brethren. We have to ask, why pay more?
Conclusion
In many ways, this was a rather dull TV to review. It effortlessly scored top marks across the board… pretty much like its predecessors. If the rest of the market catches up, TVs will be commoditised, but we’re likely some way off that. In the meantime, it’s worth saying that LG’s 2017 OLED displays are simply as good as TVs can get and any future improvements are unlikely come with significant leaps in picture quality (unless resolution jumps to something like 8K).
But that doesn’t make the 2017 OLEDs an unqualified success. The remotes aren’t perfect, the attached sound bars are bulky, expensive and not as good as decent surround-sound systems plus reaching the inputs on the G7 is tricky. Basically, much of what surrounds the TVs takes away from the experience rather than enhancing it.
As such, we’re happy to say that the 2017 LG OLED TVs have the picture quality that we hoped for – but if you see a 2016 model at a heavily-reduced price, you’re still going to get a stunning TV with fewer awkward features.
Indeed, we're troubled by the notion of paying significantly more for mandatory audio – it just doesn’t sit right with us. As such, for most people, we recommend the base model LG C7 model. However, if money is no object then the Wallpaper W7 Signature model is the sort of thing we’ve seen sci-fi movies over the past decades - it's amazing.
If all these prices still seem silly, then Hisense’s amazing Series 7 ULED TVs are what you buy.
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