OLED TVs have been around for many years and have become a familiar part of our lives. Now there are a lot of them, and there will be even more, but this one is special. And not only because he is the largest and most advanced of all. It just won’t have any competitors. And for a long time, if not forever, it will remain an absolute exclusive from the company that created it. Meet the 88-inch LG SIGNATURE OLED88ZX9!
LG has been producing TVs with large matrix OLEDs since 2013 – a long time in the digital age, but during this time adherents of LCD technology have not been able to release a single model that could provide the same quality as OLED devices.
And this is impossible, because OLED displays do not have backlighting – the pixels in them glow themselves and can be turned off, which means that they are able to create images with the best, that is, infinite, contrast in any frame of complexity. Moreover, this contrast can be seen and appreciated by everyone, and not just experts with measuring equipment.
In addition, the lack of backlight behind the matrix allows you to make huge TVs extremely thin and light – or use the OLED panel as a sound-emitting surface, achieving perfect match of visual and sound images during viewing.
Naturally, all TV manufacturers wanted to release their models on OLED matrices, but only LG, which today is the only manufacturer of large OLED panels with diagonals from 48 to 88 inches, was able to produce such matrices with a guarantee that color rendition would not degrade over time.
In other words, all current OLED TVs are based on LG matrices. However, not all the developments LG shares with other companies – it naturally keeps the best ones for itself. The matrix of this TV is one of such developments. This means that a TV based on it is a kind of unique.
Huge retina
The LG SIGNATURE OLED88ZX9 is not only the largest and most advanced OLED device, but also one of the most unusual TVs ever. First, about the size.
In the spacious LG brand store, where we tested and filmed this model (it would be too troublesome to take it to the laboratory), it looks very large, but not stunningly huge – until you come close and sit next to the screen so that the screen is at eye level … Only after that do you begin to realize the size of this TV.
It is only a little less than two meters wide, namely 196 cm! My projector screen is only 10 cm narrower! In short, this TV is huge. But if on my personal screen the pixels from a 4K projector are easily distinguishable upon closer inspection, then, no matter how straining your eyes, the pixels cannot be seen on this TV.
Only a barely noticeable roughness suggests that there are still pixels on this screen. But if you move your head 25-30 cm away from the screen, and it will be perceived as a monitor with a retina, that is, with an absolutely merged image – the ideal that manufacturers were striving for when increasing the resolution.
Someone might say: no wonder, because this is 8K. However, on even smaller 8K LCD TVs, the pixel structure differs much better. The reason is in smaller and densely packed pixels.
LG employs a 4-subpixel scheme, where a fourth white subpixel is added to the three standard primary colors R (red), G (green) and B (blue), due to which LG OLED panels have won the competition against OLED matrixes of others. manufacturers – they are brighter and do not change color over time.
8K is real
But 8K resolution is needed not only to create the effect of a retina display, but to amaze viewers with the detail of the picture. On relatively small diagonals like 55 and even 65 inches, 8K video is not very impressive, but at 88 inches it is another matter.
There are now enough beautiful videos with 8K resolution on the Internet to choose from – and I easily found several of them that impressed the quality of even promoters from the LG branded store, who, in theory, are difficult to surprise with high-quality demos.
8K video, if it really has a resolution of 7680×4320, is generally striking in detail, because it is most often filmed in this format. Unlike 4K, it is not faked by homebrew craftsmen using a simple upscaling method – this requires extremely powerful computers. What’s more, streaming services encode them in the most sophisticated way so that no detail is lost.
I deliberately selected the most “heavy” versions with the AV1 codec, and the TV played them without hesitation, although all 8K devices that I tested before did not even perceive them. However, this is also understandable.
It was not in vain that LG became the first company to apply for and receive an official certificate from the CTA association that its 8K models comply with the 8K Ultra HD standard, because LG originally created full-fledged 8K models, not hoping to modify the previous platforms with a software update – and were confident of victory.
That was last fall, but to this day, LG’s 8K TVs are the only ones that support everything that by definition should be in 8K devices. They play all 8K videos from streaming services, from USB disks and flash drives, over the local network of DLNA servers – you can see this today. They can display 8K video from external sources, and this mode is supported by all HDMI inputs.
Measurements
The “artificial intelligence” in this TV does not try to “improve” the charts and test fields during measurements, so their results are much better than those of OLED TVs from other manufacturers and previous generation LG models.
However, even though the dynamic picture settings are turned off, the electronics still interfere with the process to protect the panel and to comply with power consumption regulations. As a result, the graph of gamma (brightness response) is obtained with saturation even when outputting fields in 1/9 of the screen and corresponds to the recommended curve only when outputting bright fields in 1/20 of the area.
This means that only small objects on the screen will appear really bright.
Enabling the “Vivid” image mode does not make it really bright, but rather the opposite – both contrast and brightness in reality are less than when you select the standard mode and normal settings in the menu.
Brightness in “bright” mode is 246 cd / m2 (nit, ANSI method, that is, on a “checkerboard”), and in “standard” – 302 cd / m2. In any case, the black color is displayed as absolutely black, that is, the pixels in the selected areas do not glow at all.
In fact, in the “Bright” mode, to create the impression of high “brightness”, only the color temperature rises, and up to the exorbitant 13,000K, that is, the image becomes frankly blue in tone. When you select “Warm2” temperature in the menu, it also remains high – about 7700K on average over the entire brightness range.
But the balance of colors already looks smoother, and the image is more natural. Although additional adjustments will obviously not hurt him.
The color gamut is wide enough, approximately corresponds to the DCI-P3 standard in terms of area, but its shape changes greatly not only depending on the selected temperature (which is normal), but also on the area of the output color fields. That is, the more green in the frame, the brighter it is, and the less – the more saturated it is.
Conclusion
It’s not just an expensive TV. This is the absolute High End in the television world, that is, the most technologically advanced tv today, which will have no analogues. At least in the short term.
