LG C9 OLED Review: The Best Is Back and Better Than Ever
Our Verdict
The LG C9 OLED blows us away with impressive picture and sound, a truly smart smart TV experience, and a decidedly sleek pattern.
For
- Impeccable OLED display
- Cutting-border HDMI 2.1 connectivity
- Best-in-class performance
- Slap-up sound
- Solid smart-Goggle box features
- Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa built in
Confronting
- Premium price will turn many away
Tom's Guide Verdict
The LG C9 OLED blows us abroad with impressive picture and audio, a truly smart smart TV experience, and a incomparably sleek design.
Pros
- +
Impeccable OLED display
- +
Cutting-border HDMI two.1 connectivity
- +
Best-in-course performance
- +
Great audio
- +
Solid smart-Boob tube features
- +
Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa built in
Cons
- -
Premium price will turn many away
When it comes to premium Telly technologies, one in particular stands out, cheers to its precision lighting and superslim design: OLED. And the LG C9 OLED ($2,199 for the 65-inch model, $4,499 for the larger 77-inch) has been on our radar for months as LG has given us glimpses and $.25 of information. At present, nosotros've finally gotten the C9 OLED into our lab for testing, and everything nosotros'd suspected was truthful: The LG C9 OLED offers an unparalleled alloy of superb media operation, rich features and forward-looking technologies. It's the best Tv we've seen, and our height pick as the best TV overall.
Editor's Annotation (8/ten/2020): We've updated this review with current pricing and availability information, but the rating remains unchanged. Check out our LG CX OLED review for the latest model. Learn more than nearly the latest LG models in our roundup of all the LG 2020 TVs .
LG C9 OLED (OLED65C9PUA) Specs
| Cost | $2,496.99/£2,099 |
| Screen Size | 65 inches |
| Resolution | 3,840 10 2,160 |
| HDR | Dolby Vision, HDR10, HLG |
| Refresh Rate | 120 Hz |
| Ports | iv HDMI 2.1, iii USB |
| Sound | 2.2 channels, 2 10 40-W speakers w/twenty-W woofer |
| Smart Television set Software | webOS 4.0 |
| Size | 57 ten 32.7 x 1.8 inches [westward/o stand] |
| Weight | 55.half-dozen pounds [w/o stand up] |
LG C9 OLED review: Price and availability
The C9 OLED comes in 3 sizes, starting at 55 inches and scaling upward to 77 inches. Our own review unit of measurement sits right between the two, at 65 inches.
- 55 inches: OLED55C9PUA (no longer available)
- 65 inches: OLED65C9PUA ($2,199.99)
- 77 inches: OLED77C9PUB ($4,496.99)
Considering OLED applied science offers remarkably consistent picture quality, nosotros experience very comfy saying that our operation examination results are likely indicative of like quality in the models of other sizes. And because all three models feature the same processing hardware and smart TV features, we're confident in extending our recommendations to these other sizes.
LG C9 OLED review: Design
LG'due south OLED TVs consistently offer some of the best designs in the world. The company leverages the unique properties of OLED applied science to make a remarkably thin and elegant display that strips the panel down to the essentials of a glass panel and a layer of printed OLED pixels, backed with a gleaming layer of brushed aluminum, with a gunmetal terminate that oozes manner.
"The top half of the TV is an impressive 0.1 inches thick. This is the sort of slimness that makes you terminate and stare, even if you lot've looked at dozens of premium TV designs."
Without the stand, the LG C9 measures 57 ten 32.7 x 1.eight inches. Well-nigh of the thickness is at the bottom of the TV, which is less than ii inches thick overall and houses the set's internal components and speakers. The top one-half of the Goggle box, however, is an impressive 0.1 inches thick. This is the sort of slimness that makes you stop and stare, even if y'all've looked at dozens of premium Tv set designs. The only things to surpass it are LG's own Wallpaper and Rollable designs, which push button the display-on-glass concept to fifty-fifty more innovative ends.
By comparing, the LCD-based Samsung Q90 measures 57.1 ten 32.7 x 1.half dozen inches, with a fairly consistent thickness from acme to bottom. That design offloads most of those same components to reduce the TV'due south thickness.
The C9 sits lower than most sets, thanks to a low-slung stand up design. The brushed-metal stand looks merely as elegant as the residuum of the Television and provides a slight dissimilarity with the darker finish of the Idiot box chiffonier.
The included stand offers a very solid footing for the slim Idiot box, and well information technology should, weighing nearly 20 pounds by itself. The stand up uses a single wide, flat human foot centered in the middle of the screen. This stand up also extends back several inches, providing a wide base that manages to exist unobtrusive as it anchors the 65-inch Goggle box. Y'all can utilise a aqueduct in the stand up to tuck cables out of sight and continue the cruddy snarl to a minimum.
The TV itself weighs 55.6 pounds without the stand up — the Telly tin can exist hung on the wall with a 300 x 200-millimeter VESA mount — and 74.7 pounds with the stand attached. The base attaches hands with a screwdriver, only you'll want to make sure that the TV is laid apartment on a safe surface where yous can identify the stand. You'll as well want a second person to aid lift the Goggle box, since the 75-pound ready is mostly glass, with just minimal housing to protect information technology from flexing and potentially swell.
LG C9 OLED review: Ports
While the outward design of the C9 offers only minor refinements over previous models, the port option presents a major upgrade. All of the basic connections are present: iii USB ports, an RF connector and tuner for antenna, composite input for older hardware, and an optical output for older audio systems.
Merely the real star here comes in the four HDMI ports; they all use HDMI 2.i, which you'll find only on LG'southward 2019 models. The new standard will support 4K at 120 Hz, provide a fatter pipage for dynamic HDR information, and handle uncompressed audio for soundbars and surround-audio systems using Enhanced Audio Return Aqueduct (eARC), the new and improved version of the return-channel technology that lets y'all reduce cable ataxia by running a single cablevision between the TV and soundbar.
The new connexion standard besides supports Quick Media Switching (QMS), which adjusts the Goggle box'southward resolution and frame rate to friction match whatever content you're putting on screen. If you've always tried to play a 24-Hz movie on a lx-Hz panel, you may have noticed the display goes black as you motion from one content way to some other. QMS eliminates this buffering step, making it all the more seamless to enjoy all media sources on your TV.
Those HDMI 2.one connections also promise enhancement for gaming, with an automatic low-latency mode (ALLM), which switches to game mode when information technology senses that a game console is connected and agile. There's besides variable refresh rate (VRR) back up, which lets gaming hardware cut loose while maintaining buttery-polish action and eliminating dropped frames with a technology similar to AMD's FreeSync.
The Xbox One X has VRR adequacy already, but just upwards to 60 frames per second. However, cheers to the wider bandwidth of HDMI two.ane, this engineering volition calibration upward to 120 Hz on future game consoles (such as the Sony PS5 and Xbox Projection Scarlett) and graphics cards. That makes the LG C9 OLED distinctly future proof.
The C9 OLED also gets some avant-garde wireless connectivity. In improver to 802.11ac Wi-Fi (along with an Ethernet jack for wired networking) and Bluetooth five.0, the C9 is also ready to go with new wireless options. The C9 is WiSA-ready, so you can connect to wireless sound systems that use the WiSA standard. That'southward a huge bonus for anyone who wants to gear up upward a environment-sound system without running wires effectually the room or in the walls.
The C9 also supports Apple AirPlay ii, so it's piece of cake to wirelessly share content from your iPhone (or iPad, or iPod, or MacBook) to the TV and use the set for controlling your smart dwelling devices via Apple'south HomeKit.
LG C9 OLED review: Functioning
The LG C9 has a 65-inch OLED console that looks stunning, thanks to excellent color quality, impressive effulgence and extremely smooth action. Information technology's ane of the best displays nosotros've seen, in big part because it'due south almost identical to last twelvemonth'southward OLED panels.
LG has set a high bar for OLED quality, to the point that the C9 (and other 2019 OLEDs) don't actually offer significant improvements to the display panel over anything we saw concluding year. The panel engineering science remains unchanged, because the applied science has been pushed just nigh equally far as information technology will go. The 2019 panels get a little brighter than older versions, only otherwise, they offer the aforementioned performance and quality as seen in previous models. That's not a problem, because the level of quality is impeccable.
"The overall quality is superb, with rich, inky blacks, vibrant colors and perhaps the all-time HDR experience y'all'll become from a 4K TV."
And the display is only half of the equation. LG'due south Alpha nine Gen 2 processor does more than just handle new smart-TV features. It also enhances the picture quality through improved noise reduction, superb upscaling and AI-powered brightness command that keeps the brandish looking the same under changing lighting conditions.
All of those incremental refinements add up to the best movie we've seen on any 4K Television in 2019. This console even edges out the Sony Master Series A9F OLED from 2018, which had prepare the bar for premium pic quality. Whether information technology'south showing a scene from Blade Runner 2049, a 4K stream of surf-survival thriller The Shallows or the 4K trailer for Top Gun: Maverick, the C9 looks fantastic.
The overall quality is superb, with rich, inky blacks; vibrant colors; and perhaps the best HDR feel yous'll go from a 4K Boob tube, with wide support for formats like HDR10, Dolby Vision and Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) for live content.
1 of our standard test scenes from Blade Runner 2049 takes place within a farmhouse, with most of the lite for the scene pouring in from outside windows. Where almost LCD-based TVs struggle to show this lighting without over-illuminating other parts of the picture, the C9 OLED's per-pixel lighting ways there is zero haloing. And while other premium sets lose some detail in the darker shadows of the scene, or simply lose the shadows as the effulgence bumps up to compensate, the C9 struck the perfect balance, with crisp details and appropriate lighting.
Viewing angles are also the all-time we've seen, maintaining colour consistently from the optimal dead-eye viewing position out to nigh 180 degrees with no color shifting or negative effect. In fact, at the steepest angles, the larger problem was the reflectivity of the drinking glass.
2 areas where even the best TVs struggle are in upscaling from lower-resolution content and in maintaining clarity when showing fast action. In both instances, it'southward not uncommon to see blurred motion, hazy details and digital artifacts. But the C9 managed to keep things make clean and articulate, whether it was a fight scene from Spider-Man: Homecoming or a 1080p scene from Mad Max: Fury Road.
LG C9 OLED review: Test Results
The C9 looks great, but sometimes manufacturers will requite a TV display a tweak that makes it wait good while actually making it slightly less accurate. The gear up may hew less true to the precise colors and lighting that a managing director intended, while the brightness or color saturation get ramped up to brand images pop a little more than on screen. These changes may even goose the numbers in testing, like the evaluations we perform equally part of every review. Thankfully, LG's OLED displays not only look smashing, but they as well offer solid accuracy and impressive technical adequacy.
With ten-bit colour support, the C9 offers a wider color pallette than near 4K TVs. When we tested the C9 with our 10-Rite i1 Pro spectrophotometer and SpectraCal CalMAN Ultimate calibration software, the display was able to reproduce 132.14% of the Rec 709 color space, exceeding the basic standard with a wider pick of colors. This is slightly better than the Sony Chief Series A9F (130.83%) and way better than even premium LCD TVs, similar the Sony X950G (99.87%) and the Samsung Q90 QLED (99.83%).
This broader selection of colors fabricated for cracking results in 4K movies, similar Blade Runner 2049, where billowing fog banks looked highly realistic and glowing neon cast multicolored lights beyond people and buildings. Even elements that other TVs struggle with, like a foggy scene that usually suffers from posterization even on premium TVs, the C9 showed smooth colour transitions and ultrarealistic hues.
The C9 OLED is besides 1 of the most accurate TVs we've tested. Accuracy is measured using a Delta-E rating, which is the deviation between how color is supposed to expect and what actually shows up on screen. A smaller score is better (0 is perfect), and the C9 OLED scored a respectable 1.88 in the about accurate mode, which LG calls ISF Expert (Dark Room). Information technology's a tad more precise than the standard pic mode result of 2.xv, only even that's impressively authentic for a consumer-level display.
While that's not the platonic ideal, it's better than we've seen on other top performers, like the Sony A9F (3.5), the Sony X950G (2.56) and the upkeep-friendly Vizio Chiliad-Series Quantum (iii.six). The only recent set up to do amend is the Samsung Q90 QLED (1.5), only the visible results are extremely similar.
LG OLED vs. Samsung QLED
A comparing between the LG C9 OLED and the Samsung Q90 QLED highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the ii different technologies. The LG C9 delivers the best blackness levels available, thanks to OLED technology'south ability to illuminate the private pixels that make up the picture. The outcome is crisp, conspicuously defined lighting, with inky blacks and zero haloing of bright objects on screen. Samsung's competing technology has gotten very, very good at delivering similar blackness levels, only put the two sets side past side, and the C9 OLED is the clear winner.
But information technology's a different story for overall brightness. OLED screens don't have the backlight illumination that an LCD panel uses, which limits the brightness to whatever the glowing pixels tin can produce. LG has made enormous strides on this forepart, but the Samsung has the border here.
"The LG C9 provides the choice of automatically switching the Goggle box to game way for lower latency, all without having to observe the remote to change the picture show setting."
That'due south not to say that the C9 appeared dim or failed to handle bright content well. In fact, HDR content looks improve on the C9 OLED than on mayhap any other TV we've tested. What is meant to exist black is black, but LG'due south image processing offers better subtle, near-black and night tones than nosotros've seen in years past. Older OLED TVs struggled with crushed blacks, an effect acquired past the difficulty of displaying a dark tone without it simply looking black, but I didn't meet this problem to any noticeable degree during testing.
LG C9 OLED review: Gaming performance
When we plugged in our Xbox One X to check out 4K gaming on the C9, we were pleasantly surprised to find something new. Non only did the TV back up every characteristic available for 4K gaming and content — x-bit colour, all frame rates, HDR10 and Dolby Vision content, and HDR gaming — but it too offered united states new capabilities. With advanced features enabled, the Xbox offered variable refresh rates.
The LG C9 also provided the option of automatically switching the Tv to game mode for lower latency, all without having to find the remote to change the flick setting. The switch was automatic when the console was turned on. These boosted features are a benefit of the TV'southward HDMI two.one ports, which have greater bandwidth than the HDMI 2.0 ports institute on the bulk of 4K TVs.
Actual gaming functioning was pretty smashing. With a measured lag time of 21.ii milliseconds, this is the most responsive high-end Idiot box we've seen. And cheers to the C9'southward crawly brandish, 4K gaming looks fantastic. Racing through Australia in Forza Horizon 3 was a blitz of lord's day, sand and supercars. Exploring ancient Egypt was as vibrant in Assassinator's Creed: Origins.
LG C9 OLED review: Audio
The C9 packs a surprising corporeality of audio hardware into a slim chassis, particularly since half of it is mostly drinking glass. A pair of 40-watt speakers provide aplenty volume, with a downward-firing position in the bottom of the TV chassis. This auto also boasts a 20-watt woofer, which gives the bass a lot more oomph than you might expect from such a lithe design. Overall, the volume gets decently loud, and the bass levels are better than what near TVs offer.
However, reflecting sound off of whatever table or shelf is below the Boob tube volition atomic number 82 to mixed results, since information technology won't be the same in our lab equally in your dwelling. Nosotros besides noticed some slight distortion as the book approached total blast. You can set up both of these issues by getting one of the best soundbars to go with the TV.
One more reason for a soundbar? Dolby Atmos support. The LG C9 can handle Dolby'southward vertical sound phase on the decoding side, just for the best functioning, you lot want a speaker set or soundbar that can offer a fuller Atmos experience.
LG also offers a feature called AI Sound, amidst a number of other smart features. This automatic process uses the microphone in your remote to mind to the sound coming from the speakers and then adjusts the audio to provide a better listening feel. Since it lets the Tv's auto-learning smarts suit to the acoustics of the room the fix is in, this feature can actually provide a meaning improvement in overall sound quality, providing a uniquely tuned, imitation-v.1 sound experience tailored to your living room.
LG C9 OLED review: Smart features
We've already touched on the C9'south potent Blastoff 9 Gen 2 processor, but it actually comes to the forefront with LG'due south webOS interface and ThinQ AI capabilities. And while the new webOS looks and feels a lot like the one nosotros saw on LG'due south 2018 models, this version comes with several improvements.
"This is the kickoff smart TV we've seen that offers both Alexa and Google Assistant."
Most of the AI-stuff happens behind the scenes, with automated features like brightness adjustment, tailored content recommendations and self-managed app organizing. But there are some more than interactive capabilities under the ThinQ umbrella that are sure to spark some involvement.
The beginning is the option to use either the default Google Assistant, which is tied to the remote microphone push button and is integrated into the TV'due south functions, or Amazon Alexa, which has recently been added. The Amazon assistant is accessed past pressing and holding the Amazon Prime number Video button. This the starting time smart Boob tube nosotros've seen to offer both leading phonation assistants.
There'southward also a new tool for smart abode devices, called Home Dashboard. Aimed at making the Goggle box a cardinal control hub for all of your connected dwelling house stuff — ranging from the best video doorbells to smart thermostats and online kitchen appliances — it looks to exist a great option for whatever gadget lover. Dwelling house Dashboard also offers a strong alternative to SmartThings, which offers like capability on Samsung TVs, particularly for devices in that company's ecosystem.
LG C9 OLED review: Remote control
The LG Magic Movement remote command continues to be one of the best on the market, offering a comfortable device that's fairly like shooting fish in a barrel to navigate, despite being loaded with buttons. The utilise of a clickable whorl bicycle in conjunction with a standard directional pad makes navigating through smart TV menus a breeze. But the inclusion of a move-controlled cursor, which means you can dive around the screen with a waggle of the remote, gives this remote an advantage over the competition. Text entry is much easier and faster, and selecting items rapidly from setting and app menus becomes less confusing and cumbersome when it's merely signal and click.
As mentioned earlier, the remote has voice interaction congenital in. And it can be used with both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, provided you accept an Amazon account prepare on the Tv.
LG C9 OLED review: Verdict
At that place are no two ways nigh information technology — the LG C9 OLED is the best Idiot box nosotros've seen in 2019, and it gets our top recommendation for 4K smart TVs. The design is inspiring, the smart functions intelligent and approachable, and the functioning superb. If y'all desire the best 4K Boob tube on the market, this is information technology.
If you desire a similar OLED experience without the LG branding, the Sony Master Series A9F is a practiced choice for you, offering a level of picture quality very close to the C9's. The Sony besides has slightly better audio, thank you to the company's sound-from-screen audio technology, and Android offers a robust smart-TV experience. The existent trouble with the Sony A9F isn't the TV or the software, but the cost, which is about a third more the LG C9'southward.
And if you aren't sold on the virtues of OLED and want to go with a premium LCD, the Samsung Q90 QLED ($2,499/£2,495) is a formidable option. The picture quality is very, very skillful, and the Samsung smart TV platform compares very well to LG's webOS. Yet, the LG C9 is still our superlative option, thank you its category-leading functioning, undeniable smarts and sharp, stylish blueprint.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/lg-c9-oled
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