LG’s Evo G4 was one of our favorite TVs of last year, featuring an OLED panel that showed fantastic color and put out a surprising amount of light with pixel-level precision for an incredible picture. Brightness has been one of the biggest weaknesses of OLED TVs, and the G4 managed to overcome it. Its replacement, the LG Evo G5, gets much, much brighter while showing even wider color. It’s one of the best-looking TVs we've tested to date, justifying its high price ($3,399.99 for the 65-inch model we tested) with absolutely stunning picture quality. Accordingly, it's our new Editors’ Choice winner for OLED TVs.

Design: Sleek and Made for Mounting

Like LG's previous G (short for Gallery) series TVs, the G5 is designed primarily to be hung on the wall and comes with a flat, nearly flush wall mount. While smaller screen sizes of the G4 come with a table stand, the G5 only ships with a wall mount, regardless of size. LG sent a table stand with the G5 we received for testing, but you can expect to spend an extra $150 to $200 on the stand, depending on screen size.

The nearly edge-to-edge screen has no bezel, just a thin brushed metal band running along the edges. The clean lines are only broken up by a small rectangular bump in the middle of the bottom edge for the infrared sensor, far-field microphones, a tiny mic mute switch, and a single multipurpose control button.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Ports sit on the left side of the back of the TV in a reverse L-shaped recess. Two HDMI ports (one eARC) and a USB port face left, while two more HDMI ports, two more USB ports, an optical audio output, a 3.5mm IR blaster port, an Ethernet port, and an antenna/cable connector face down.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

A new Magic Remote is included with the G5, replacing LG’s earlier curved and glossy remote with a slim, rectangular, matte black wand. It keeps all of the features of the previous Magic Remote, including air mouse functionality that lets you wave the remote to move a cursor on the screen and a circular navigation pad with a scroll wheel in the middle. Various menu buttons sit around and above the pad, with a pinhole microphone near the top between the power and help buttons. Volume and channel rockers reside in the center of the remote, with dedicated service buttons for Alexa, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, LG Channels, Netflix, and Sling below.

Interface: WebOS With Alexa

LG’s WebOS smart TV platform drives the G5. It covers most major streaming services including Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Disney+, Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube, though it lacks Crunchyroll.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

It also supports both Apple AirPlay and Miracast/WiDi for streaming directly from your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC. WebOS features the Amazon Alexa voice assistant, which you can use hands-free via the TV’s built-in far-field microphones or by speaking into the mic on the remote.

Picture Quality: One Blazing OLED

The LG Evo G5 is a 4K OLED TV with a 120Hz refresh rate. It supports high dynamic range (HDR) in Dolby Vision, HDR10, and hybrid log gamma (HLG). It has Wi-Fi 6E network connectivity and an ATSC 1.0 tuner for over-the-air broadcasts. It does not have ATSC 3.0 for 1080p and 4K broadcasts.

We test TVs using a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software. Light output is usually the weakest aspect of an OLED TV, and we were shocked by the G5’s numbers. In HDR Filmmaker mode, the TV puts out a modest 357 nits with a full-screen white field, but reducing the white field to 18% bumps up that peak brightness to 1,608 nits. It gets even brighter with a 10% white field, putting out a blazing 2,386 nits. That’s incredible for an OLED TV, surpassing the G4 (1,203 nits 18%, 1,510 nits 10%) by a large margin. It’s still not as bright as some mini-LED TVs we’ve tested, like the Hisense U8N (2,755 nits, 18%), but unlike those TVs, OLED panels can brighten and dim on a per-pixel level and show no light bloom whatsoever. Moreover, perceived increases in brightness become less and less apparent as a light source gets brighter, so the visual difference between a 600-nit and a 1,600-nit TV is much more noticeable than the difference between a 1,600-nit and a 2,600-nit TV, for instance.

HDR Cinema mode puts out slightly less light on paper (340 nits full-screen, 1,578 nits 18%, 2,325 nits 10%), though that doesn’t translate to most content. As explained below, video footage we watched on the G5 appeared much brighter in Cinema mode than in Filmmaker mode. It’s not entirely clear why this is the case, but it's likely that the Filmmaker picture mode simply skews slightly dimmer for most content to give a more restrained, director-intended look. The difference in measured light output between Cinema and Filmmaker modes is negligible, and you can effectively treat them as appropriate for well-lit and dark rooms, respectively.

(Credit: PCMag)

The above charts show the G5’s color levels in Filmmaker mode with an SDR signal compared against Rec.709 broadcast standards and with an HDR signal compared against DCI-P3 digital cinema standards. SDR colors and white levels in both SDR and HDR are nearly perfect. HDR colors are mostly spot-on, with greens and reds actually reaching a bit further than the color space. Magentas run a little warm, but not significantly. 

BBC’s Planet Earth II looks incredible on the G5. In the “Islands” episode, the greens of leaves are varied and lush, and the sunlight peeking through them blasts out light. Fine details like fur and bark can be seen clearly even when they’re very dark and in shade. It’s a lifelike picture that makes the nature footage look like you’re viewing it through a window and not a TV.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The party scenes in The Great Gatsby really show off the G5's strong contrast. White shirts and balloons stand out naturally against black suits and really pop under direct lights, showing an impressive range. The black suits themselves look incredibly dark, while details like their cuts and contours come through. Skin tones are natural and balanced, and flourishes of blues and oranges nicely stand out.

Demonstration footage on the Spears & Munsil Ultra HD benchmark disc also looks fantastic on the G5. Highlight details are preserved in bright, snowy nature shots, letting wisps of clouds and the outlines of distant hills be easily seen against the white skies and laying snow. Dark trees backlit by dawn and dusk light not only show loads of shadow detail but even retain their green color (when nearly all saturation is usually lost by LED TVs). Colorful objects against completely black backgrounds are vibrant and bright, while the backgrounds remain perfectly black with no light bloom whatsoever. The lack of light bloom is standard for OLED TVs, so the G5's brightness being right up there with a good LED TV is what really makes it stand out.

Gaming: Responsive Performance, With All the Trimmings

For gaming, the G5 has a 120Hz native refresh rate with variable refresh rate (VRR) up to 165Hz, and is AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync certified. It’s very responsive, too; using a Leo Bodnar 4K Video Signal Lag Tester, the G5 showed an input lag of 4.8 milliseconds with a 1080p120 signal and 12.9ms with a 4K60 signal. In both cases, that’s less than a frame of latency, which qualifies it as a standout choice for gaming.