Let’s face it. OLED TVs don’t get much more dramatic than this 77-inch flagship from LG. Currently available with a £12,000 saving – yes, you read that right; the price has been slashed for £20,000 to a mere £7,999 – this behemoth could be the best OLED bargain you’ll find in 2018.
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LG OLED G7 77-inch: Design
Obviously, you’ll need a fair amount of room to accommodate the OLED77G7V, but the result is a fundamentally different viewing experience from your bog-standard 55-incher. As it happens, 77-inches is also a great size to appreciate the extra resolution offered by UHD.
Cleverly, LG has managed to make the G7 look fairly minimalist, for something so maximalist. The set’s ‘picture on glass’ design, wherein the panel is bonded to a glass backing, is striking.
That panel is perilously thin and the set weighs a phenomenal 54kg, so so take care when handling.
The LG OLED G7 range
If 77 inches is just too much for your humble abode, the G7 is also available in a – ahem – 'tiny', 65-inch incarnation as the LG OLED65G7.
LG OLED77G7V review: Performance
Image fidelity is just outstanding; there's no other way to put it. The G7 combines pitch perfect blacks with nuanced hues. A polarising filter, used atop the existing anti-reflective filter, enhances black level performance, so if you watch a letterbox movie in a darkened room, the black bars top and bottom completely vanish.
Okay, that's the sort of thing that only TV reviewers notice or care about but it's indicative of how great the black levels are.
The 77-inch and 65-inch G7 TVs are both Ultra HD Premium certified and support HDR variants including HDR10, HLG and DolbyVision. There’s even a Technicolor HDR preset which emulates a studio grading suite. You know those services TV calibrators charge for? This preset does pretty much the same with a single button press.
A cutting-edge 10-bit panel, it makes a grand job of upscaling HD to 4K. The G7 looks excellent with regular Blu-ray as well as HD TV sources.
LG’s picture presets are generally extremely good, however there are small things which can be done to optimise image performance. Make sure that Just Scan is On rather than set to Auto in the Aspect ratio menu, as this simple change can eliminate patterning artefacts over ultra-fine 4K detail.
When watching movies on UHD Blu-ray, use the Cinema Home image preset with Trumotion Off and Dynamic Contrast set to low. The resulting image looks stunning. Personally, I find LG’s Sports mode a bit too garish, so you might want to give that a miss.
Wide band colour is rich and accurate. I didn’t spot any unwanted colour banding artefacts.
The OLED viewing angle is also far superior to what we generally see from LED LCD models. There’s no obvious sweet spot for optimum colour or contrast, which is good news for those sitting slightly off axis.
LG G7 77-inch review: features
As befits a premium flatscreen, the G7 has just about all the toys.
Smart connectivity is first class. LG’s webOS remains my favourite smart TV platform, offering scads of functionality without ever seeming cluttered or confusing. There’s a full raft of catch-up TV services too, as well as Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube (all available in 4K) and Now TV.
Version 3.5of webOS looks much like we’ve seen before with a familiar Launch Bar that offers access to apps, inputs and features, but this can be heavily customised to suit how you use the TV. Apps remain open and live even when you navigate away from them, which makes programme-hopping a lot more intuitive.
Connectivity is located in the pedestal base. This is where you’ll find a quartet of HDMI inputs, all HDCP 2.2 compliant for use with 4K source components, plus no fewer than 3 USBs and an optical digital output.
The G7 offers twin Freeview Play tuners or optional HD satellite tuners. There’s an integrated sound bar with a radiator-style grille, rated at 80W, which sounds great straight out of the box. There’s also a Dolby Atmos decoder onboard, which means you can bitstream out immersive 3D audio to a waiting Dolby Atmos soundbar or AV receiver.
The set ships with two remotes, one LG’s Magic cursor remote, the other more conventional. Bad news for 3D Blu-ray lovers (all 17 of you), though: the screen doesn’t support 3D. Bad times.
LG OLED77G7: The verdict
Until very recently, 4K OLED TV didn't get any more eye-popping than the OLED77G7, and it's only now being challenged by LG's own successor, the logically-named OLED77G8.
The G7's cinematic images remain mesmerising, and certainly do justice to the extra resolution offered by UHD, with images having depth and extraordinary detail. The TV is also finished to a high specification and looks positively mouthwatering. Even the integrated sound system is a step above the norm.
In short, I rate this big G7 as sensational. Perhaps size (and a 12 grand price cut) really is everything…
