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Review: LG 65UF950

Introduction and features

The 65UF950 is so good looking it's almost unfair - to both the competition and, as it turns out, you. For it's like a siren enticing you irresistibly towards the rocks…

Its 65-inch screen is suspended in a chassis that looks neither wide enough around the edges nor deep enough round the back to support such a large amount of screen acreage. Its rear, in particular, is so thin over much of its area that it almost had me thinking LG had sent me one of its OLED TVs by mistake.

But no, this really is an LCD TV.

And remarkably the screen actually feels quite robust in its super-skinny home - a testament to LG's uncompromising build quality.

In fact, with a cool white finish applied to its rear to seal the deal, the 65UF950 is for my money the best looking LCD TV I've seen in 2015.

The 65UF950 continues to impress with its connectivity, which includes that key modern day triumvirate of four HDMIs, three USB ports, and LAN and Wi-Fi network options capable of delivering both multimedia files from networked DLNA devices and access to LG's online services.

WebOS continues to be your friend

These services are accessed through LG's inspired and - judging by the copy-cat efforts of one or two rival smart TV systems we've seen this year, inspiring - webOS interface.

For the most part this follows the brilliantly slick, focussed, friendly design introduced last year, except that it now runs a bit quicker and includes both some new side menus to streamline navigation and a handy new customisable favourite programmes content option.

It's a pity LG hasn't managed to put right its ongoing lack of 4OD/All 4 and ITV Player apps - especially as all the other big brands have now got round this once common deficit in one way or another. But LG does offer Now TV when others don't, and also handles Amazon and Netflix in their 4K versions if your broadband speed is up to it.

As you'd expect from its crazily thin form, the 65UF950V uses an array of edge-mounted LEDs to light its screen.

These are delivered with a local dimming drive in tow, to deliver different amounts of light to different parts of the screen according to the demands of the content you're watching.

Wider colours sir?

Also present and correct is LG's take on 2015's must-have TV accessory, a wide colour gamut.

In this instance we've got a wide colour phosphor panel design rather than a quantum dot-like approach - though LG actually caters for both these colour systems within its latest so-called 'ColorPrime' LCD ranges.

Given the presence of ColorPrime technology and the fact that, at first glance at least, the 65UF950V looks seriously bright, it's perhaps surprising that at the moment, at least, LG isn't claiming that the 65UF950V will be able to handle high dynamic range (HDR) content via a later firmware update - despite such an update being announced for its EG960V OLED TVs.

This is a blow when you look at how many rival TVs on offer from the likes of Sony, Panasonic and especially Samsung ARE offering HDR support via upcoming firmware updates.

IPS worries

The only cause for concern on the 65UF950's spec sheet is its use of an IPS panel.

While these sorts of panel offer a slightly superior effective viewing angle to the rival VA panel types now being used by the vast majority of other TVs in the UK market, they've often struggled in the past to deliver a convincing contrast performance.

An issue which, if unfixed, could really start to become uncomfortable this year given the stellar contrast performances we've already seen from a number of the 65UF950's rivals.

On the plus side, though, IPS panels invariably come with passive rather than active 3D support built in. The passive approach means you shouldn't have to worry about the crosstalk ghosting and flickering problems associated with the active 3D system, and experience suggests that when you're talking about a native UHD TV like the 65UF950V you also don't feel too badly impacted by passive's reduced resolution versus active 3D.

Picture Quality

In a year where we've seen flat TV picture quality take a quantum leap forward - including with LG's own OLED TVs - the 65UF950V stands out for all the wrong reasons. Or to be more precise, a variety of mostly contrast-related reasons.

At the heart of what the 65UF950V gets wrong is the inability of its LCD panel to produce anything close to a deep, rich, natural black colour in its natural state. By which I mean that dark scenes look washed out and milky without any of the TV's contrast-boosting tools in play.

It's common, of course, for LCD TVs to suffer some degree of greyness where there should be blackness when running in their native states, but the extent to which the greyness afflicts the 65UF950V is pretty shocking when considered against some of its rivals this year.

The wrong tools

Of course, though, LCD technology's inherent difficulties with contrast mean that the vast majority of LCD TV owners will seldom if ever attempt to watch their TVs without using some sort of contrast-boosting processing system in play.

Be it a dynamic contrast system (where the whole lighting level is continually adjusted to suit the image content) and/or, ideally, a local dimming system where different sections of the screen's light are controlled individually.

We've seen numerous examples already this year of just how effective these sorts of systems can be, in fact.

On the 65UF950V, though - partly because of how hard they're having to work - these systems are anything but effective.

The main problem is light banding. Activate the local dimming system and yes, immediately the picture's general black level depth improves massively, with far less greyness hanging over proceedings. But what you now have to put up with instead is clearly defined vertical stripes of light running the full height of the picture wherever there's a bright object appearing against a dark backdrop.

Local dimming breaks bad

The cause of this distracting problem is painfully simple.

LG has apparently arrayed the 65UF950V's lights along the bottom edge of its screen, meaning they have to fire upwards to light the picture. So if you then introduce a local dimming system, each individually controllable cluster of edge LEDs will fire different amounts of light up the screen - and since LG appears to be making little or no effort to diffuse the effects of the resulting up-firing light differentials, you see the clearly defined light bars I mentioned.

Especially if you're watching a movie with a wider aspect ratio than the TV's 16:9 one, meaning there are black bars above and below the image.

You can minimise the striping issue by keeping the local dimming on its Low setting and adjusting the TV's settings to tame the image's contrast and brightness. But nothing I was able to do simultaneously tackled both the screen's native contrast woes and the striping problem anywhere near well enough to make the 65UF950V a rival for the likes of the Sony 75X9405C or any of the Samsung UHD TVs we've seen to date this year.

Don't sweat the bright stuff

The one bit of good news for the 65UF950V is that the sort of dark or mixed brightness content that causes it so much trouble doesn't crop up in everything you watch. Most non-drama TV shows prefer to stick with a determinedly bright palette, and there are even a few drama shows that seem determined to stick to the brighter side of life.

Most movies, though, will operate with a very dynamic contrast range at some point, and so will many of the most high profile dramas currently hitting the small screen.

And I'd say that there will be points in all of these high-contrast sources where the 65UF950V's images will become borderline unwatchable, regardless of what combination of picture settings you've ultimately settled on.

It must be said for the record that when the 65UF950V looks good, it tends to look very good.

Its brightness levels are exceptional, giving full rein to a colour palette of rich, dynamic saturations and some surprisingly effective tonal delineation that only starts to fail during dark scenes, when the set just doesn't have enough control over its light output to deliver uniformly effective toning.

Native UHD content looks superbly detailed and clean too, with little if any noise being introduced by the TV and plenty of colour subtlety on hand to keep pace with the sheer amount of pixels in the image.

HD upscaling

There's a slightly softer look to the 65UF950V's upscaled HD pictures than some may like; certainly you get a greater sense of sharpness and, perhaps, pixel density with the latest upscaling engines from Sony and Samsung.

But there's an argument to be made for the LG's slightly gentler, less 'shouty' approach - at least to the extent that it's very efficient at keeping noise out of the upscaled picture.

The 65UF950V is also a pretty effective handler of motion, managing to keep both blur and judder under reasonably decent control without making images look processed so long as you avoid the upper reaches of LG's TruMotion processing engine.

I'd also expected to have little but good things to report when I unleashed the 65UF950V on a selection of my favourite 3D Blu-ray discs - but unfortunately at this point LG's screen actually slipped back into my bad books.

3D isn't great either

For just as happened with the equivalent model from LG's 2014 TV range, the 65UF950V's 3D images are plagued by eye-catching amounts of crosstalk ghosting noise - despite this being something passive 3D technology was actually created to avoid!

The crosstalk doesn't cover the whole image to the same extent; it seems to effect certain areas much worse than others. Unfortunately one of the worst effected areas is the bottom central portion of the image, making it painfully hard to read subtitles.

The 65UF950V's 3D images do at least deliver on the brightness, colour richness and freedom from flicker passive 3D was designed for, but the crosstalk often ruins everything before you get chance to take the good stuff in.

Usability, Sound and Value

Thanks to LG's inspired webOS 2.0 smart platform the 65UF950V is for the most part a dream to use.

No other smart platform is savvier about getting you quickly and easily to the content you most want to watch. Even initial set up is about as much fun as it is ever likely to be thanks to the cartoon antics of LG's 'Bean Bird' character and the simple, well-explained way you're guided through all the key steps.

The addition of an exceptionally easy to establish favourite TV channels shortcut menu is a welcome touch, and LG's 'Magic' remote continues to impress for the most part with its point and click and menu 'wheel' combination - except that I do think the point and click element can expect a bit too much precision from the user at times.

LG has also listened to last year's reviews and attempted to better incorporate the TV's picture, sound and network set up menus into the WebOS menu environment. However, the way it goes about this feels a bit longwinded, so maybe one more tweak could be ushered into WebOS 3.0.

Overall, though, the 65UF950V is just about the state of the art where smart TV usability is concerned.

Sound

The best way to sum the 65UF950V's audio up is remarkably good by the standards of the truly super-skinny TV, though only middling to good when considered against some of the best TVs around today.

The Harman Kardon-designed speaker system and Auditorium stand design do a clever job of hiding the fact that the sound is coming from down-firing rather than forward facing speakers, particularly in the way sounds appear well placed on the screen and there's lots of treble detail clarity.

Vocals generally sound clear yet also reasonably naturally placed within their wider audio context, and there's remarkably little of the sort of mid-range cramping that I'd normally expect from such a 'barely there' chassis design.

LG has taken care, too, to ensure that the speakers can't be driven to the point where they start to phut or flat-out distort.

The one real pity is that the 65UF950V compounds its odd 3D picture problems with some equally odd 3D audio problems, as 3D movies sometimes appear suffer with distracting lip-synch problems that I couldn't completely remove via any of the provided audio tools.

Value

In a year where we've got Samsung asking you to hand over £6,000 or so for its flagship 65-inch TV and LG asking roughly the same for its 65-inch 4K OLED TVs, I guess £3,800 might not seem too much of an ask for a TV as gorgeously designed and feature-rich as the 65UF950V.

But the sad reality is that it's simply not a TV I would be happy buying for any money.

In fact, if you really don't want to give up on buying a webOS TV then I wouldn't be surprised if some of LG's cheaper, less spectacularly thin LCD TVs actually turned out to be much better all-rounders.

Verdict

The 65UF950V talks a serious talk. It's potentially the prettiest LCD (rather than OLED) TV of this or any season with its super-model skinniness and appealing combination of on-trend colours. It's beautifully built too, and its features appear to tick most of the right boxes (except for HDR support) with their combination of local dimming, a wide colour gamut and LG's brilliant webOS 2.0 smart TV platform.

Sadly, though, a mixture of the outstanding quality of other high-end TVs this year and a suspicion that the push for slimness with the 65UF950V has caused it to fall quite heavily at the all-important picture quality hurdle make it a no-go zone.

We liked

It's possibly the prettiest slim TV ever built, and it's packed with features.

These include a content-rich smart platform accessed through LG's peerless webOS interface, plus a wide colour gamut picture.

Pictures look bright and sharp with the right sort of material too - especially if that material is native 4K.

We disliked

Significant black level performance issues make dark scenes routinely uncomfortable to watch, there's no HDR support, 4K upscaling could look a touch sharper, and 3D suffers with both patchy crosstalk ghosting and audio synchronisation issues.

Verdict

The 65UF950V is a true successor to last year's UB950V series for all the wrong reasons, falling into almost exactly the same traps of unexpectedly poor 3D and alarmingly distracting contrast problems during dark scenes.

That LG could let such picture issues through the door last year seemed surprising, but for the brand to have fallen into exactly the same mistakes again this year feels downright careless.

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