LG SM9000 4K HDR TV Review _ The Price Is Nice, But Should You Buy

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back everybody I'm Caleb Denison for Digital Trends and today we're reviewing the lgsm 9000 series LED LCD TV I got the 65 inch model back there and we're gonna dive right into picture quality straightaway but before we do that I got a correction to make so if you didn't happen to watch the unboxing a basic setup video for this TV I suggest you do that click right up there it covers stuff like the TV's aesthetics and the user interface and what it's like to set up the television if you did however watch that video you probably caught me making a big ol mistake I suggest that this TV didn't have hdmi 2.1 features that is complete BS of course it does it has HDMI 2.1 spec across all of its HDMI inputs and therefore supports EARC variable refresh rate auto low latency mode that kind of stuff sorry about that I made a mistake LG actually I was one of the first people to find out from LG that they were doing this right ahead of CES and broken the news with everybody else of course I know this but I made a big mistake I had a brain fart alright so outside of HDMI 2.1 the key difference between this TV and LG's flagship right above it is that it doesn't have full array local dimming Pro it has full array local dimming but not the pro version which I suspect comes down to how many zones of local dimming it has will count those in a second outside of that everything else is the same it's got the alpha 7 gen 2 processor it's got nano cell technology so presumably you're getting better color at off angle has an IPS panel also helping with the better off angle viewing we're gonna test all that stuff but first let's check out how many zones it's got ok start counting count along with me here there's a total of 12 horizontal zones on this particular TV this is the spears and Munsell UHD benchmark test disc shout out to Stacy Spears entirely Pruitt for getting this to me so 12 zones horizontally not terrible I guess but what really shocks me is that there are only 4 zones across the top or vertically speaking do the math and that is 48 local dimming zones which is not a lot so I expect to see that reflected in black levels and halos now let's check screen uniformity we've got a 100 nits full-field white pattern here and there's definitely some vignetting going on in the corners it's not super heavy I've seen worse and also you see it less if you're sitting right in front of the TV but if you do go off angle you can see it more there's some vertical banding going on here I see three maybe four total it'll be interesting to see if this exposes itself when we watch real-world content now check this out this is a torture test for the local dimming system this is a star field and you can clearly see the splotchiness happening here that's the local dimming trying to keep up with what is admittedly a really hard thing to resolve but hey you watch Star Trek you watch Star Wars you're gonna see that kind of thing so I'm not really stoked about the full array local dimming on this TV at least with a torture pattern like this we'll take a look at some other content to see what this plays out like in real life now I want to take a look at how this TV is tone mapping HDR and here we're looking at a ramp where it pretty much washes out at around 1100 nits which is not to say it's hitting 1100 nits it's just taking any code value above 1100 nits all the way up to a thousand and just peeking it out as bright as it can get so I've switched over to my video forge pro from spectra Cal thanks for letting me use this guys this is an SDR and when you're off access you can definitely see quite a bit of blooming that's a product of just having four zones on the top let me switch this into HDR now we're in HDR and as you would expect with much brighter boxes we're seeing a whole lot more of this blooming around these white boxes and we'll see that in this other test pattern here as well again we're in HDR and you can see that a lot of what should be black is a little bit milky one last pattern I want to show you before we watch some really good stuff I'm not particularly impressed by this particular test pattern I'd expect to see a much more intense white in the middle even though this is SDR and then something odd is happening here where it's dropping out to black and then it's it's bumping it up back again here I suspect again that's a product of the local dimming system only having four zones across the seeing more or less the same thing with HDR although there is a slightly brighter center here but the ramp is just not as smooth as I'd want to see it and of course over here I'm seeing kind of a milky gray instead of a true black test patterns are great because they let us get really really granular with the TV but they don't tell the whole story sometimes what we see in test patterns we don't actually see in real life content so I want to look for a few things and right away I'm definitely seeing some vignetting happening over there so it does expose itself in certain situations where you have a big wash of color and it's easier to see that it's a little bit dimmer on the edges the color at first comes off as very bright and vibrant but I've noticed that with this TV the yellows have a little bit of a green hue to them it's just a little bit off I suppose you could fix that with a calibration but I'm not sure that this is the type of TV that somebody's going to call in a calibrator for now how about the halo that we saw in the test patterns does it bear out here well it's not often that you get an image like this which is stark black with something very bright in the middle going all the way down but I couldn't very clearly see the halo around that object now when the object gets a little bit bigger and there's less of a black canvas to look at what I've noticed is that's a whole lot less obvious this is a good example yes there is still a little bit of halo happening around this feather but it's much less pronounced than when you have a very small bright object on a very big black background and when there's no black background to contend with and you've got a full field of color it really pops it does a great job of that so I think there's a dazzle effect that you're gonna get so you're gonna check this TV out at your local electronics retailer this kind of footage is what you want to see something that goes back and forth between very dark scenes with bright objects and full field full-color scenes here's something that really caught me off guard we're gonna have some wind turbines come up check out the tips of the turbine blades they are shuttering like crazy there's a lot of stutter there and you can actually see it in the edge of this closed end shot of the turbine I totally wasn't expecting that and that makes me very concerned about fast-moving sports scenes I'm not sure that it's going to have the cleanest motion resolution here's another interesting thing that I'm seeing especially with all these bird shots that we have is that there's almost like a Maury effect happening in these areas where there's a lot of detail it kind of shimmers and shakes a little bit the processor is obviously having a difficult time taking care of all of these really intricate textures and colors that are happening on the screen right now we don't see that so much with something like this which is less complex and when in fact you have a still image like this there's some really nice detail happening and the highlights come off really nicely as well now let's talk about how it does with cable TV upscaling that's still primarily what a lot of people watch and it's not ever been that great we're talking about low bitrate content usually at about 720p so there's not a whole lot for the TV to work with to make it look better what I'm seeing here is kind of par for the course with upscaling first of all I noticing that the yellow again seems a little bit off just to my naked eye as for the resolution it's not seeing a whole lot of improvement here but that's par for the course most TVs upscale at about the same quality unless you're talking about a bargain-basement TV with really lousy processing it's doing the best it can with what it's got but is it as nice as what you're gonna stream from Netflix or put in a 4k blu-ray disc or even a standard blu-ray no absolutely not cable still looks kind of crappy so I really rate this TV over the coals and it's not exactly targeted at video files which is a good thing because I don't think it's a good TV for video files for the everyman who wants a big bright beautiful television for a reasonable price I think it suits that but of course there's other options out there a lot of the issues that I saw on this TV granted were granular things but I think they play into the overall video experience and I got to say I didn't see a lot of this with say the TC l6 series for instance so there's a lot going on for this TV HDMI 2.1 is a big deal I also like the webOS system fairly well and of course it's going to offer the Apple AirPlay 2 and homekit integration very shortly with a firmware update so there's a lot of fun stuff with this TV and look when you look at content like this big bright beautiful the TV presents it exceptionally well but if you're the sort of person who's going be in a dark room watching a lot of movies or a lot of sports not sure it's the best option if however you're a serious gamer give this TV a look you're gonna get hdmi 2.1 with variable refresh rate and auto low latency mode which is great for gaming has relatively low input lag also it's about a thousand bucks for a 55 inch and $1,400 for a 65 inch so definitely an option there overall I'm kind of conflicted there's some things here that have me going Matt you know because for the price I feel like you can do a little bit better but then again LG's got some specific features that attract certain folks so if you're in the market for this TV go check it out for yourself see what you think I'm gonna be middle-of-the-road on this one and say I'm not gonna necessarily recommend it but I won't discourage you from investigating it either thanks for watching everyone hit me up in the comments section down below I try to engage with you guys there you want to leave me a comment about what you liked about the video which it didn't ask me any questions I'll be there for you like subscribe hit that notification bell also check out this video that's the 75 inch 6 Series from TCL I think you want to see that and as always visit Digital Trends calm for the latest tech news and reviewswelcome back everybody I'm Caleb Denison for Digital Trends and today we're reviewing the lgsm 9000 series LED LCD TV I got the 65 inch model back there and we're gonna dive right into picture quality straightaway but before we do that I got a correction to make so if you didn't happen to watch the unboxing a basic setup video for this TV I suggest you do that click right up there it covers stuff like the TV's aesthetics and the user interface and what it's like to set up the television if you did however watch that video you probably caught me making a big ol mistake I suggest that this TV didn't have hdmi 2.1 features that is complete BS of course it does it has HDMI 2.1 spec across all of its HDMI inputs and therefore supports EARC variable refresh rate auto low latency mode that kind of stuff sorry about that I made a mistake LG actually I was one of the first people to find out from LG that they were doing this right ahead of CES and broken the news with everybody else of course I know this but I made a big mistake I had a brain fart alright so outside of HDMI 2.1 the key difference between this TV and LG's flagship right above it is that it doesn't have full array local dimming Pro it has full array local dimming but not the pro version which I suspect comes down to how many zones of local dimming it has will count those in a second outside of that everything else is the same it's got the alpha 7 gen 2 processor it's got nano cell technology so presumably you're getting better color at off angle has an IPS panel also helping with the better off angle viewing we're gonna test all that stuff but first let's check out how many zones it's got ok start counting count along with me here there's a total of 12 horizontal zones on this particular TV this is the spears and Munsell UHD benchmark test disc shout out to Stacy Spears entirely Pruitt for getting this to me so 12 zones horizontally not terrible I guess but what really shocks me is that there are only 4 zones across the top or vertically speaking do the math and that is 48 local dimming zones which is not a lot so I expect to see that reflected in black levels and halos now let's check screen uniformity we've got a 100 nits full-field white pattern here and there's definitely some vignetting going on in the corners it's not super heavy I've seen worse and also you see it less if you're sitting right in front of the TV but if you do go off angle you can see it more there's some vertical banding going on here I see three maybe four total it'll be interesting to see if this exposes itself when we watch real-world content now check this out this is a torture test for the local dimming system this is a star field and you can clearly see the splotchiness happening here that's the local dimming trying to keep up with what is admittedly a really hard thing to resolve but hey you watch Star Trek you watch Star Wars you're gonna see that kind of thing so I'm not really stoked about the full array local dimming on this TV at least with a torture pattern like this we'll take a look at some other content to see what this plays out like in real life now I want to take a look at how this TV is tone mapping HDR and here we're looking at a ramp where it pretty much washes out at around 1100 nits which is not to say it's hitting 1100 nits it's just taking any code value above 1100 nits all the way up to a thousand and just peeking it out as bright as it can get so I've switched over to my video forge pro from spectra Cal thanks for letting me use this guys this is an SDR and when you're off access you can definitely see quite a bit of blooming that's a product of just having four zones on the top let me switch this into HDR now we're in HDR and as you would expect with much brighter boxes we're seeing a whole lot more of this blooming around these white boxes and we'll see that in this other test pattern here as well again we're in HDR and you can see that a lot of what should be black is a little bit milky one last pattern I want to show you before we watch some really good stuff I'm not particularly impressed by this particular test pattern I'd expect to see a much more intense white in the middle even though this is SDR and then something odd is happening here where it's dropping out to black and then it's it's bumping it up back again here I suspect again that's a product of the local dimming system only having four zones across the seeing more or less the same thing with HDR although there is a slightly brighter center here but the ramp is just not as smooth as I'd want to see it and of course over here I'm seeing kind of a milky gray instead of a true black test patterns are great because they let us get really really granular with the TV but they don't tell the whole story sometimes what we see in test patterns we don't actually see in real life content so I want to look for a few things and right away I'm definitely seeing some vignetting happening over there so it does expose itself in certain situations where you have a big wash of color and it's easier to see that it's a little bit dimmer on the edges the color at first comes off as very bright and vibrant but I've noticed that with this TV the yellows have a little bit of a green hue to them it's just a little bit off I suppose you could fix that with a calibration but I'm not sure that this is the type of TV that somebody's going to call in a calibrator for now how about the halo that we saw in the test patterns does it bear out here well it's not often that you get an image like this which is stark black with something very bright in the middle going all the way down but I couldn't very clearly see the halo around that object now when the object gets a little bit bigger and there's less of a black canvas to look at what I've noticed is that's a whole lot less obvious this is a good example yes there is still a little bit of halo happening around this feather but it's much less pronounced than when you have a very small bright object on a very big black background and when there's no black background to contend with and you've got a full field of color it really pops it does a great job of that so I think there's a dazzle effect that you're gonna get so you're gonna check this TV out at your local electronics retailer this kind of footage is what you want to see something that goes back and forth between very dark scenes with bright objects and full field full-color scenes here's something that really caught me off guard we're gonna have some wind turbines come up check out the tips of the turbine blades they are shuttering like crazy there's a lot of stutter there and you can actually see it in the edge of this closed end shot of the turbine I totally wasn't expecting that and that makes me very concerned about fast-moving sports scenes I'm not sure that it's going to have the cleanest motion resolution here's another interesting thing that I'm seeing especially with all these bird shots that we have is that there's almost like a Maury effect happening in these areas where there's a lot of detail it kind of shimmers and shakes a little bit the processor is obviously having a difficult time taking care of all of these really intricate textures and colors that are happening on the screen right now we don't see that so much with something like this which is less complex and when in fact you have a still image like this there's some really nice detail happening and the highlights come off really nicely as well now let's talk about how it does with cable TV upscaling that's still primarily what a lot of people watch and it's not ever been that great we're talking about low bitrate content usually at about 720p so there's not a whole lot for the TV to work with to make it look better what I'm seeing here is kind of par for the course with upscaling first of all I noticing that the yellow again seems a little bit off just to my naked eye as for the resolution it's not seeing a whole lot of improvement here but that's par for the course most TVs upscale at about the same quality unless you're talking about a bargain-basement TV with really lousy processing it's doing the best it can with what it's got but is it as nice as what you're gonna stream from Netflix or put in a 4k blu-ray disc or even a standard blu-ray no absolutely not cable still looks kind of crappy so I really rate this TV over the coals and it's not exactly targeted at video files which is a good thing because I don't think it's a good TV for video files for the everyman who wants a big bright beautiful television for a reasonable price I think it suits that but of course there's other options out there a lot of the issues that I saw on this TV granted were granular things but I think they play into the overall video experience and I got to say I didn't see a lot of this with say the TC l6 series for instance so there's a lot going on for this TV HDMI 2.1 is a big deal I also like the webOS system fairly well and of course it's going to offer the Apple AirPlay 2 and homekit integration very shortly with a firmware update so there's a lot of fun stuff with this TV and look when you look at content like this big bright beautiful the TV presents it exceptionally well but if you're the sort of person who's going be in a dark room watching a lot of movies or a lot of sports not sure it's the best option if however you're a serious gamer give this TV a look you're gonna get hdmi 2.1 with variable refresh rate and auto low latency mode which is great for gaming has relatively low input lag also it's about a thousand bucks for a 55 inch and $1,400 for a 65 inch so definitely an option there overall I'm kind of conflicted there's some things here that have me going Matt you know because for the price I feel like you can do a little bit better but then again LG's got some specific features that attract certain folks so if you're in the market for this TV go check it out for yourself see what you think I'm gonna be middle-of-the-road on this one and say I'm not gonna necessarily recommend it but I won't discourage you from investigating it either thanks for watching everyone hit me up in the comments section down below I try to engage with you guys there you want to leave me a comment about what you liked about the video which it didn't ask me any questions I'll be there for you like subscribe hit that notification bell also check out this video that's the 75 inch 6 Series from TCL I think you want to see that and as always visit Digital Trends calm for the latest tech news and reviews\n"