Testing the OLED Evo G3: LG reclaims pole position

Luca Fontana

5.7.2023

Translation: Jessica Johnson-Ferguson

LG dominated the OLED TV market for a long time. Then Samsung came up trumps with QD OLED. However, this temporary power shift might already be over. LG’s OLED Evo G3 is just terrific.

2022 must’ve been quite mortifying for LG. Of all competitors, LG’s OLED division had to take a beating from Samsung. A company that didn’t take the slightest interest in OLED displays in TVs for decades. The irony! So, it’s no wonder this year should see a huge comeback. LG’s entering the ring with two new improvements:

1. A new microlens layer (MLA) in the OLED panel.
2. An improved algorithm for even more peak brightness.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Full disclosure: the TV, a 65-inch version of the G3, was provided to me by LG for testing.

Design: still flat and rectangular

The «G» in G3 stands for «Gallery». Why? Because it’s made to go on your wall, like a picture in a gallery. This is reflected in the TV’s shape. Its thickness is the same throughout. We’re talking 2.4 centimetres. This is supposed to create the illusion of a mural that costs 3,600 francs (at the time of writing). A small fortune probably only a handful of TV enthusiasts are willing to pay.

Apart from that, LG has stayed true to its Gallery design and has created a state-of-the-art, slim TV with narrow edges and no unnecessary frills. Not to mention the elegant aluminium frame at the front. It looks classy. At the back, there’s a handy plastic cover that hides all ports and helps you keep your cables tidy. Overall, a solid design as usual.

Now for the specs. LG’s G3 features the following:

And a word about weight. Without the foot stand, the TV weighs in at 23.9 kilos. So if you want to mount your TV to the wall, you’ll need a VESA 300×300 mm mount. The mount’s already included in the scope of delivery of the G series. If you wanted a foot stand, you’d have to buy that separately. With the foot stand, the TV weighs 28.1 kilos.

Measurements: LG’s G3 outperforms Samsung’s QD OLED panels from last year

The following is a deep dive into the subject matter. If you’re not into charts and diagrams, just skip it all and scroll straight to the chapter «The picture: OLED-worthy reference material with the usual strong processor». From that point onwards, you can expect a lot of my subjective impressions and quite a bit of video material.

The best values for all types of content were achieved in HDR Cinema Home mode – except for gaming, in which case you should always select Game Mode. The measurements listed below therefore always refer to HDR Cinema Home mode.

Maximum brightness

But LG isn’t mad. It’s genius. With a newly added layer in the panel – the Micro Lens Array (MLA) – convex microlenses ensure that the generated light is focused and amplified. LG even mentioned 5,000 lenses per pixel. Let's do the maths: with a UHD resolution of 8.3 million OLED pixels, we’re talking almost 42 billion microlenses on the display. Crazy. But the MLA is only available up to and including inch size 77.

Right, let’s take a look at the brightness of the G3. In the chart, I’m comparing it directly with Samsung’s S95B and Sony’s A95K, both of which source QD OLED panels from Samsung’s factories. Last year, they were the first OLED panels ever to crack the 1000-nit mark at maximum peak brightness. LG’s G2 panel came in behind it, albeit only by the skin of its teeth.

But LG’s G3 panel has higher ambitions. LG’s G3 wants to be the new top dog. No question. Spoiler alert: LG came, shone and conquered.

There are two axes: the vertical one stands for brightness, the horizontal one for the section in which the brightness is measured. At two per cent of the total screen area, i.e. in selected, very small image areas, LG’s G3 reaches a total value 1,413 nits in Cinema Mode. By OLED standards, that’s pretty much astronomical. Unbelievable!

I did measurements in TV’s vivid mode, which is the brightest, but most poorly calibrated one, and the measuring device even read 1,863 nits. Admittedly, that’s not quite the 2,100 nits promised at the CES. But I’m still impressed.

The brightness isn’t as astronomically high when you measure the full window size. There, it does come in above last year’s QD OLED panel with its 222 nits. But only by the skin of its teeth. By contrast, the G3 easily outshines the 178 nits of last year’s G2 Evo panel. I already noticed this the moment I turned on the TV for the first time. «Wow, that’s bright,» I muttered. LG has made a giant leap in terms of brightness.

The white balance

To measure the accuracy of the white balance, I need two tables:

1. Greyscale delta E (dE)
2. RGB balance

The greyscale dE shows how much the greyscale generated by the TV deviates from the reference value. The RGB balance indicates in which direction the greyscale levels produced by the TV deviate from the reference value. Why is this important? Let’s take a look at the concrete G3 example:

If you were to put the TV right next to a reference monitor, that would mean:

• Value is 5 or higher: most people will see the difference to the reference monitor.
• Value between 3 and 5: only experts and enthusiasts will be able to tell the difference.
• Value between 1 and 3: only experts will see the difference, enthusiasts won’t.
• Value below 1: even experts will not see any difference.

The colour gamut

Now for measuring the colour gamut; the coverage of the most common colour spaces. These are:

• Rec. 709: 16.7 million colours, standard colour space for SDR content like live TV and Blu-Rays
• DCI-P3 uv: 1.07 billion colours, standard colour space for HDR content, from HDR10 to Dolby Vision
• Rec. 2020 / BT.2020 uv: 69 billion colours, still barely used in the movie and series industry

The large blob of colour, including the darkened areas, shows the full range of colours detectable by the human eye. The lightened area on the left shows the BT.2020 colour space. On the right, you’re seeing the same, only the smaller DCI-P3 colour space. The white boxes show the actual boundaries of the respective colour spaces. The black circles, on the other hand, represent the limits actually identified during the measurement.

The measurement showed the following colour space coverage:

• Rec. 709: 100% (good = 100%)
• DCI-P3 uv: 98.67% (good = >90%)
• Rec. 2020 / BT.2020 uv: 74.12% (good = >90%)

The G3 achieves an excellent 98.67 per cent coverage in the important DCI-P3 colour space. This means it easily outperforms LCD competitors like TCL’s mini-LED and Samsung’s Neo-QLED TVs: TCL, for example, «only» achieved 86.11 per cent. To date, only the QD OLED TVs by Samsung and Sony have achieved 100% coverage in the DCI-P3 colour space.

The colour error

Now for the colour error. What it does is describe how accurately colours are represented. As with greyscale above, the deviation from the TV to the reference value is referred to as dE. The white boxes indicate the reference colours sent to the TV by the test pattern generator. The black circles, on the other hand, represent the colours actually measured. Again, dE values below 5 are good for non-calibrated TVs.

The measurements blow my mind. Not only does LG’s G3 deliver great colour fidelity in its Cinema Home mode. It’s almost reference worthy! In fact, with a total of 40 readings, I get an average dE of an outstanding 1.97. It’s the first time I’ve ever got a value below 2. The previous leaders were Sony and Samsung’s QD OLED panels. They reached an average dE of 2.64 and 2.46, respectively. Well done, LG!

Reflections

You can’t measure reflections on your screen as such. But some of you requested me to take a look at it in my tests. Good idea. For testing, I recreated a standard situation in a living room and took a photo of the screen in daylight, without closed curtains, blinds or shutters. There’s an oven behind me and a standard lamp next to the TV. The light from the standard lamp is reflected in the glass door of the oven behind me and thrown back onto the TV.

The result?

LG’s G3 has also come a long way in handling reflections. The G2 performs visibly poorer in this respect. Together with the significantly improved overall brightness, I would call LG’s G3 the first OLED TV I’ve tested that also comes into its own in bright rooms.

Interim conclusion after measuring

Right off the bat, I find the G3 noticeably brighter than all OLED TVs I’ve tested before. More radiant. Richer. More impressive. Not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of feel. Then there are the excellent colour error values that promise to deliver an extremely true colour image without calibration. Not to mention the perfect OLED black as always. In theory, LG has managed to produce a TV that sets the bar crazy high. Let’s see how it fares in practice.

The picture: OLED-worthy reference material with the usual strong processor

A very bright image. Excellent colour fidelity out of the box and without calibration. At least that’s how the theory goes. But how are things in practice?

Colour rendering

The comparisons with Samsung and TCL are also interesting. Samsung’s lack of a Dolby Vision format is particularly noticeable. LG’s and TCL’s Dolby Vision images feel pleasantly warm, powerful and natural at the same time. After comparing LG and TCL to each other, I’d say the South Korean TV on the left wins; the Chinese TV on the right has gone a bit overboard with the contrast.

Black crush and shadow details

Brightness gradations

Processor: the usual strong level

The processor is the TV’s brain. Its main task is to receive, process and then display image signals. In this context, processing means recognising poor image quality and enhancing it. This is what LG says about it: «META Booster brings luminance and true colour expression to another level along with richer HDR expression so you can experience more realistic imagery with brightness up to two times greater than before.» Well, well.

What they’re actually saying through all this elaborate marketing speak is that the processor’s built to remove noise, enhance colours, smoothen edges, make movements more fluid and add any missing pixel information.

Motion processing and judder

For this test, I want to make the processor sweat. Concretely, by taking a look at judder. Something all TVs are affected by. Especially with long camera pans. Sam Mendes’ «1917» is full of such steady, slow-flowing camera movements, making it perfect for the judder test. In my comparison with models by other manufacturers, I pay particular attention to the vertical bars in the barn, checking whether they run smoothly through the image or judder.

LG’s sixth-generation Alpha 9 processor has also shown what it’s made of this year. If I set Clarity to Natural in the settings, there’s hardly a trace of judder. In contrast, the Japanese manufacturer Sony in the second comparison hardly does any active judder reduction. In Sony’s eyes, movies have to be a bit jerky – like they were at the cinema before the digital age. Nice and old fashioned. To me, it’s too much.

In the third comparison, Samsung’s OLED Neural Quantum processor comes into play. I filmed the image there in Filmmaker Mode. By default, it has judder reduction completely disabled. If I turn it up from 0 to 7, the judder is visible if you pay attention, but it’s never intrusive. Compared with LG, the picture now looks even more fluid. I like it.

Let’s skip to the next scene from «1917». Again, Mendes’s camerawork constitutes an immense challenge for most processors. Hard edges in front of a blurred background – like the helmets of the two soldiers below – present a particular challenge. Both the processor and pixels have to react incredibly fast.

LG’s Alpha 9 processor shows no weakness here, either. Sony’s processor once again lags a bit behind.

Pixel response time

Next up, the Apple original For All Mankind. I want to see how long a single pixel takes to change colour. You can tell if the pixels aren’t changing colour fast enough when the image looks smeared – an effect known as «ghosting». When the camera pans over the surface of the moon, pay attention to the superimposed text.

Upscaling

Now for one of the most difficult tests: upscaling. I want to see how well the processor upscales lower quality material. For example, Blu-rays or good old live television shows. Or The Walking Dead. The series was deliberately shot on 16 mm film to preserve the old-fashioned grain that creates the feeling of a broken, post-apocalyptic world.

Samsung’s Neural Quantum processor in the last comparison does the best job with this scene; the picture is sharp, pleasantly warm and rich, but still natural. And there’s barely any image noise. Only in terms of compression artifacts is LG clearly ahead.

Gaming: input lag and game mode

Did this happen in other games, too?

No. Not once. During my four-week test period, I mostly played Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. ABL didn’t intervene a single time. That’s no wonder, what with all the scene changes and cutscenes. The FIFA series just seems to be prone to ABL.

Now then, what else? When measuring the colour accuracy in Game Mode, I get a solid average Delta E of 4.44 (read the section on colour error further up if you’re interested in more detail). This is no reference image level, to be sure. But it’s one of the best values I’ve ever measured in Game Mode. Only TCL’S C92 was better with a dE of 4.19.

On to input lag. Using the measuring device from Leo Bodnar, I measured an average input lag of 10.1 milliseconds for a UHD picture with 60 frames per second. That’s very good. In addition, the TV supports all features relevant for gamers:

• 4x HDMI 2.1 ports (4K120Hz)
• Auto Low-Latency Mode (ALLM)
• Quality Motion Smoothing (QMS)
• Variable frame rate (Nvidia G-Sync, AMD Freesync Premium and HDMI Forum VRR)

LG – like Samsung, Sony, Philips, TLC and Panasonic – has entered into a partnership with many large gaming studios as part of the HGiG, or HDR Gaming Interest Group. According to the manufacturer, this should ensure that HDR is displayed as the game developers intended – like when playing Spider-Man: Miles Morales on the PlayStation 5.

Nice! Like last year, LG offers a dedicated submenu where you can fine-tune settings for gaming and see the current frame rate. Very important is the fact that the LG G3 supports the PS5’s VRR-120Hz mode without any issues.

Smart OS: webOS

Then, there’s the app bar, which is the most important bar. And it’s now also the smallest one. I can then scroll down, which feels fluid and responsive thanks to the good processor. But it’s about as sexy as the hodgepodge of tiles showing me connected devices and the smart home hub along with god knows what else.

A sweet extra: if I activate the Always On feature in the menu, the TV doesn’t turn off when I press the standby button, instead switching to an art mode. I can choose to have it display either a clock, a painting or a moving image. This is meant to liven up the rectangular black hole that a TV otherwise is when off, at low power and low brightness.

The lowdown: back to the top – but for how long?

The end of the reign of LG’s older but therefore mature (W)OLED technology might not be as close as I thought a year ago. LG has not only caught up with the competition; it’s overtaken it. At least the competition’s models from last year. Now that’s what I call a made-to-measure comeback!

Luca Fontana

Senior Editor

Luca.Fontana@digitecgalaxus.ch

I'm an outdoorsy guy and enjoy sports that push me to the limit – now that’s what I call comfort zone! But I'm also about curling up in an armchair with books about ugly intrigue and sinister kingkillers. Being an avid cinema-goer, I’ve been known to rave about film scores for hours on end. I’ve always wanted to say: «I am Groot.» more

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