LG C3 OLED TV Review _ Buy Now, or Wait

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enOne month from now as I record this video LG will have announced the successor to the TV I'm  about to review for you yep I've never before reviewed a TV so late in the year that's 2023  for you but as it turns out I think right now is the perfect time to be talking about the LG  C3 OLED TV so let's get into it welcome back everyone I'm Caleb Denison and it has been  one heck of a year talking about TVs we spent a lot of time talking about the absolute best  OLED TVs you can buy as well as the best LED TVs you can buy including the best bang for your buck  models on the market the LG C3 kind of sits in the middle of all that discussion with the Sony  A80L and the Samsung S90C flanking it well and apparently the Samsung S89C is in there  too but more on that in a bit now now the LG C3 offers like I don't know 90% of the performance  of those super premium super expensive TVs but at a much more approachable price again within  the premium TV sphere today we're going to talk about why you should or perhaps should not buy  the LG C3 and stick around to the end because after we do that we're going to talk about why  the LG C3 is itself a symbol for what LG needs to do in 2024 specifically with the  model that will eventually replace this TV what I'm presuming will be called the LG C4OLED so let's get into it out of the box the LG C3 delivers a lot of wow factor it's designed so  that most of the electronics are tucked into a little bump out toward the lower third of  the TV's backside this leaves the impossibly thin panel up top sitting proudly to while  your friends now unlike the stepup G3 OLED which comes with a wall mount in the Box the C3 comes  with a tabletop stand so if you do want to mount it you'll need to buy a mount separately also  in the box is LG's magic motion remote along with some product literature and that's about  it attaching the TV stand is a piece of cake and while you may be tempted to hoist this thing up  onto your media cabinet alone I urge you to get some help see I did because you're going to SP  a fair chunk of change on this thing and you know accidents happen so don't let it happen to you now  in case you haven't gone TV shopping in a while LG TV ship with LG's webOS software running the  show if you've never owned a smart TV before I think you're going to get along with webos  just fine it's actually kind of fun but it's also very powerful and loaded with features too many  features if you ask me there's so much stuff here that it can eventually feel overwhelming  especially for someone just transitioning from an older TV the basic webOS setup is a piece of  cake onscreen prompts walk you right through the whole thing and after that there's quite a bit  to discover now you may find yourself having to approve updates all the time it seems like every  time I open Netflix there's an update to install and I'm all for having the latest and greatest  version of an app or operating system that's better than not supporting the TV and letting  things get old outdated and crusty and to LG's credit those updates are lightning fast I can't  even get mad about waiting on an update to watch content when the weight is so short but it's guys  it's like so many updates all the time anyway back to the setup as you let LG's webOS wizard  walk you through the process it's going to ask you about AI picture this and AI sound that you can  give these a try but since I'm kind of a purist I prefer to leave these up options disabled also in  the past I have not had the best luck with the AI sound feature uh no hard no it often creates this  wash of fake surround sound which I don't care for and that has the unintended consequence of  washing over the dialogue from time to time and as for AI picture I don't personally care for  the results most of the time but that doesn't mean you won't love it so feel free to play  around with it you can turn it on and off at your discretion there's also a wizard that attempts to  figure out what kind of picture profile you may prefer whether you might want the standard mode  or the Filmmaker mode or whatever it will create a custom picture profile for you by putting up a  bunch of slides you pick the two images that you like best out of the six that are on display and  after you've done this several times it comes up with what it thinks you might want to watch  now I like the idea that LG has here where it's basically coaching people to select uh picture  preset rather than just go with the default out of the box settings however I don't like the result  that it ends up offering so frankly I would skip this part if I were you one thing you absolutely  need to do though no matter what picture profile you pick is disable the Eco settings because if  you don't you are not getting all the brightness and contrast that you paid for here's what that  looks like out of the box the TV will be in an auto power saving mode now you can disable  this by selecting any other picture preset for SDR I recommend Cinema or Filmmaker mode in HDR  Cinema mode is my preference Cinema home is a bit brighter just know that you'll need to disable  motion smoothing if you don't like it because it is turned on by default in cinema home then  you need to go into settings General and Energy savings and here you can turn this off to unlock  the brightness potential of the TV now while the basic get up and running running setup is a breeze  I'm still frustrated with how long it takes to get your preferred picture settings implemented across  apps and HDMI inputs there's an apply setting to all inputs option here that makes you think that  your SDR HDR and Dolby Vision picture modes will be implemented across apps and all the HDMI inputs  but it is not it just means that your customized version of Any Given picture mode let's say like  I did you adjust Filmmaker mode a little a little bit it makes sure that that adjusted version of  Filmmaker mode or whatever will be available to you in other inputs and apps you still have to  select the picture mode that you want for SDR HDR and Dolby Vision on each of the four HDMI inputs  so even though I made those three selections on HDMI 1 I had to go in and do it again for HDMI 2  three and four that means that for the HDMI inputs alone I had to make 12 picture mode selections  and you have to do it for apps too thankfully you don't have to make selections for each individual  app for example once you customize Dolby vision for Netflix that same Dolby Vision picture mode  will be used for Max and Disney plus but you still have to do SDR HDR and Dolby Vision selections for  apps meaning that you have to do a total of 15 individual picture preset selections across all  sources for this TV and while that allows more customization I guess I think it's a huge hassle  other TV platforms copy your preferences across HDMI inputs and apps and I way prefer that and  I think it's definitely the best user experience for most customers I mean getting folks to adjust  their picture mode is already difficult enough telling them they have to do it 15 times that's  just no good anyway once I got the C3 all set up and let it run some content for a while I dove  into measuring it which brings us to a segment I like to call numbers for Nit-Nerds numbers  for Nit-Nerds is where we dive into measurement results and talk about what they mean if you are  not interested in the nerd stuff please skip ahead using the timestamps that we have down  below this video I'll be talking about the real life performance of this TV uh when we're done  with this section okay so starting with Peak brightness I maxed out all of the brightness  settings for SDR that means brightness setting at 100 and Peak brightness set to high and I was not  at all surprised to measure Peak brightness at 400 nits in SDR with a 10% window and 150 nits  full screen white that's very respectable for any TV and especially for an OLED in HDR I got  800 nits from a 10% window and again 800 nits using the real life HDR Peak highlight test on  the Spears and mle dis SDR color measurements came in looking excellent but not when I had  the brightness settings maxed out I saw just a couple of color errors up in the Delta E of 8  neighborhood with all those brightness settings maxed out but as soon as I restored Filmmaker  mode to its default settings color measurements were outstanding in HDR color measurements were  also excellent with errors only in the absolute brightest and totally darkest colors showing me  what I already know about WRGB OLED which is that low luminance colors stray from being absolutely  accurate and the brightest colors don't remain as pure as we'd see from a QD-OLED keep that in  mind for later in terms of the two-point white balance in SDR it was just about perfect out of  the box in HDR though the errors barely tipped over the technically visible neighborhood but  not by a whole lot I ended up having to knock the green down in the twoo white balance to get to a  perfect D65 white point as you can see here now I do not recommend you mimic these settings on your  own C3 as it's entirely possible these settings could do more harm than good on your TV given  that any two TVs are rarely the same our motion test showed the LG C3 doing a very admirable  job with motion resolution just a bit of stutter apparent in 24 FPS content due to the OLED panel's  instant response time this is totally normal I do think that Sony's left and lighter handed motion  smoothing for cinematic content is preferable LG's Real Cinema setting introduces more soap  opera effect than I'm personally willing to tolerate but you may feel very differently about  that tone mapping appeared excellent using both 1,000 and 4,000 nit patterns with no excessive  clipping in the brightest areas now this is a good sign for preserving highlight detail but  I'll be checking that in real world content momentarily so as a recap by the measurement  the LG C3 is a stellar performer definitely what you should expect from a premium TV and  the good news is that the measurements are a good indication of what you'll get when watching realcontent LG C3 is just an outstanding OLED TV I don't think we should be surprised by that the  C Series is always been excellent its 800 nits of peak HDR brightness is more than enough for  moderate lit to dark rooms in fact if you're putting your TV in a dedicated media room I  think the C3 is a better choice over the brighter MLA equipped G3 TV you just don't need the super  Juiced brightness of the G3 If You're Building A specialized media room or home theater all  of the demo content I viewed looked outstanding LG's processing has come a long way in the past  few years and is dangerously close to Sony's processing Sony will tend to preserve color  accuracy over brightness punch so while the LG C3 may not be as technically color accurate as a  Sony OLED it's got a brighter punchier vibe yet it stops short of over brightening the picture  which we've seen with some competing oleds the LG C3's preservation of bright highlight detail  was solid and its shadow detail preservation is particularly good especially compared to LED TVs  where Shadow detail is sometimes sacrificed in the effort to get the truly Inky blacks that OLED TVs  just pull off naturally really folks this TV is an absolute treat to watch and I have no problem  recommending it to anyone hell this TV replaced the Sony a95 L as my daily TV and I don't miss  that much more expensive Sony QD-OLED nearly as much as I thought I would I love the LG C3 it  looks amazing make no mistake it does just about everything right it is almost a slam dunk almost  see there's just one big problem here LG has real competition this year so let's talk about  that let's take a look at the pricing of the C3 among its closest competition keeping in  mind the prices are definitely subject to change especially in the coming months the 65 inc3 model  reviewed here comes in at $1600 the Samsung S90C which is a QD-OLED TV comes in at $1,600 and Sony  A80L which uses the same panel as the C3 but has Sony's processing and Google TV built in comes in  at just $100 more $1,700 2 to three years ago the LGC series stood alone it was significantly less  expensive than the Sony competition and QD-OLED didn't exist yet so it was a slam dunk choice  for anyone wanting an OLED TV but not needing to go go to the absolute topof thee line like the  LG G Series the LG C series doesn't stand alone anymore if you want the best color brightness and  color purity the Samsung S90C delivers that if you want the most cinematic look with the best  motion resolution and slightly better upscaling that's what the Sony A80L offers I do still think  that the LG C3 is perhaps the best gaming TV you can buy I trust wrgb OLED TV is a bit more than  QD-OLEDs when it comes to long-term Burnin risk and the fact that LG's TVs offer four HDMI 2.1  inputs means it will be favored over the Sony A80L by some Gamers guys what I'm getting at is that I  think LG needs to consider dropping the price of the C Series if Samsung and Sony are coming  to the market with competitive TVs that have their own advantages at the exact same price  then in order for the C Series to regain its no Riner just buy it status it's going to need to  undercut the competition on price and honestly I feel like LG should be able to do that by now LG  dominated the OLED TV market for about 10 years its sister company LG display makes the panels  which means that LG electronic should be saving a bit on panel cost and have a bit more margin  to play around with LG has also been making these OLED TVs for over 10 years now and I feel like its  efficiency and scalability in terms of production should contribute toward being able to lower the  price a bit plus we have much less expensive mini LED TVs now offering higher brightness and black  levels that are dangerously close to OLED LGC series oleds just need to make a more compelling  case going forward speaking of going forward I think LG could make the C4 more compelling if its  price comes in a bit lower than the C3 did when it was introduced but if the C4 does launch at a  lower price then the c3's price needs to drop even more as those 20124 models roll out and  that could make the C3 the no-brainer purchase that I really want it to be the LG C3 it is a  stellar TV and if you buy one you will absolutely love it especially those of you who don't watch  TV with sunlight just drenching your room the C3 offers the best picture quality you can get at a  more reasonable price than brighter pricier Ultra Premium oleds if you're the kind of Shopper who's  doing your research and weighing your options you'll want to consider whether the Sony A80L  or the Samsung S90C might be a better fit that's just not something that I've had to say in years  past thanks as always for watching everyone what do you think of my take on the LG C3 did I get it  right or did I miss something let me know down in the comments don't forget to like And subscribe  I'll see you on the next one and until then here's two other videos I think you might likeI didn't write myself an outro again\n"