LG offers TV with Dolby Vision in quest for mind-blowing experience

There are plenty of gimmicks in the smart TV world, but consumers need to tick all the boxes for a quality experience.

The LG comparison

The fact LG is selling a TV in India that repels mosquitos shows marketing strategies vary around the world. I dare say a TV that sends mozzies buzzing would do well in Northern Australia or where people view a TV outdoors.

The rest of us down under are locked into LG, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic and the like flogging us smart TVs boasting the most exquisitely perfect picture quality. It’s the rage.

LG not only offers ultra high definition (4K) resolution, and a claimed 64 times the colour variations of a standard HD TV. There’s also high dynamic range (HDR) which brings contrast within the brightest and darkest parts of a movie image. So when viewing a tree on a bright, sunny day, you should still see details of the dark foliage under it, or all variations of brightness in a fire scene.

LG says it goes one step further by offering Dolby Vision, a form of HDR which adjusts the colour and contrast of every single frame in a movie. It says the HDR used by competitors, HDR10, has one fixed contrast level for the entire movie so it is inferior. It’s the Betamax vs. VHS battle renewed.

I spent time last week with LG’s 65-inch UH950T LED TV. This premium LED model costs $5999 compared to LG’s OLED equivalent at $8999 which I reviewed early this year.

4K resolution on the review set.

I was keen to sample the Dolby Vision experience so I watched supplied USB clips from Jupiter Ascending, and streamed episodes of Marco Polo, Netflix’s only 4K, Dolby Vision compliant series to date, although a dozen are in the pipeline.

I have to say the quality of the Marco Polo stream was disappointing. Sure, it was good quality, but it was neither razor sharp nor was I blown away by detail in the darker regions of a scene — and this series has lots of dark and night-time scenes.

While they weren’t Dolby Vision, other 4K offerings from Netflix such as Marseille with Gérard Depardieu were stunning. I could see individual faces in the soccer crowd in the opening scenes. And upscaling of TV content on this TV was excellent, as I noted when watching a rerun of a rerun of Apollo 13.

My Marco Polo experience isn’t necessarily a complaint about the UH950T smart TV, the quality of Dolby Vision, the cinematography, Netflix, or the streaming speed of Telstra’s 4G wireless connection. But it affirmed you need all the boxes ticked to get a viewing experience that blows you away.

Marco Polo with Dolby Vision on LG’s 65-inch LED TV

I’m confronted with other issues when choosing a smart TV.

One I have little control over, that 16:9 movies made for cinema and modern TVs have differing dimensions, and you therefore get black bars on the screen, or you’re forced to distort or enlarge the image for a full-screen experience. Otherwise the 4K movie footprint on your screen is clear but small. That annoys me.

There are other issues such as the quality of the user interface, quick access to the program guide and fast scheduling of recordings and notifications, the reliability of scheduled recordings, and the choice of available apps. There’s whether the TV remote controls the Blu-ray player and other STBs, and whether you can swap quickly between TV inputs easily.

For the most part, the UH950T offers solutions as good as its competitors. LG uses webOS as its smart TV operating system, an OS bought from HP. This range is the debut of its latest version, webOS 3.0.

In this version the TV program guide loads really quickly. Some competitor TV guides don’t. And with LG’s magic remote, which projects a fast-moving cursor on the TV, you can quickly scan up and down the channels and schedule individual programs, series and notifications. Alternatively, you can use the excellent scroll wheel to scan the guide.

In fact you can use the scroll wheel to move up and down channels as you watch and to scan selections in the launcher across the bottom. It’s the best selection tool out there.

Marseille in 4K on LG’s 65-inch LED TV was sharp

If you move the cursor to the far right, two selectable tabs appear: “programmes” and “recommended”. The first shows what’s on each channel in column form, the second is a list of recommended viewing. “Recommended” brought up current programming on channels I had already watched, but nothing more. Hopefully this improves the longer you use the set.

There’s a magic zoom feature where you can zoom in on an area and take a screenshot. That’s not a big deal for me, but being able to stream mobile content to the TV is. LG offers at least two ways to do this. There’s the LG TV Plus app, but I found it could take 30 seconds or so for a selected video to appear. The other way was to use the TV Cast app which offers a more Google Chromecast-like experience.

The lack of a broad range of important apps is an issue for LG, as it is currently for Samsung. LG’s premium app collection offers Netflix, Stan, ABC iView, SBS On Demand, Google Pay movies, 13 choices in all, but there’s no catch up TV apps for commercial channels or Foxtel Play.

I counted around 120 apps in the general app collection. They included Spotlight, Plex, GoPro, BigPond TV, AFL Game Analyser, Al Jazeera, Dailymotion, Euronews, YouTube and Quickflix, but some others weren’t especially memorable.

There’s a universal search feature that displays content across sources. Those sources include current and scheduled TV programs, YouTube, apps and Netflix episodes. You can search too by voice. Searching for “movies with George Clooney” brought up Netflix and YouTube content with the actor while “movies with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock” brought up “Gravity” on Netflix. Searching “AFL” listed the remaining 4 matches of the current round as free-to-air viewing and the AFL Game Analyser.

LG’s wide gamut colour

In webOS 3.0, the apps, inputs, and other selections is in one long launcher menu along the bottom of the screen. This sounds unwieldy, but you can quickly left and right through this list with the scroll wheel. It makes for fast and efficient selection.

You can select up to 8 favourite TV channels to appear in the launcher too.

Like rival Samsung, LG lets you program the standard remote to operate attached STBs and gaming consoles. And a multi-view feature lets you watch TV on one side of the screen while viewing a movie, photos, playing music or launching premium content on the other.

I especially liked the LG TV Plus app. Not only could I control the TV and operate the cursor and touchpad from a phone, I could open TV apps from the phone app’s launcher screen. The app has a full keyboard that pops up when needed, for example when searching or web browsing.

And speaking of web browsing, LG offers a great implementation of it. There was no voice browsing but I could quickly type in a URL or search option with the keyboard and select items with the touchpad and cursor. You can save 5 websites to the launcher.

In the end, I can’t vouch for Dolby Vision on this set but I can say this is a great smart TV with an excellent viewing experience backed by a versatile operating system. LED isn’t quite the experience of LG’s premium OLED but it won’t burn as big a hole in your pocket.

LG UH950T LED smart TVs
Price: $5999 (65 inch), $3999 (55 inch)
Rating: 8/10

Upscaling of free-to-air TV quality