TechRadar Verdict
One of the most affordable big-screen OLED TVs around, with all the deep blacks, vibrant colours and contrast levels you'd expect. HDR support and the excellent webOS software are the icing on the OLED cake – but that curvy screen may not be to everyone's taste.
Pros
- +
Great OLED screen
- +
Excellent webOS 2.0 software
- +
Smart, svelte chassis
Cons
- -
Can't cope with higher brightness
- -
UI can get slightly sluggish
- -
Still well over £2,000
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The LG 55EG920V is one of the Korean display giant's best-value OLED TVs – and when we're talking about a telly which still costs some £2,200 that should give you an idea of where the advanced screen technology sits in the grand scheme of things. We're still in premium-land right now.
However, compared to the new £8,000 Panasonic TX-65CZ952 and the competing £4,000 LG 65EF950V sleek 55-inch OLED TV, it's a positive steal.
At the risk of lapsing into cliché, OLED is genuinely one of those technologies you have to see in the flesh to really get.
Describing it in terms of absolute blacks, great colours and incredible contrast performance is all well and good, but that doesn't get across just how big a difference there is between OLED and standard display technologies.
Even checking out OLED TVs at different events and demos isn't really enough. Showreel demo footage is keyed in to look as awesome as possible on the specific screens it's tuned to, and you have to take such things with a grain, or several thousand grains, of salt.
Seeing is believing
But getting this EG920V review sample home, and out of the box and into the realm I'm used to watching TV in really made it stand out. Even the sort of low-rent broadcast signal we watch on a daily basis can look many times more stunning thanks to the extra fidelity and depth of an OLED display.
In short, I'm now utterly sold on the tech, and disappointed that it's no longer sitting in my lounge with each of its eight million or so pixels shooting light into my eyeballs.
That's the biggest thing about OLED itself – the fact that it needs no LED backlighting because of its self-emissive pixels. As well as being able to deliver almost unprecedented contrast by having the brightest and darkest pixels cheek-by-jowl, it means you can have beautifully slim panels – a fact that this curved 55-incher takes full advantage of.
In fact it makes the EG920V feel insanely delicate when you're trying to extricate it from the packaging. I was terrified the thing was going to snap in two, but it's well engineered enough that I shouldn't have worried.
Hell, I dropped the thing down the stairs and it was mostly fine. Mostly. Jokes, LG. Jokes…
In addition to the curves and the OLED tech this is an Ultra HD display too, offering four times the resolution of your standard 1080p Full HD TVs. And because of that OLED panel, and LG's efforts to help broadcasters and content distributors create the various high dynamic range (HDR) standards, the EG920V is all ready and waiting for the wonderful world of HDR to land in our homes.
Turning to the less exciting but ultimately important subject of connections, we're talking three HDMI 2.0 ports (with the all-important HDCP 2.2 protocols in place), one USB 3.0 and a pair of USB 2.0 sockets, as well as the usual array of ethernet, RF, component, composite and audio ports in the rear.
