Just as importantly, bright highlights of mostly dark images retain a consistent level of intensity. But it’s still overall a winning remote control design. The screen attaches to one of the centrally mounted metallic sheet stands we’ve seen for a few C-series generations now. In particular, try to avoid spending too long at any one time watching content with bright logos or static bright image elements. The OLED65CX boasts two new picture modes: The Filmmaker Mode has arrived through a collaboration between the UHD Alliance and movie creatives, and is designed to recreate on the TV the sort of settings creators use when mastering content.

The color and contrast performance are both founded on a spectacular black level performance that’s free of the greyness and localized clouding problems you get with pretty much all LCD TVs. The blocking has been reduced, too, without the loss of shadow detail that was created by LG’s early attempts to fix this widely publicized blocking phenomenon. 4K/HDR Performance TL;DR: A roster of small but ultimately telling improvements make the OLED65CX a brilliantly immersive screen.

OLED TVs have always being particularly well suited to standard dynamic range (SDR) technology. Broadly speaking, this means turning many of the TV’s picture processing tools off, resulting in pictures which some may find a little juddery, and too dull to watch in a bright room. Colors are rich and vibrant, but also nuanced and balanced.

The only issue at the moment for UK users is the (hopefully temporary) lack of many of the UK’s terrestrial broadcaster catch-up apps. The mode works well if the TV is in a fairly regular living room environment, where the TV is likely to get watched in a wide variety of lighting situations. As usual, this is mostly a very good thing. The improved upscaling is particularly effective in the most detailed areas of HD pictures, which look noticeably cleaner and more densely textured than they did last year. First, black levels get even deeper, and retain that depth and neutrality more consistently.

But this is a small negative against all the good stuff. This is faint though, and doesn’t occur very often at all. You can also customise how often the TV gives you onscreen prompts to help you discover new features and, perhaps most usefully, the Recommendations system for helping you find new things to watch has been improved and made more readily accessible. The LG CX OLED comes in a mix of sizes, from a new-for-2020 48-inch size to a massive 77-inch screen. Significant changes to the Alpha a9 Gen 3 Processor have cleared up any issues leftover from the LG C9 OLED, too – as well as improving the way that faces are displayed by the chip’s processing.

In terms of supported apps, you’ll find relative new additions to the streaming landscape such as Disney+ and Apple TV+, as well as all the usual suspects like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime in the US. For starters, the OLED65CX’s black level performance improves on 2019’s LG C9 OLEDs in two ways. Support for all these is built in, too, which means there’s no need for an external listening device. The point and click approach can be a bit imprecise, and the stiffness of the scrolling wheel can cause you to accidentally press it (for select) rather than just spinning it.

The economical, no-nonsense home screen, with its row of icons connected to different content sources, is instantly accessible and easy to use and customize. Second, the CX combines its improved black levels with more shadow details and dark color shading subtlety than last year’s B9s (which actually delivered deeper blacks than the more expensive C9s). So basically the CX’s handling of black level and dark scenes combines the best bits of both the B9 and C9. The Home Hub screen that provides info on and control over other smart devices on your network benefits from an improved layout, and you can now customize the icons that appear when you press the Settings button. However, under the hood, LG has done a great job at focusing on the flaws that we saw in the previous model.

So it’s no surprise to see the OLED65CX looking stunning with every SDR Blu-ray or broadcast we threw at it. HD/SDR Performance TL;DR: The peerless per-pixel light control of OLED technology joins with improved LG picture processing to make the OLED65CX’s SDR/HD pictures a joy to behold. Note that LG doesn’t actually label a picture preset ‘Dolby Vision IQ’. In its Game mode it only suffers with a puny 13ms of input lag.

This is nicely finished and well built, but perhaps looks a touch chunky compared with the incredible slimness elsewhere. Highlighting one of the main content apps usually brings up a second tier of icons containing direct access to shows or films from the app you’ve highlighted. Great though the OLED65CX is with HD SDR images, it’s the improvements it brings with 4K and HDR images that really count in the premium TV world.

So unlike with LCD TVs, contrast-rich scenes don’t suffer with such distracting inconsistencies as sudden fluctuations in overall brightness, heavy dimming of small stand-out bright image elements, or obvious bands or haloes of light around stand-out bright objects. This is essentially a Dolby Vision mode that combines the extra HDR picture information and screen optimisation elements of Dolby Vision HDR with an assessment of room conditions provided by a built-in light sensor. Very complex motion, such as small objects moving within a panning image, can still cause a few glitches. And if that isn’t the definition of a great TV, I don’t know what is. The bass crackle is certainly distracting when it happens, though.

The idea being to adjust multiple aspects of the picture in real time to make sure the resulting image achieves a consistent look no matter how much your viewing conditions change. For while it doesn’t actually measure any brighter than last year’s models using an HDR test signal (just over 800 nits in Vivid mode, or 784 and 760 nits in the more natural Standard and Cinema modes), side by side comparisons reveal that bright peaks in HDR pictures look punchier on the OLED65CX than they did on the OLED65C9. And if we’re lucky, the PS5, Xbox Series X, and next-gen PCs will be able to make use of the OLED65CX’s 4K/120Hz/4:4:4/HDR support. There’s still a little room for further improvement with its handling of near-black imagery too, and its screen can be quite reflective of bright objects in your room. One of the HDMIs can also support ARC/eARC (audio return channel), so that the TV can output Dolby Atmos from streaming services or 4K Blu-rays to compatible soundbars or AV receivers.

The OLED65CX also suffers less with noise in dark areas and much less with exaggerated compression blocking artefacts when viewing dark scenes on some streamed shows than previous LG OLEDs have. There are four, all capable of handling 4K at up to 120Hz in 10-bit HDR with 4:4:4 chroma sampling. With the new LG CX OLED, though, LG has truly outdone itself, as a host of small but important improvements add up to a TV experience movie fans will struggle to tear their eyes from.

The only issue we had with the OLED65CX’s audio is that really heavy duty bass in a movie soundtrack can cause the speakers to start crackling and dropping out. Of course, as with any OLED TV you’re expected to take some care with what you watch on it to reduce the possibility of permanent image retention. The OLED65CX improves LG’s color performance, too. The detail doesn’t take a heavy hit when there’s motion to handle either. Like the rest of LG’s OLED TV lineup, the LG OLED65CX inevitably deploys LG’s WebOS interface for its smarts.

The 48-inch model now retails at $1,299 / £1,099, with the largest 77-inch size now retailing for $2,999 / £2,999. It’s not a night and day difference, but it’s enough to make HDR pictures look more intense, expressive and realistic. In most ways the new CX Series sounds superb – especially when it comes to the volume levels and the scale of the soundstage it somehow manages to cast out from its incredibly skinny body: there’s genuine width and even some verticality to the sound the set produces, especially if you ditch the default Dolby Atmos sound setting and use LG’s excellent AI Sound Pro option instead.

Talking of local contrast, the way the OLED65CX really can put the brightest pixels of an HDR image right next to the darkest ones without any sort of compromise. There’s an unexpected hitch for UK buyers, though: LG and Freeview Play haven’t done their usual deal for the Korean brand’s 2020 TVs, meaning there’s currently no sign of key UK terrestrial broadcast catch-up apps such as the BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, All 4 and My5. There’s also not much difference at all, in truth, between Filmmaker Mode and LG’s Cinema Home preset.

In short, the OLED65CX’s deft touch and per-pixel light reproduction ekes out every drop of quality from SDR content. It doesn’t reinvent the OLED wheel, but the small improvements Toyota camry 1995 in nigeria it makes in a number of areas add up to a pretty profound impact on how much you get lost in whatever it is you’re watching. LG OLED TVs have always been good – great, even.

There’s support for both automatic low latency mode switching and variable refresh rates too. The LG CX OLED TV might not look like a huge step forward in comparison to the LG C9. For instance, it doesn’t support the HDR10+ HDR system designed as a rival for Dolby Vision.

There’s also a spinning wheel in the remote’s center that lets you quickly cycle through vertical menu lists. LG says it’s working to be add these services in separate deals – but there’s no suggestion yet of when they’ll turn up. Fortunately there isn’t much content around that’s extreme enough to cause this problem, so the strengths of the sound system typically rein supreme. I guess the sheer volume of content apps available these days could make WebOS’s long scrolling bar of apps a bit unwieldy for some content-hungry households.