The LG EF950T is a 4K Ultra HD OLED television with HDR — and deserves to be on your wishlist

What television should you buy? Money aside, this is the one that should be at the top of your wish list.

This is the TV you will want to buy

WHAT television should you buy? Money aside, this is the one that should be at the top of your wishlist.

What’s so great about the 65-inch LG EF950T, aside from the fact that it’s a very big and very sexy TV?

It has both the ultra-high definition of 4K and the incredible colours of OLED, it’s simple to navigate, it has a contrast boost with HDR (more on that later) and unlike the EG960T predecessor it has a flat screen. Yes, there are reasons to like the curved TV trend but our preference remains for the flat screen. Pythagoras once said flat walls deserve flat screens, and if he didn’t it’s only because he was too busy playing with triangles like a total square.

The EF950T comes in both a 55-inch and 65-inch, both with 3840 x 2160 resolution

Because the EF950T is OLED (organic light emitting diode), the display doesn’t need backlighting which accounts for the super thin design. That combined with the very thin bezel around the screen, you feel like you’re looking at an image, rather than an image within a frame.

If you’re not up on the latest in televisions, and it’s hard to keep up, here are the cheat notes to get you back up to speed.

BRIGHT FUTURE: Why HDR is the big trend in televisions

Consumer electronics is a lot like track and field. Every time the new star steps up to the starting line, it’s about pushing that little bit further than anyone else.

The trouble for consumers is that pushing the high jump bar up another notch means getting your head around a new technology.

In the past few years TVs have come in either 4K or OLED _ the first format is all about mind-blowing resolution, the second technology is about a truly rich colour palette and blacks that defy description but demand excessive capitalisation. They are BLACK.

When the two came together with OLED 4K TVs, a weary consumer might have hoped things would have paused for a while. But this year the new technology that every TV maker is spruiking: HDR.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, gives the image an improved contrast range, just like the HDR mode one your camera incorporates blends different exposures to create an image that has greater detail in both the bright and dark parts of a scene.

Having HDR on a TV means you can see more detail when the scene has both bright and dark areas, like a dark room with bright light coming in a window.

The catch with a HDR TV is, yet again, one of device coming first and content coming later, albeit sooner rather than much later.

Slim at the top ... the LG EF950T side on.

To make the most of the HDR features of the new generation of TVs you need HDR content, and that is coming through Ultra HD Blu-rays with HDR and Netflix.

If you raced out and bought LG’s previous model OLED TV, the curved EG960T, you can upgrade that unit’s software so you’ll be able to watch HDR streaming content. But if you want to connect to a HDR-capable Blu-ray player, you will need the HDMI 2.0a port in this year’s model.

At this stage, given the limited content, buying a HDR TV is about ensuring your purchase is future proof, or at least future proof for the immediate future.

Even with content that is not HDR, the combination of OLED and 4K in the EF950T is so compelling. Colours really pop because the blacks are so black and the 4K resolution is almost disarming, particularly when you see every pore in intimate detail in a close up on an actor’s face.

One of the annoyances in watching sport on a big-screen TV is the juddering of movement. This has Enhanced Motion Clarity, which is yet another TV term to get your head around, which means the pixels turn on and off on this LG OLED 1000 times quicker than it does on an LED or LCD display.

That means that the EF950T eliminates the juddering problem as good as anything on the market.

When you are comparing high-end products from competing companies, the differences can be small. But one difference that where LG stands ahead of its competitors is in its WebOS 2.0 interface that means navigation is pointing the “magic remote” at the panel of tabs across the screen. It’s simple and intuitive.

If point and click isn’t your thing, the remote also has voice control.

In our testing we watched a range of 4K and HD content, both from streaming services and form an Ultra HD Blu-ray. We watched sport, we watch drama and we even watched Terminator Genisys again just to be able to ensure Arnold Schwarzenegger sucks at acting even in 4K with HDR.

This is the TV you want to buy. The only thing stopping you is that something this good doesn’t come cheap.

LG EF950T 4K OLED

LG EF950T 55-inch $5499

LG EF950T 65-inch $8999

5/5 / www.lg.com.au

Originally published as The LG EF950T is a 4K Ultra HD OLED television with HDR — and deserves to be on your wishlist