No matter how glamorous curved screens look, and no matter how hard Samsung tries to argue that curved TV screens improve the viewing experience, they’re still roundly (see what I did there?) avoided by many buyers. This has led to frustration among AV die-hards desperate to upgrade to OLED screen tech but unable to find an OLED screen that wasn’t curved.
Thankfully LG has cottoned on to this and released a range of flat OLED models: the EF950V series. And we’re looking at the 4K, £4,000, 65in 65EF950V model.
And by ‘looking at’, I mean ‘ogling’. Make no mistake about it: far from feeling like a poor relation to LG’s curved offering, the 65EF950V’s flatness feels like a natural home for OLED. Not least because ‘going fl at’ spotlights the incredible slimness OLED can deliver. At its edges and over around two-thirds of the 65EF950V’s rear panel it’s less than 5mm deep, creating a physics-defying profile that will have movie den visitors cooing with envy. (The reason the entire rear can’t be less than 5mm deep is that LG has to find room to put the speakers, Freeview HD tuners and video processing systems).
The fl at approach also looks much less cumbersome when wall-mounted, and the fact that the panel doesn’t distort onscreen reflections, like curved screens do, is a bonus.
Take control
LG provides enough picture tweaks on the 65EF950V to keep both dedicated amateur and professional calibrators happy, including colour, gamma and white balance management, along with an OLED brightness setting that operates a little like an LCD backlight adjustment, and reasonable degrees of control over its noise reduction and motion compensation processing.
First impressions of the 65EF950V in action are overwhelmingly positive in the way it seems only OLED can deliver. As with its Panasonic rival, the LG TV produces levels of contrast and black depth that leave other types of TV technology looking washed out by comparison. Even the very best LCD TVs – those that use direct LED lighting and local dimming – can’t deliver the dazzling visuals of Gravity’s above Earth shots or the windows of Hogwarts at night with anything like the boldness and richness here.
And, again, these bright image areas aren’t sullied by the localised clouds or light bands that invariably appear around them to some extent with all LCD TVs.
The 65EF950V can be watched from even quite acute angles without colour or contrast performance suffering. What’s more, since the screen is fl at you don’t have to worry about kooky image geometry when you’re watching from the side of a room.
The screen revels in its native 4K resolution. With sport, this means players' designer stubble and snarling faces are brought into sharp focus, while HDD-served 4K clips of Exodus: Gods And Kings enjoy remarkable resolution, texture and depth. It's a palpably different experience than Full HD, and has me itching for the eventual UHD Blu-ray release.
Sharpness is, of course, aided by the pixel-level light output and colour precision that OLED makes possible. And the superior motion rendering of the technology also makes its presence felt, again heightening the sense of overall image clarity.
The 65EF950V isn’t quite as assured at upscaling HD sources as the Panasonic 65CZ952B, failing to engineer quite so much sharpness. But it still crafts a noticeable upgrade on straight HD, and seems a little more refined in its upscaling efforts than previous LG 4K models.
With UHD Blu-ray still to be launched, I tested the 65EF950V’s HDR performance with a couple of HDR Amazon series – Mozart In The Jungle and Bosch – and some 4K HDR clips provided by LG. For the most part the results were excellent, as the luminance range of the HDR content was unlocked by the dynamic talents of the OLED screen. Actually, the 65EF950V is slightly brighter than Panasonic's set, giving its images a touch more HDR punch than the Panasonic model will likely do following its firmware update.
HDR playback does, though, highlight a couple of niggles that you don’t get on the (twice as expensive) Panasonic. Firstly, the left and right edges of the LG’s image appear dimmer than the central areas with some shots – such as those of Tom Cruise’s white-walled sky-base in Oblivion – creating an unwanted vignetting effect. And the 65EF950V’s normally stunning black levels can suddenly take on a quite noticeable and very un OLED-like grey hue if the source content features just the right awkward mix of bright and dark content – a mix more likely to appear with HDR than non-HDR content.
These two issues only crop up from time to time, and usually only fleetingly. You can reduce the regularity of their appearance, too, by limiting the screen’s general and OLED brightness. Yet having spotted the issues once, you might sometimes find yourself looking out for them again. Alternatively, you may simply ignore them and focus on the set's good attributes.
So how does this OLED TV compare in brightness terms with high-output LCD rivals? True to form, the 65EF950V isn't as equipped in this regard as Samsung's JS9500 series (a clear rival in price and spec). Yet while HDR playback is therefore not as immediately dazzling, the visual impact remains courtesy of the foundation provided by its superior black levels. As HDR builds towards a 2016 breakout, it's clear that both rival screen technologies are ready for it.
Connections are as you would expect from a high-end TV in 2016, including a quartet of v2.0 HDMIs capable of handling both 4K at 60fps and HDR video. LG’s smart features are delivered by the 2.0 version of its WebOS operating system. This remains the single most efficient and easy-to-follow smart TV platform around, despite strong competition from Panasonic’s Firefox system.
LG provides 4K versions of the Amazon and Netflix streaming services, as well as BBC iPlayer and Demand 5 catchup services and Sky’s Now TV platform. It is disappointing, though, to find no support for All4 or the ITV Hub, especially now that Panasonic and Sony provide Freeview Play and YouView respectively in many of their sets.
The 65EF950V arrives with a very serviceable audio system. Designed in conjunction with specialist marque Harman/Kardon, the speaker array manages good vocal clarity, plenty of treble detailing and a surprising amount of bass wallop. Independence Day’s ‘city destruction’ sequences (I'm prepping for the sequel) have cinematic drama.
Watershed moment in TV
All in all, despite a couple of relatively minor flaws, the 65EF950V is seriously worthy of consideration and marks something of a watershed moment in TV history. Moving to a fl at form and hitting a £4,000 price point (perhaps less if you hunt around) for a 65in UHD model makes OLED competitive with the upper echelons of the LCD TV world for the first time. In other words, with the 65EF950V OLED has finally, truly, come of age.
Specifications
3D: Yes. Passive
4K: Yes. 3,840 x 2,160
TUNER: Yes. Freeview HD plus CI slot
CONNECTIONS: 4 x HDMI; RF input; 3 x USB; RGB Scart; optical digital audio output; headphone jack; Ethernet; integrated Wi-Fi
SOUND: 2 x 10W (two-way, four-driver system)
BRIGHTNESS (CLAIMED): N/A
CONTRAST RATIO (CLAIMED): N/A
DIMENSIONS (OFF STAND): 1,450(w) x 842(h) x 49.9(d)mm
WEIGHT (OFF STAND): 19.9kg
FEATURES: USB multimedia playback; DLNA streaming; Perfect Mastering Engine; Triple XD Engine; OLED panel; WebOS 2.0 smart system; fl at screen!; Harman Kardon-designed audio system; ‘fl oating’ transparent neck design; Magic Remote