LG C5 assessment: I’ve discovered my excellent gaming TV

For years, the LG C sequence of TVs has been the go-to alternative for gaming followers, delivering every part the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles want to make sure titles look and play at their best possible. It’s price reiterating that options that make video games look nice additionally improve each different form of viewing too – the LG C5 is the most recent in a lineage of excellent-looking TVs that frequently high all-round lists.

Before you’ve even switched it on, the LG C5 begins to impress. The show panel is razor skinny, with all the heart and gubbins of the TV confined to a hidden block on the base of the again of the display.

But the true headline for players is discovered across the again. The LG C5 comes geared up with 4 full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports. That’s sufficient on your PS5, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch 2 and a gaming PC – you would possibly by no means have to have a look at the rats’ nest of cables behind your TV unit once more.

Something of an optical phantasm, the cracker-thin LG C5 appears prefer it would possibly snap in half in a powerful breeze. Narrow bezels and a minimalist, brushed metallic stand full the look.

The panel itself is similar as final yr’s LG C4 – the C5’s foremost competitors – and runs on the upgraded Alpha a9 Gen 8 AI processor, which manages brightness in a extra naturalistic approach in addition to enabling a collection of AI options.

Overall picture high quality is great, with the OLED tech delivering infinite distinction, deep blacks and punchy highlights with out blooming, even in brilliant rooms.

It’s extremely customisable too, with the choice to have the AI deal with the picture, fine-tune it as you want, or use the upgraded Filmmaker mode, which goals to show films and reveals because the director meant, switching off picture and movement enhancements to ship correct colors and correct body charges.

The upscaling of decrease decision sources on the LG C5 is a number of the finest I’ve seen, cleansing up fuzzy edges and subtly enhancing textures with out wanting overly sharpened. Non-HD video nonetheless has a telltale blurriness about it, however upscaled 1080p video on the C5 is difficult to differentiate from true 4K at a look.

There’s some occasional flickering on fast-moving, out-of-focus textures because the C5 tries to interpolate frames – the picture processor generally has bother with backgrounds in driving scenes – however tweaking the movement settings clears issues up.

Gaming Mode turns off post-processing trickery to ship solely completely rendered frames. Football appears nice right here too, with Sports mode delivering fluid movement and element with out having to mess around with settings.

LG’s WebOS interface is slick, intuitive and fast to navigate. The distant can be utilized like a Wii distant to pick out issues on-screen, which is most helpful when getting into wi-fi passwords and the like. Your house display pulls in advisable content material from a spread of apps, channels and streaming companies, and an AI helper accessible on the distant can information you to your favorite genres, administrators and actors.

The AI assistant is surprisingly adept. I requested for The Simpsons, and the outcomes included episodes and sequence from the Disney+ app, as you would possibly count on, but additionally E4, which occurred to be displaying the programme. Let the AI preserve a watchful eye in your viewing historical past, and it’ll get higher at recommending new issues to look at.

Unlike LCD TVs that use a backlight, each single one of many C5’s eight million pixels is self-emissive, that means they will activate and off individually. This makes an enormous distinction for gaming.

OLED shows create excellent, inky blacks and an infinite distinction ratio that makes shadowy scenes in video games extra atmospheric, whereas recreating brilliant highlights with an depth that backlit TVs can’t replicate. This pixel-level management additionally leads to a near-instant response time, eliminating the ghosting and blurring that may plague lesser screens throughout fast-paced motion.

The C5 helps Dolby Vision and HDR10, the HDR codecs utilized by the Xbox and PlayStation. This means the C5 can show a variety of brightness ranges between complete black and complete white, giving the picture extra element within the shadows and punchier highlights.

You’ll discover the distinction in video games like Cyberpunk 2077, the place neon billboards are dazzling at night time, and instantly transferring from a darkish inside into blazing daylight is sufficient to make you squint.

One downside with codecs is that it doesn’t assist HDR10+, a more recent HDR customary utilized by some streaming companies that’s gaining traction, however that gained’t impression anybody taking part in on the present era of consoles.

Otherwise, the LG C5 comes with a full home of options particularly designed to assist next-generation gaming. It boasts a local 144Hz refresh fee, that means extremely easy and fluid movement on Xbox and PlayStation video games that assist it, plus headroom for PC players with a robust sufficient setup.

This is complemented by full assist for Nvidia and AMD’s variable refresh charges, a function that dynamically syncs the TV with the body fee of your console or PC to remove display tearing – that ugly visible glitch the place the picture seems to stutter or break.

Input lag – the delay between your controller and what occurs on display – is available in at beneath 10ms within the C5’s devoted Game Mode. An auto low latency mode mechanically detects while you’re taking part in a recreation and switches the TV to its quickest settings, so there’s no fiddling round each time you swap over to Homes Under The Hammer.