LG’s Superb-Looking OLED HDTV Doesn’t Come Cheap

 HDTV manufacturers have been experimenting with new technologies, trying to find the next big thing. Ultra HD (4K) televisions are the  most notable because they represent a jump in resolution over 1080p, but they’re also fairly useless until we get media in that format. Organic LED (OLED) screens have shown promise for years, but haven’t really clicked yet. Curved displays are a new trend, and their usefulness is uncertain. LG played mixand-match with these technologies with the 55EA9800, a 55-inch 1080p curved OLED screen that produces the best picture we’ve ever seen. It crushes high-end plasma screens as far as black levels and offers a wider color spectrum than any other HDTV we’ve measured. But if you want all that superb performance, you’ll have to pay a steep price.

DESIGN AND FEATURES
LG calls the 55EA9800 “pencil-thin,” but every pencil I’ve compared against the screen has been significantly thicker than the just-over-0.2-inch-deep panel—and at 37.9 pounds, this is easily the lightest 55-inch HDTV
I’ve encountered. It’s completely bezel-free, with only a thin metal band running around the top and side and a thin black frame of 0.3 inch around the picture. The screen comes in a single piece with a built-in curved, clear plastic stand that holds it upright and contains a pair of clear speakers. You have to be careful when removing the HDTV from the box and setting it up, though: The HDTV doesn’t wobble, but the panel flexes slightly if not held correctly.

The illusion is lost a bit when you look around the HDTV and see the electronics that drive it in a large black plastic lump mounted on the back. The left side of the screen holds four HDMI ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and a USB 3.0 port. The combination composite/ component video inputs, optical audio output, antenna/ cable connector, and Ethernet port sit in a recessed space on the back, facing down.

As LG’s top-of-the-line HDTV, the 55EA9800 is laden with features. It comes with two pairs of stylish passive 3D glasses with hard carrying cases and another two pairs of clip-on 3D shades for users who already wear glasses. It also includes a separate  SB webcam you can plug in for video chat. Built-in Wi-Fi (or an optional wired Ethernet connection) lets the HDTV access tons of online services and apps. The LG content hub also offers access to dedicated 3D video online, plus a Web browser. And the 55EA9800 uses LG’s Magic Remote, a motion-sensing wand (with only a few buttons) you use to control an on-screen cursor to navigate the HDTV’s menus and features.

PERFORMANCE
We tested the 55EA9800 with basic dark room calibration, manually adjusting the brightness and contrast levels and setting color temperature to the warmest setting. The screen’s built-in Picture Wizard II feature can walk you through simple calibration, but we found the resulting settings didn’t turn out the superlative test results we achieved under our calibrations.

Even if the panel doesn’t get super-bright (99.014 candelas per square meter),
its incredible black levels more than make up for it. If the 55EA9800 puts out any light when displaying black, it’s so little that our equipment can’t measure it. That’s a first for us, and puts the 55EA9800 up against the highest-end plasma HDTVs on the market like the Samsung PN8500 and the Panasonic ZT60 series.

Color is less perfect out of the box, but even inaccurate results were genuinely impressive. Reds and greens were consistently oversaturated but stayed generally in line with the ideal tint and hue values, keeping the colors generally accurate. These saturation levels show that the 55EA9800 can reach a wider color space than any other HDTV we’ve tested. That’s remarkable, but not ideal for watching movies. Setting the color space to  standard reduced the oversaturation, but the color levels still went beyond normal values. This HDTV would benefit from a professional color calibration, though you can always turn the Color (saturation) setting slightly below the defaults, as well.

These excellent test results translate into the best picture I’ve seen on an HDTV. I watched Black Swan on Blu-ray, and the anamorphic letterboxing vanished against the frame in a dark room, displaying perfect black above and below the picture. The extreme contrasts came through with detail on both ends of the spectrum, showing remarkable detail on the black fabrics of the costumes in a variety of lighting conditions. Jason and the Argonauts on Blu-ray looked similarly impressive, but its bright 1960s-era Eastmancolor film colorization made the oversaturation issues of the Wide color space mode very apparent. Although Wide might sound more appealing, the Standard or BT709 color space modes reduce the oversaturation significantly. Otherwise, details were incredibly sharp, with no hint of highlight texture or edge swallowed by the bright picture of the film.

CURVED DISPLAY AND 3D
The curve of the screen is one of the biggest features of the 55EA9800. It improves off-angle viewing and lets users see the 2D picture with equal contrast and color accuracy whether they’re directly in front of the screen or viewing it from the side—but the same can be said of a Àat IPS panel. Any benefit of the curved display is eclipsed by the benefit of the OLED technology that gives the HDTV such remarkable contrast and color. For now, I can’t say that a curved display is effectively worth more than the bragging rights of cutting-edge technology it represents, but an OLED display clearly offers plenty of potential benefits to cinephiles.

The 3D picture also looks impressive, but even the curve of the screen can’t fix a common problem with passive 3D. I watched IMAX Under the Sea 3D on Bluray from different angles, and sitting in front of the screen was like looking through a clean glass-bottom boat into the water. But crosstalk started to appear when viewed from the extreme sides, and it got more extreme, producing a distinct ghost image, when I viewed the screen from a position higher than where the 55EA9800 sat. Your HDTV should ideally be positioned at eye level or slightly higher, but the 55EA9800’s lack of wall mounting hardware can make that potentially awkward.

If you were hoping OLED screens would usher in a new age of energy efficiency for HDTVs, you’re going to be disappointed by the 55EA9800. With energy saving features turned off, the screen consumes an average of
210 watts. That number shrinks to 162 watts in Minimum energy saving mode and 122 watts in Medium energy saving mode, which are much more reasonable and barely darken the screen at all (compared with the Maximum energy saving mode, which made the screen uncomfortably dim).

IS IT WORTH IT?
I can’t speak to whether curved displays are worth the sizable premium they command, but I can say with certainty that OLED screens represent the future of high-end HDTVs. The LG 55EA9800 is a technological
marvel and the finest display I’ve ever tested. If you can’t quite justify an $8,000 investment, consider lessexpensive high-end Àat panels like the Samsung PNF8500 plasma. It doesn’t offer the perfect blacks of the 55EA9800, but it costs a third of the price and is one of the best screens you can pick up for less than a car. But if you are able to drop nearly five digits on an HDTV, you won’t be disappointed by the 55EA9800.

WILL GREENWALD