TechRadar Verdict
Finally, LG has delivered a large screen OLED panel in a traditional flat screen form factor, and the wait was worth it. Impossibly good image quality and future proofing for 4K and HDR content, this is the best TV money can buy, so long as you have the money to actually afford it.
Pros
- +
Extraordinary contrast
- +
Gorgeous colours
- +
Sensational design
- +
webOS is brilliant
Cons
- -
More expensive than LCD
- -
Still lacking 4K and HDR content
- -
Some noise with upscaling
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LG has been paving its own way forward with OLED televisions. While Samsung joined the party briefly when the first generation was released back in 2013, since then only LG has released new models with anything resembling regularity.
While those OLED panels have been almost universally well-received, they have all been curved – launching with a concave design that is meant to mirror the human eye's natural shape, but ultimately doing little more than reducing the viewing angle for many rooms.
But the 65EF950T (and the 55-inch 55EF950T) has finally reworked the OLED TV design and brought it back to the standard flat panel the world knows and loves, and the end result is comfortably one of the best televisions ever released.
You'll pay for that quality though. The 65-inch model has an RRP of $8,999, while the smaller 55-inch model will set you back $5,499.
Interestingly though, those are the exact same price points as the curved 65EF960T and 55EF960T that were launched last year, meaning there's no discernable difference in cost between flat and curved, although the flat panel will also support HDR content (if you can find some).
LG has managed to cram a whole heap of tech into the fairly thin television. The lower half of the back of the TV is significantly thicker than the top half (though probably still thinner than your old plasma), and houses all the tech that makes this thing work.
There's a quad-core processor, which runs the WebOS user interface and handles the 4K upscaling, plus Harman/Kardon designed stereo speakers, coupled with 3 HDMI 2.0(a) ports, 2 USB 2.0 and a single USB 3.0 port on the side.
The inclusion of HDMI 2.0(a) ports is important, as you need it to show off HDR content from an external source (like a 4K Blu-ray player, when they launch out here). The curved OLED panels can display HDR content from a streaming service, but the fact their HDMI ports aren't up to the 2.0(a) standard means that you won't get the HDR benefit from a 4K blu-ray player if you picked one up.
Also thrown in there is 802.11n Wi-Fi, a single tuner, and FreeView Plus support for access to HbbTV content.
And for those who enjoy 3D on their home televisions, the EF950T also supports passive 3D, with a couple of pairs of glasses in the box.
