Review: LG 65EC970V

Introduction and features

If you're even remotely interested in home entertainment technology, you'll recognise the LG 65EC970V as potentially one of the biggest things to happen to television since the arrival of HD.

In fact, many people who've seen the combination of OLED technology and native UHD resolution at any preview over the past couple of years may well be harbouring hopes that it's as close to perfection as any TV has ever got before. Including Pioneer's legendary final-generation plasma TVs.

The thing is - like plasma technology, and unlike LCD - OLED technology is a self-emissive technology.

Each and every pixel in an OLED screen can produce its own individual light level and colour. There's no need to share an external light source between groups or even all pixels as happens with LCD technology.

Even direct LED TVs that place their lights behind the screen can't deliver light down to anywhere near pixel levels of accuracy like OLED can.

Obviously OLED's self-emissive nature raises the potential of contrast performances far beyond anything LCD is capable of - and all the demos we've seen to date have done nothing to dent our enthusiasm about this potential. In fact, OLED's contrast performance blew us away in full test conditions too when we took a look at LG's 55EC930V.

One issue with that 55-inch model, though, was that its 'mere' HD resolution led to a rather pixellated look to its pictures at times.

Hence our frankly giddy excitement at the prospect of OLED's contrast charms being partnered with a native 4K UHD resolution for the first time. Our excitement at the arrival of the 65EC970V isn't exactly quelled by its design.

It is, in short, the most gorgeous TV we've ever seen.

Its curved design is typically pretty (we'll get into potential practical issues associated with curved screens later), the way its incredibly narrow frame and screen share the same single 'plane' gives it a beautiful premium finish, and best of all the slenderness of much of its rear panel is nothing short of mind boggling.

There's barely a couple of millimetres between the screen and the outside of the rear panel, making you marvel at how such a design can even exist, as well as making all LCD TVs look positively fat by comparison.

Given the uninspiring state of built-in audio with many of today's flat TVs, it's hard not to fear a sonic downside to the 65EC970V's slimness given the simple lack of space for any speakers.

However, the 65EC970V somehow carries a claimed 40W sound system designed by audio luminary Harman Kardon, so hopefully it won't sound rubbish after all.

A slightly chunkier section of the TV's rear carries its connections.

These are decently numerous, including the now-expected highlights of four HDMI inputs (including support for 4K UHD feeds at up to 60 frames a second); a trio of USBs for recording from the built-in tuners or playing back multimedia from USB devices; and both integrated Wi-Fi and LAN network options.

These network options can be used for streaming multimedia from networked DLNA devices, or for accessing the online services that form part of LG's webOS smart TV system.

These services include most of the UK's favourite streaming services, such as Netflix, Amazon Instant, the BBC iPlayer, and Now TV (a service still not found elsewhere in the Smart TV world).

The only major absentees are the ITV Player and 4OD.

The most significant point about webOS, though, is its interface. This revolutionised the smart TV world when it launched last year thanks to its ground-breaking icon-driven design, laser-like focus on putting your favourite content at your finger tips, and treatment of all sources as apps.

Oddly the 65EC970V only currently carries 2014's version of webOS rather than the 2015 v2.0 version other 2015 LG TVs carry. But even an old webOS is still excellent, and in any case LG assures us that it will be updating the 65EC970V to webOS 2.0 via a firmware update in the coming weeks or months.

Looking for picture quality features beyond its key OLED/4K combination, the 65EC970V features what looks on paper like some fairly potent motion processing, built-in 3D (with a generous six pairs of glasses provided) using LG's passive system, and a solid array of picture calibration features.

The only eye-catching absentee from the 65EC970V's feature list is high dynamic range playback (which you do get with Samsung's similarly priced though LCD UE65JS9500s).

LG recently announced that it will be updating some of its new OLED TVs to accept HDR via streamed sources like Netflix and Amazon - but unfortunately the 65EC970V doesn't look as if it's going to be receiving this update.

Picture Quality

For the most part the 65EC970V delivers emphatically on its OLED-based picture quality promise.

Its contrast performance in particular is just incredible.

The deepest, richest black colours I've simply ever seen on a television work wonders on anything you watch - but especially films, with their relatively extreme contrast ranges. The blackness makes pictures look more natural and more colour-rich, and OLED's ability to combine almost complete blackness in one pixel with bright whites and colours in neighbouring pixels means that pictures look gorgeously and expressively dynamic.

The 65EC970V's OLED screen is particularly effective at showing small areas of light against predominantly dark backdrops. For instance, if a clip features lights showing in the windows of a building at night there is simply no other TV technology that can deliver such vibrancy and colour richness for the light parts while simultaneously providing such unprecedentedly deep black parts.

With all LCD screens both the light and dark elements of such images are compromised, with the light parts looking a little flat and lifeless, and the dark parts looking a little greyed over.

The degree of these compromises naturally varies from LCD screen to LCD screen, but to reiterate this point, no LCD screen can even get close to the localised contrast performance the 65EC970V can deliver.

Which is exactly why home cinema fans love OLED so much.

Natural beauty

We nearly always find that a TV's colour performance is directly related to its ability to produce a good black colour. So it's no great shock to find the 65EC970V delivering for the most part a lovely colour performance that combines rich, vibrant tones with a reasonably wide colour range and tones which are generally winningly natural.

There's never a feeling of cartoonishness about the 65EC970V's video pictures, despite their vibrancy.

Native UHD content lives up to our hopes too. The image structure issues noted with the 55EC930V completely disappear, leaving you looking at gloriously polished, detailed pictures that look pretty much like real life for the majority of the time, in just the sort of way good UHD pictures should.

There's no longer so much as a hint of the individual pixels being used to create pictures.

It helps the sense of clarity delivered with UHD sources that the 65EC970V is a reasonable handler of motion, suffering less with the motion blur problems than LCD TVs tend to.

It's a pity that LG's motion processing isn't particularly great, causing obvious unwanted side effects if you use it. But the main point is that you don't really need to use it.

The combination of all the 65EC970V's strengths - especially the contrast - delivers pictures that look at times genuinely better than anything I've ever seen before. But that is not the same thing as saying they're perfect.

There are problems to report too.

Carefully does it...

First, and most surprising, it's possible to mess up the 65EC970V's black level performance. Leave the TV's brightness too low - as LG's own picture presets do, actually - and noticeable amounts of shadow detail can disappear into the blackness.

Shift the brightness too high, though, and bizarrely dark areas start to be infused first with a yellowish hue and then, if you keep pushing them, a grey wash all too reminiscent of the look of a low-quality LCD TV.

At the yellowish stage, moreover, you can see what appear to be different levels of brightness across the screen, with the edges looking darker than the central areas.

None of these issues make sense given our understanding of OLED's self-emissive nature, but that doesn't change the fact that they're there.

The good news is that it's just possible to achieve a balance between the TV's brightness, contrast and 'OLED brightness' settings that really does combine gorgeous LCD-battering black levels with plenty of shadow detail and no obvious luminance inconsistencies.

You may have to tweak the settings from time to time to suit different types of source material, but for the most part I'd recommend using a brightness value of between 50 and 55, a contrast setting of around 88-90, and an OLED brightness setting of around 90.

It should be stressed, actually, that a well-balanced 65EC970V delivers a fairly amazing amount of shadow detail during dark scenes. Certainly if you find yourself watching any scenes in space you'll see many, many more stars in the sky than you'll ever have seen on any LCD TV.

Turning to the 65EC970V's colours, while for much of the time they're excellent I did sometimes see unwanted pink or green tints sneak into parts of (usually quite dark) pictures.

There's also a tendency for certain dark but heavily textured picture areas to take on a bluish tinge, and it struck me too that the 65EC970V doesn't deliver subtle colour blends and shifts as effectively as the best of its rivals. This can cause some gentle colour striping at times, and occasionally gives skin tones a rather patchy look.

It's also a simple fact that the 65EC970V's colours don't rival the intensity of those experienced with native HDR content viewed on Samsung's JS9500 LCD TVs.

And, having mentioned those sets, it's also important to point out that they're capable of producing much brighter pictures than this OLED too.

A bigger concern given the current paucity of native UHD 4K content is that the 65EC970V's upscaling of HD isn't as good as that of some rivals. Noise is kept reasonably well suppressed, but there's a softer, less detailed look to upscaled HD than you see with the best UHD TVs from Samsung, Sony and Panasonic.

It's perhaps not surprising from this that the 65EC970V isn't especially easy on the eye with standard definition either - though the LG set is hardly alone in this regard.

Curvaceous

As promised earlier, we should add a couple of points about the 65EC970V's curved screen from a picture quality perspective.

If you sit so close to the screen that it pretty much fills your field of view you may feel slightly more immersed in the action thanks to the way the image wraps around into your peripheral vision. But the curve can distort reflections if you've got a bright light source opposite the screen, as well as damaging image geometry if you have to watch from much an angle down the TV's side.

However, since we really ought to finish on the sort of positive note the 65EC970V's pictures so richly deserve overall, while the curve may limit viewing angles, pictures suffer none of the drop off in colour and contrast you see with LCD TVs if you have to watch them from an angle.

The 65EC970V is also a mesmerisingly good 3D performer.

We know most of you have apparently given up on 3D these days, but if you give the 65EC970V a chance it will surely reawaken your interest thanks to its gorgeously crisp, clean, colourful, bright, crosstalk-free, flicker-free and natural 3D images.

If only 3D on a TV had been this good from the start it's hard to imagine the format would have suffered such a sorry decline in interest.

Usability, Sound and Value

Usability

Thanks to the superb user-friendliness of its webOS interface, finding content to watch in today's complicated times is exceptionally easy on the 65EC970V. Even Samsung's new Tizen operating system can't quite match the simplicity and approachability of webOS.

The only bumnotes are that webOS runs slightly sluggishly on the 65EC970V (it will be interesting to see if this issue is fixed when the webOS 2.0 upgrade comes along) and that the remote's point and click system feels fiddly using the default sensitivity settings.

It's also a pity that the TV's picture and sound set-up menus aren't presented in the same friendly way that the webOS content menus are - though I guess most people won't have to spend too long delving around in these menus once their 65EC970V is all set up.

Sound Quality

While the 65EC970V is no rival for the very best-sounding TVs around, such as Sony's X9005B series and even some of LG's own LCD models, its Harman Kardon four-channel audio system produces a much more listenable sound performance than we'd expected.

Voices sound believable and well rounded, there's a striking amount of treble information which helps movie mixes sound detailed and involving, and while bass isn't deep at least it's smooth and free of distortion.

Value

There's no disguising the fact that precious few people will be able to find £6,000 to spend on a television. So for the vast majority of people, even though LG has made 4K OLED a reality the 65EC970V still lies in the realms of fantasy.

That said, the 65EC970V does deliver pictures which are, in some ways - especially for people previously enamoured of plasma TVs - unprecedentedly good. And you can hardly expect such prowess to come cheap.

Also, given how many manufacturing innovations LG has had to come up with just to deliver a viable 4K OLED TV, the £6,000 price isn't actually as high as we'd feared.

The 65EC970V's price also, though, puts it up against Samsung's JS9500 TVs with their high dynamic range support, 'Nano Crystal' wide colour gamut technology and new high-brightness panel designs.

Verdict

For many home cinema fans the 65EC970V is a dream come true.

There are many, many occasions where its combination of a native 4K UHD resolution and OLED screen technology delivers pictures more beautiful and natural than any I've ever seen before on any television.

Its webOS operating system, moreover, ensures that the 65EC970V is still easy to use despite its cutting edge nature, and its design is gorgeous.

It needs native UHD content to really shine, though, and if you're thinking ahead you might be concerned about its lack of HDR support.

We liked

Thanks to its incredible contrast performance, native 4K UHD resolution and rich, natural colours, the 65EC970V delivers at times the best pictures we've ever seen.

Its design is stunning too, webOS delivers a great interface, and even the sound quality from the built in speakers is respectable, despite the crazily slim design.

We disliked

You have to be surprisingly precise with brightness and contrast settings to maximise this stunning TV's OLED black level potential.

Colours can be a little patchy at times too, and there's no support for the rich colours and high brightness of upcoming HDR content.

Verdict

If you're lucky enough to have six grand to spare you're faced with a stark TV choice between the LG 65EC970V and the Samsung UE65JS9500.

And it's a very tough choice, based around the unbeatable contrast and stunning design of the LG and the unprecedented brightness and colour intensity (as well as HDR support) of the Samsung.

Whichever way your money ultimately goes, though, the bottom line is that the 65EC970V is another ground-breaking moment for TV picture quality, and its overall score should reflect this.

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