LG dazzles with its finest OLED TV yet
OLED TELEVISION
£2499
If you want LG’s best 4K OLED TV in 2022, this should be it. The big story with the G2 is its addition of a new heat-sink layer to one of LG’s high-brightness Evo OLED panels. Being able to dissipate more heat means the TV can be run as much as 15 per cent more brightly than last year’s G1 (and this year’s C2, which, despite now sporting the same Evo panel, doesn’t get the heat sink) without increasing its susceptibility to screen burn. An increase of that magnitude would see the OLED65G2 pushing against the 1000 nits figure often considered a key value when it comes to delivering high dynamic range (HDR) with conviction.
Among the improvements promised with the G2’s Alpha 9 Generation 5 processor are better upscaling of HD and SD content to 4K, thanks to improvements in LG’s AI-based image analysis and a new upscaling ‘flow’ that actually removes a processing step to produce cleaner results.
The Dynamic Tone Mapping system LG uses to map the light range of HDR sources to the screen’s capabilities has been improved, too. Now it can figure out both the genre of content you are watching and whether a particular scene is taking place at night or in daylight, giving the TV more image ‘shorthand’ it can use when trying to optimise its presentation of an HDR image in real time.
Likely even more useful is the ability of the new processing system to divide the picture into more than 5000 blocks for analysis, compared with fewer than 600 in 2021. This should help the TV apply much more localised image tweaks than its predecessor, which should result in more refined-looking images. Connected to this much finer level of image control is improved AI Object/Background recognition. This figures out which parts of the image are background elements, and the relative hierarchy of all the separate objects within an image, before carefully adjusting everything to add subtle emphasis to an image’s most important aspects. The idea is for images to look more in keeping with the way our eyes interpret the real world.
Immense processing power
A key element of the Alpha 9 engine (which also powers the C2) is always to optimise pictures for each particular screen it is working with. So with the OLED65G2 the processor should be doing its best to take maximum advantage of the panel’s extra brightness potential.
The G2 can now upmix limited-channel sources to 7.1.2 channels, compared with the 5.1.2 channels possible with 2021’s models. This new upmixing cap
