LG C1 OLED TV screen quality to enthuse the most devoted of gamers

LG has been the trailblazer with its OLED TV sets. OLED, or organic LED TVs, have crystals that emit their own light.

LG C1 OLED 4K smart TV offers a faster screen refresh rate, up to 120 frames a second.

LG has been the trailblazer with its OLED TV sets. OLED or organic LED TVs, have crystals that emit their own light. Displays don’t need backlighting and each pixel lights up individually, which means fantastic contrast and sharp lines between light and darker regions of the screens. OLED displays have beaten rivals for image quality, but you pay a premium price for them.

In 2021, OLED faces tougher competition from new microLED or mini LED screens which approximate OLED quality but at a cheaper price. Samsung has an 110-inch wall microLED set with 24 million self-emitting red, green and blue LEDs. Hisense and TCL have gone the mini LED path with screens with huge numbers of tiny LEDs.

The challenge is out for OLED to go a step further. With the LG C1, which I have been trialling, LG uses an advantage of OLED displays to offer a faster screen refresh rate, up to 120 frames per second. The claim is that OLED can achieve this more easily on a big TV without being burdened with backlighting such as with mini LED.

Showing the different quality of an old 4K set Vs the LG C1 OLED. I zeroed in on the 'T' in the news banner

The image definition and edges are clean in the LG C1 OLED smart TV. The image was taken with an ordinary smartphone camera and zoomed.

The edges around the T look ragged on my old 4K TV.

For gamers it means their LG C1 TV can deliver the super-fast refresh rates of a gaming monitor, with smoother action and more responsiveness. Gaming monitors can offer 240Hz or higher, but 120Hz is more than good enough unless you are at the serious competitive edge.

Gaming is a big factor in 2021 TVs for several reasons. First the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are relatively new to market if you manage to get your hands on them. Gaming also is increasingly popular due to the pandemic and people more at home.

Samsung addressed gaming early this year with its Neo QLED TVs offering a wide game view and a game bar. The game bar offers metrics such as current refresh rate and input lag, and you can alter the screen aspect ratio.

The LG C1 supports Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync which means the TV‘s refresh rate can match the game’s frame rate, provided you have a compatible graphics card in your connected PC or gaming laptop. That’s a better visual experience.

Accenture this year valued the gaming industry at greater than $US300bn, which it says is more than the combined markets for movies and music. While most of this is mobile gaming, TV makers ignore the gaming market at their peril.

The C1 delivers the screen quality we’re accustomed to with beautiful OLED displays. I took close-up photos of the C1 and my old five-year-old 4K TV at home and you can see the difference in the image quality. There is no comparison.

You can turn the LG C1 into a piece of artwork when you're not using it.

There’s more to the C1’s performance as a regular smart TV. But I am not a big fan of LG webOS smart TV interface these days, having experienced the newer interfaces of Google, Samsung and Hisense.

The apps on the main menu appear in a single row across the screen which means a lot of sideways scrolling if you have a sizeable list. On other sets you get sample content as you scroll through main menu apps but with webOS only some apps offer this when you scroll further down the main menu.

There are some nice touches such as the visually appealing home dashboard where you keep track of your HDMI devices, connected sound and media servers in one spot. I could link to my Philips Hue hub and control my home lights from the remote here.

The C1 supports all of Amazon Alexa, Google Home and LG ThinQ voice assistants and there is a button to invoke each of them on the remote.

The TV comes with an art gallery so you can turn your TV into an artwork, akin to what Samsung offers with The Frame.

LG offers its magic remote with its signature cursor; it’s a large and reasonably heavy remote but well set out with dedicated Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Movie buttons. There are smaller, more elegant remotes on the market.

In the end I can’t fault the C1’s OLED display which delivers fantastic image quality; my only beef is the menu system with better alternatives by other manufacturers nowadays. It’s time for an overheal of that, LG. Nevertheless this is a great TV.

Current prices on LG Australia’s website are $2476 (48-inch), $2778 (55-inch), $3776 (65), $7499 (77) and $9499 (83).