Today we’re reviewing the LG c9 oled I know a lot of you have been eagerly anticipating this review. We’re excited to do it and don’t you worry we’re also going to be comparing it to the LG c8 from last year.
Connectivity
There’s a lot different from last year’s c8 OLED and most of it is internal so let’s go through that real quick. Okay, so one of the biggest differences for this year and this is big news for TVs in 2019 in general. Lg has incorporated full spec HDMI 2.1 now you video nerds out there know what that means. For those of you who don’t, there are two big features that come along with this new HDMI spec. Don’t worry, you don’t need new cables but you are gonna need some new equipment to take advantage of most of it.
HDMI 2.1
The first thing that people are going to be excited about this new HDMI 2.1 is a variable refresh rate that brings. This closer than ever to a computer monitor so now we’re looking at the possibility of this being a legit gaming monitor. When the new ps 5 of the new Xbox come out we expect them to support variable refresh rate. We do expect them to use HDMI 2.1 and that’s gonna allow all kinds of interactivity between the console and the tv. Most importantly though you get that variable refresh rate so everything always looks smooth.
eARC
The other part of HDMI 2.1 is eARC now if you’re familiar with arc or audio return channel. That means you can connect say a soundbar or av receiver to the tv. And I’ll pipe the sound down through the HDMI cable to those audio pieces. And you can get tv sound out through your soundbar or big surround sound system.
That’s great with each everything gets bumped up several notches. So now you can get full on Dolby atmos uncompressed sound through HDMI 2.1 down to your devices. This makes the connection and interoperability of those devices way easier and it’s going to sound a lot better. The last word on HDMI 2.1 is really this is built for the future. So it’s gonna allow all kinds of high bandwidth super-rich video to be passed through HDMI to the television. It opens up a whole bunch of new stuff none of which we have yet which speaks to the future-proofing of this tv. You can buy this tv now and know that it’s going to be able to take care of all kinds of new features in the future.
Processor
The next important feature that is new for this year is LG’s new alpha 9 gen 2 processor. So the processing as we’ve discussed before is the most important part of any tv. You can take a wonderful OLED panel like this to find it on another tv and if the processing isn’t as good. The picture quality is not going to be as good so for the alpha gen 2 processor. It’s doing a couple of key things that are brand new.
AI
The first is this deep learning ai stuff. So the idea there is that LG has used artificial intelligence to analyze a huge database of images. It gets down to the pixel level so that it can understand it’s looking at a bird right now or a dog. It knows a dog from a horse from a cat right and then it knows that there are certain aspects of that animal. That it’s going to want to hone in on to clean up the picture. You know a dog’s nose tends to look a certain way, there’s a certain amount of texture, there the fur, the hair.
That’s a lot of fine detail that you want to render correctly and the reason that LG is doing this is. Because when you have a pristine source like a USB file that’s very uncompressed and very pretty on its own. It’s always gonna look great it’s gonna look great at the store but when you get the tv home. And you’re using your 720p cable box or maybe you’re streaming at low-resolution rates. There’s a lot of different aspects there you’ve got over-the-air broadcast as well. That’s a lot of variants in different quality.
Alpha 9 Gen 2
So the alpha 9 gen 2 processor attempts to take that image no matter what the quality no matter what the source. And make it look as good as it possibly can. One of the ways it does that is it very successfully eliminates banding.
So say you’re watching something on Netflix and there’s a big wash of gray or blue what you’ll notice especially in like suns. That scenes, for instance, there’s all these bands of color and that’s because it’s a low bitrate signal. So LG takes its powerful processor runs it through and eliminates those kinds of artifacts. And the result is a very clean pristine picture.
Brightness
Here’s a feature that I was not expecting but I’m excited about. You know TVs sometimes have these brightness sensors where it tries to judge the room and how bright it is. And then it boosts the brightness of the tv to match or conversely if you shut off the lights. Then it reduces the brightness so it’s not just beaming at you in a dark room.
Lg has a version of that that has been greatly improved. So instead of just raising the brightness or lowering the brightness depending on the room conditions. It alters the curve of the brightness so it retains highlights and hdr scenes. It maintains color saturation the way it needs to it’s not just moving the brightness. It’s moving the whole picture settings if you will up or down, so you get the best picture quality no matter what the ambient look is.
Sound
LEDs are thin that’s one of the greatest things about them you don’t have a backlight. There’s no muss, no fuss in the back but I swear this is even thinner than last year. So the profile on this tv is stunning whether you wall mounts it or put it on a stand people are going to be amazed when they see it. It’s even thinner than this LG v30 phone and that’s one of the thinner phones out there.
Downside
Here’s the problem with thin TVs the thinner they are the thinner they tend to sound. There’s not a whole lot of room for speakers here’s what LG has done to address that problem. So they have built speakers into the base of the tv and then they fired down into the stand. That sort of acts as a scoop or a waveguide to force the sound out towards you, it works pretty well. There’s not a whole lot of base to the sound but it is loud and clear without distortion. And that processor I was talking about before also processes the audio.
So it’s taking Dolby atmos sound signals to get it and processing it. So that you get a good approximation of what Dolby atmos might be. It’s not like you’re gonna hear things swirling around you but you do get a good sense of the movement of objects on the screen. It’s a decent solution but you can do better.
I would recommend at least a soundbar for this television although if you’re gonna stand mount it as we have it here. There’s not a whole lot of room for it so keep that in mind. You might want to have a place to put that soundbar because right in front of the tv is not going to be a good idea.
UI
So let’s look at the user experience specifically with WebOS you guys know I’m a fan. But things have gotten even better. So, first of all, you might notice that the nav bar down here has gotten a little bit shorter. It’s not taking up as much of the screen and that’s so it can pop up so any time you hover over an app like Netflix or amazon prime or even youtube.
Here it’ll pop up this second ribbon and give you suggested content or have you start from wherever you last watch. So, for instance, Netflix I was watching our planet recently, I can go straight back to that if I want to. Or I can pick something out of the trending.
It doesn’t work for all apps Hulu, for instance, it just doesn’t work for that. And I’m not too sure to what degree it’s gonna work with live tv apps like sling tv. And PlayStation view but that’s something that can always be developed.
Conclusion
Should you buy the c8 since it’s so much less expensive than this tv? Well, I would say it comes down to future-proofing. If you want the most future proof tv you can get right now the LG c9 is it. It’s got full spec HDMI 2.1 and with that comes arc.
Buy Here
Then you also get the variable refresh rate which I think is a big deal to gamers. Then you get the more recent version of the alpha 9 gen 2 processor which makes some subtle differences. But again subtle can be meaningful and it is. In this case, cleans up the picture a little bit more and the ai that’s on the tv.
That is designed to help you get to the content. You want to watch faster and give you a better overall sound experience. The interface has been improved. So the WebOS is a little bit fancier than it was before old WebOS was great. This just happens to be a little bit better and in terms of picture quality.
