LG’s EG960T is as good as it gets on television

It doesn’t take a lot for me to be in my ‘Happy Place’ but LG has done its best to ruin this.

LG 4K OLED TV

It doesn’t take a lot for me to be in my Happy Place. Give me a TV, a nice chair, some snacks and beverages and I’m pretty set. But LG has done its best to ruin this, and lamentably I think it’s succeeded. With its EG960T, which can — without hyperbole — potentially be described as the best TV in the world, LG has taken my Happy Place and made it obsolete.

Just as taxis are no longer my preferred private car option, and just as my coffee at home is now exclusively made with an AeroPress, I think I’ve developed a thing for curves. And now everything else just doesn’t quite cut it.

That this is the “best TV in the world” doesn’t hit you the second you turn it on. I spent roughly four hours in a Sydney hotel room with this dreamboat and it was maybe two episodes of Daredevil in that I realised this is pretty much as good as things could get for now, bar a trip to the cinema. Going from HD to 4K, aka “Ultra HD”, isn’t the revelation that going from SD to HD was. And it’s definitely not a black-and-white to colour. But the improvement is real, the picture quality is real, and superhero Daredevil taking names and fighting crime in gorgeous 4K looked damned near real.

LG’s secret weapon is OLED, a technology that involves self lighting pixels, as opposed to the whole panel backlighting in LED and LCD TVs that you probably have at home. With OLED, pixels can switch on and off individually and produce light only where required. LG says this leads to a “perfect black”, and it’s hard to disagree. Daredevil is set largely at night, amidst the sordid crime and corruption of a fictionalised (but not that fictionalised) New York City, and the show’s black tones were impossible to fault. The screen’s sidekick feature is that it’s curved, which could be mistaken for a fad or marketing trick but does genuinely make the screen more immersive, if subtly.

Not only does everything look superb but the whole experience of using the TV and navigating around is effortless, and even fun. LG’s Web 2.0 operating system ties in live TV but also the Netflix, Bigpond and Quickflix apps, as well as the usual catch-up services and ways to stream your own content from a phone or computer. TV menus can often look ugly and like an afterthought, but not here.

The lack of good 4K content currently available is an issue for any early adopter, though rest assured it has a secure future, unlike, say, 3D. Ultra HD Blu ray discs and players are due out by year’s end, but Netflix is already streaming 4K content. The selection is currently barebones but this will hopefully improve as TV sales ramp up.

Now that I’m back home with my old TV life is OK, sure, but it and my “Happy Place” will never quite be the same.

David Swan travelled to Sydney as a guest of LG.