The Future Of TV In All Its Glory
LG ‘won’ the 2014 Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas with its debut 4K UHD OLED TVs. And reacquainting ourselves with these extraordinary new models at the IFA technology show in Berlin has done absolutely nothing to dampen our ardour for them. In fact, with the 65-inch 65EC970V now scheduled to go on sale before this month is out, our anticipation of its arrival has reached fever pitch.
We can now confirm a few specifications of the 65EC970V beyond the key and obvious facts that it’s a 65-inch OLED TV with a built-in 3840x2180 4K/UHD resolution and a curved screen design.
For starters the set now has a price – a surprisingly approachable price at that – of £5,999. It’s also going to feature LG’s exceptional webOS smart TV interface; passive 3D (now dubbed 3D due to the way using a 4K screen with passive technology delivers a much higher resolution image than you get with passive 3D on a mere full HD TV); and LG’s proprietary True 4K Engine Pro picture processing engine to handle upscaling of the non-native 4K sources you’ll initially spend the vast majority of your time watching while native 4K sources remain painfully thin on the ground.
We’re not hearing of LG putting together any sort of external 4K movie server box of the sort recently announced by both Sony and Samsung to go with its new 4K OLED heroes, though Netflix 4K support is definitely going to be available.
Ogling the latest 65EC970V models on show on LG’s IFA stand is a truly jaw-dropping experience. This may be down in part to the fact that LG slightly disappointingly elected to show off its 65EC970V with some very stylised, specially shot ultra-high-contrast, ultra-richly-coloured footage rather than just running a normal video 4K source. But then you could equally argue that if you’ve got it, you might as well flaunt it!
Plus it was only by using specially created content that LG was able to pull of the fancy trick in the 65EC970V demo of using three screens together to deliver a single, ‘stitched together’ image.
So mouthwatering are the 65EC970V’s pictures that it’s difficult to try and break down into constituent parts just where their main strengths lie. That said, given our love of contrast and black level response we were especially struck by the incredibly deep, natural and stable black levels the direct-emission OLED pixels deliver as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. There’s not a hint of greyness to be seen despite the backdrops of most of the demo footage being complete black.
This unprecedented black level prowess has a gorgeous knock on effect with colours too, as they’re reproduced with an intensity and vibrancy so spectacular it makes your eyes want to grin with pleasure.
It’s a testament to the contrast and colour prowess of OLED tech that it’s only after swooning at these aspects of the 65EC970V’s performance that we fully started to appreciate the spectacular charms of its UHD resolution. In fact the 65EC970V is pretty much uniquely qualified to show off the full detail and sharpness possible with UHD resolution, thanks to the way OLED’s ultrafast response time pretty much eradicates the sort of motion blur you can get with normal LCD technology.
It was great to see the 65EC970V sets on show at IFA looking far more ‘finished’ than previous incarnations, with no trace of previous visible glitches like image retention, flickering lines and visible picture ‘seams’. In fact, its pictures looked flawless in a way only OLED can.
The only cause of any sort of concern was the amount of reflection on the 65EC970V’s screen. This was quite aggressive (admittedly LG’s bright stand lighting won’t have been helping) compared with some of the other TVs we’ve looked at this IFA, and of course, the curved screen design doesn’t help here as it tends to stretch and distort reflected objects across more of the screen area than a flat screen would.
First Impressions
All the same, the 65EC970Vs did enough to convince us again that a genuine picture quality revolution is now just days away from going on sale.
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