Is the LG 55EG960V perfect? No of course not, no consumer product will ever be perfect, that's just an unrealistic expectation. We still use a Pioneer Kuro as our main TV, which was considered the reference point for years, but even that had issues. The simple fact is that no mass produced product at anything approaching a realistic price point is going to free of issues. The important thing is that where there are issues, the manufacturer in question addresses them either with a fix or a replacement. In the owners thread for the EG960V there have been reports of problems with banding, screen uniformity and dead pixels but we can only comment on the sample that we're reviewing and we haven't experienced any of these issues ourselves. It's also worth remembering that despite any issues that you might experience with an OLED display, what's the alternative?You can buy a backlit LCD but we know what we would prefer.
All that being said, does the EG960 have the best picture we've seen from a consumer display? In a word - yes. Oh, you want more than one word, very well here goes. Whilst there's no doubt that advances have been made in squeezing every last drop of performance from LCD, the reality is that OLED is the future of TV. The quality of the image produced by the EG960V was quite simply stunning, with fantastic screen uniformity and the deepest blacks we've ever seen. This creates a bedrock on which the rest of the image is based and when combined with a seriously bright picture, the dynamic range is jaw-dropping. The out-of-the-box performance was excellent and, when calibrated, the EG960 was capable of a reference level of accuracy; giving images a natural appearance. The 4K panel delivered an exceptional level of detail and, thanks to some superb video processing, even lower resolution content looked great.
In terms of other benefits, the OLED panel provides an extremely wide viewing angle with no loss of quality and the motion handling, whilst not as good as plasma, is superior to LCD. The design is attractive, the build quality excellent and the audio performance surprisingly good. LG's webOS smart platform remains the most intuitive on the market and the Magic remote is the perfect compliment. So what isn't so good? Well the colour performance could have been better at lower saturation levels and the colour space doesn't hit DCI but the EG960V does use a 10-bit panel. There's currently no support for HDR, although frankly we would struggle to see how that could improve what is already a stunning picture. The input lag might be a bit high for serious gamers and if we were nit-picking, the HDMI inputs are too close to the edge. Ultimately the LG 55EG960V delivers the best looking image we have ever seen from a consumer display and, as such, we consider it the new reference point for an Ultra HD 4K TV.