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LG's Ultra HD OLED Curved 65" Beast - My Experience

2015-10-25
today's topic is how big one1 so big that it actually doesn't fit on the set with me yes friends LG sent me both a 65 inch 65 VG 9600 UHD curved OLED TV and an Onkyo receiver to go with it to hook up and give my thoughts on the movie and gaming experience so this isn't a review per se since I don't have much to compare it against but rather my impressions on the experience of moving from a 1080p flat LED backlit LCD to a bigger curvier sexier OLED bottle so here we go the mastercase 5 by Coolermaster gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower pc case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories check out the link in the video description to learn more so let's kick things off with some specs and physical observations about the 65 eg 9600 the first thing you'll notice pulling it out of the box is that the screen is curved this was the big thing at CES this year but even as someone who has been using a curved display as my daily driver on my work PC for the better part of a year now I'm just not sold on it in the living room I need to be clear it's not bad in fact an unexpected side effect was that I get less noticeable glare off of the display than I did with my old flat one so right on there but I'm just not convinced that until we're putting 120 inch TVs in our living rooms that the curve affects immersiveness in any meaningful way and I basically forgot about it 30 seconds into whatever content I was enjoying the next thing you'll notice about this TV is that it is wafer thin both in terms of the thickness of the panel a fairly meaningless ego measuring contest that all the TV makers and no one else seem to care about since your attempt to mount the thing flush against the wall will be limited by the thicker lower half that contains all the power delivery processing and inputs anyway and in terms of the bezel size which is a completely different story and combined with the clear acrylic stand that didn't really impress me on the 34 um 95 monitor but makes a ton of sense here makes this TV feel more like a floating piece of technology science fiction than just another TV but no one Tunes in to Linus tech tips for my style tips so let's move on to the next thing you'll notice when you turn it on the screen this OLED panel is absolutely mind-blowing I mean I'm a pretty tech savvy guy I was already aware of the fact that ol LEDs do not emit light at all when they receive a black signal but seeing it in person in your living room white text or bright objects on darker black backgrounds look so crisp thanks to the 4k panel and sex tastic infinite contrast between the purest white and deepest black making it an absolute sight to behold rounding out our tour of the TV it features one each of RF component and composite legacy inputs a digital audio pass-through three USB ports a LAN port for if your Wi-Fi sucks and four HDMI 2.0 ports with hdcp 2.2 compliance making this one of the first Ultra HD TVs that's suitable for both movie enthusiasts who want support for 4k blu-ray discs when those start showing up and gamers who want their PC to be able to output at 3840 by 2160 60 Hertz for a less according to some people who unfortunately don't seem to know any better cinematic but objectively way better gaming experience thanks to the higher refresh rate which leads us pretty well to the gaming experience at 60 milliseconds of display leg even in game mode you're behind by about four frames at 60 Hertz as a best-case scenario this number would be considered quite poor for a competitive gaming monitor but I should probably put it in the appropriate context playing games like Super Meat Boy while slightly trickier timing wise than on a 144 Hertz gaming monitor wasn't just possible but actually still fun and for games that are less reliant on pixel perfect timing like arcade racers or 3d person action games the vast majority of people won't even notice and the crisp moving images like seriously motion blur not a thing helped it feel more responsive to me then it ended up actually being when I objectively measured it with my Leo Bodnar lag tester so overall I had a blast playing games on this-tv with the highlight being the battlefront beta with my nerdy tech couch master with pretty much the only thing that could make this scene better being some Doritos and some Mountain Dew let's move on to movies now though the first movie I watched on this TV actually after I watched my Fawlty Towers remastered collection which obviously being standard-definition don't like that great the first H the movie I watched on this TV blew my mind just for the sake of thoroughness I ordered a 3d blu-ray of How to Train Your Dragon even though I'm not that into 3d to watch with my son for the first 15 to 20 minutes I had that pressure sensation that I get in the front of my brain even in the theater then actually after that it was gone the passive alternating horizontal line stereo 3d approach that LG has taken with this TV works like a charm image clarity is only noticeably reduced on small background objects and I got none of the headaches that I typically experienced due to slow pixel response times on LCDs with active shutter glasses and even my wife reported having a positive 3d experience for the first time ever thanks to the lightweight polarized glasses and clip-ons and outstanding stereo separation it's a fantastic 3d movie watching experience which I guess leads us back to gaming again where things were not quite as rosy I grabbed the trial of in videos 3d TV play soft ware package that allows you to use your TV's glasses and game in 3d and once again stereo separation frakking awesome but because interleaved passive 3d requires the signal to use frame packing you're limited to AV resolutions and refresh rates so while trying to was a sight to behold in glorious 3d having to choose between 4k in 2d at 60 Hertz 1080p in 3d at 24 Hertz or 720p in 3d at 60 Hertz I opted for 4k not necessarily because it makes a huge difference in sharpness from couch distance compared to 1080p but because compared to 720p since I'm not going to play it 24 Hertz it is much much better so I'll go for gold bear which brings us back to movie watching I guess so let's talk about the benefits of 4k many of the evaluations of 4k TVs center around the 4k content that's available to us right now so unless you bought that asinine Sony 4k player we're simply talking about stream content from the likes of Netflix or YouTube and I've seen reviewers compare the jump from 1080p to 4k to lifting a blurry veil off the screen the issue here is that they're comparing web 1080p to web 4k and as we explained in our does 4k matter on the web video which you can check out here the reason that 4k YouTube videos look better than 1080p is nothing to do with the higher resolution and everything to do with the higher bitrate or data rate that YouTube is allowing for content that identifies as 4k so for the sake of thoroughness I decided to confirm that our YouTube findings were also applicable to Netflix by purchasing house of cards season 1 on blu-ray and running that on my PC then streaming it in 4k on my Nvidia shield console and switching between them impressively the Netflix stream was difficult to distinguish from the blu-ray experience in brightly lit scenes and pretty much impossible from a normal viewing distance but getting close and peeping at the pixels you can tell that the blu-ray copy is just playing better in spite of being 1080p which doesn't mean i'm pooh-poohing 4k content in general it just means that the little 4k icon in the bottom of the screen is not ample justification for a 4k TV purchase and for me if that's what it's about for you native 4k content then you might as well wait until 4k blu-ray arrives which I guess brings us nicely into our conclusion I'm not saying that a 4k TV particularly an OLED is a terrible investment at this point early 4k TV buyers sorry y'all got hosed you paid a fortune you're stuck with 30 Hertz maximum refresh rates and you're rocking a panel that by the time any content arrives to actually legitimately make use of the extra pixels will have been absolutely crushed by even a 1080p OLED panel that delivers a more vibrant picture with stunning contrast which in my mind is more important Finch shear resolution but based on my experience with this model folks shopping for a premium 4k TV in late 2015 don't really have to worry about any game-changing technology shifts before they can properly take advantage of it I mean 4k blu-ray is almost here the 3d experience is refined to the point where I would call it excellent we've gotten to the point where the size of your TV is limited more by your living room than by what you can afford the choice of curved versus non curved is totally up to you with plenty of options out there panels are thinner than will ever matter and while I wasn't that impressed with out of the box color accuracy on this particular TV after a little bit of color calibration something you should probably be factoring into a $5,000 purchase the 65 eg 9600 delivered a movie watching and gaming experience that I feel like I could enjoy for a very very very long time speaking of things that I could use for a very long time I fix-it toolkits man they've got a lot of great tools and if you spend 50 bucks or more and use offer code LTT over on ifixit.com slash Linus which we'll have linked in the video description you can save 10 bucks what can you save 10 bucks on well all kinds of things everything from just their pro Tech tool kit to their their repair business tool kit which has like freaking everything in it it's this like shoulder bag that you basically just kind of grab with you and it's got anti-static straps it's got their magnetic mat that keeps all the screws in place and you can label them while you're working on a project it's got their it's got both of their screwdriver 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