LG G5 OLED evo hands-on review: gaming on the brightest OLED TV I’ve ever seen
Exceptionally brighter
Pros:
✅ ☀️ 3x brighter highlights and 40% brighter white window vs last year
✅ 🏃🏻♂️ Faster 165Hz refresh rate
✅ 🎮 G-Sync, FreeSync, and VRR support for all game consoles and PCs
✅ 🪞 Glare-reducing anti-reflective coating
Cons:
❌ 🤑 Pricing starts at $2,499 for a 55-inch and up to $24K for a 97-inch set
❌ 🫥 No TV stand included with any screen sizes, sold separately
The LG G5 is shaping up to be the best OLED TV ever. LG is promising its flagship TV is 3x brighter than last year’s LG G4. Plus, it’s upping the refresh rate to 165Hz and adding Xbox Cloud Streaming to make the TV even better for gamers. There are also new AI features – but before you groan, they make LG G5 the most user-friendly TV with an automatic user account and a streamlined picture calibration process.
🤏 Thinner than a picture frame. The LG G5 hugs close to the wall more tightly than any other TV I’ve ever seen. That’s due in large part to LG’s one-wall design and just how absolutely thin it is. The TV measures only 0.3 inches thick, making it even thinner than most picture frames or even a painting canvas. Interestly, LG is adding a new Always Ready mode that will display AI generative art, so it could be a new competitor to the equally thin Samsung Frame Pro TV.
☀️ 3x brighter. LG has outfitted the G5 with a new four-stack OLED panel with Brightness Booster Ultimate to bring the biggest 3x times brightness increase we’ve seen from the company’s (or any) OLED TVs in years. Even with a mostly white screen, LG is promising a 40% increase in brightness. Essentially the tech behind this new panel is it’s a tandem OLED like in the new iPad but instead of just two display panels over each other, the LG G5 has one red and green OLED panel and two blue OLED panels. The difference in vibrance looks noticeable in the image above, but it’s even more staggering when you see it in person, believe me.
👾 165Hz gaming. The LG G5 has a bumped native refresh rate up to 165Hz. While it’s not the first TV to introduce this, it’s one of the few to support Nvidia G-Sync, FreeSync Premium Pro, and VRR, so won’t see any noticeable frame rate peaks and drops no matter which gaming device you have plugged in. Only TVs from the LG’s OLED evo lineup offer G-Sync support; so the LG G5, B5, C5, and M5 will pair super nicely with Nvidia’s new graphics cards like the RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti.
🎮 Console-ready. Of course, the LG G5 is equally designed for console gamers with its Game Optimizer features. Launch any game puts the TV into auto-low latency mode and activates VRR for the quickest and most responsive picture. Pressing the options button on the remote control while playing any game will bring up an overlay showing the frame rate, and whether VRR is activated, plus quick options to adjust the black levels and genre-based picture presets. Going into the Game Optimizer submenu gives you an even longer list of options to set contrast, highlights, and more picture and sound options.
🕹️ Game Portal. LG is also tripling down on gaming with a new Game Portal. It’s basically a new hub for streaming games and games you can play with just the remote control. We got to play Pac-Man with the remote. There are also other classics like Wheel of Fortune, Tetris, and SpongeBob SquarePants Bounce. LG also says it will add Xbox Cloud Streaming to its TVs soon, where it will join Nvidia GeForce Now and Amazon Luna, among other services.
🤖 AI on board. LG is also injecting AI into its TVs, and a lot of the new features definitely seem to improve the user interface. For starters, you can just speak to the TV, and it will automatically switch the home screen to your user profile. This includes reorganizing your app icons and swapping show/movie recommendations to those catered for you. Beyond that, there’s a new AI chatbot you can ask to change TV settings without any menu diving, and it will also link up with Microsoft Copilot+ for more complex queries like planning a seven-day Paris vacation.
🎨 AI-powered picture calibration. You can also use AI to help you adjust picture quality, which is the best AI-enhanced feature I’ve ever seen. Instead of adjusting picture quality with sliders, LG’s AI will show you a series of images with different contrast, vibrance, brightness, and darkness, and develop a final picture profile based on the images you choose. That greatly simplifies picture calibration, especially for everyone who doesn’t want to go through the whole technical process with a spectrometer or spectrophotometer and pattern generator.
🪞 Fewer (but not no) reflections. The LG G5 still features a glossy screen but it has a new anti-reflective coating that claims to reduce any reflected light down to 0.6%. We saw how well it competed with the Samsung S95D QD-OLED 4K TV’s almost matte coating, and as you can see, the Samsung TV basically became washed out with almost gray-colored blacks. There were still a few reflections you could see on the LG G5, but nothing overtly distracting. Of course, this was an extreme case with two massive floodlights pointed toward the ceiling, no one is going to watch TV with that type of lighting – let alone have it at home.
🤑 Oof that’s pricey. The LG G5 is an expensive TV with 55-inch models starting at $2,499, the company just announced pricing on its 2025 OLED evo TVs. And expect to pay $3,399 or $4,499 for a decent 65-inch or 77-inch size screen too. This model tops out at 97-inches for $24,999, that’s more expensive than an 8K television! Of course, you’ll likely want to wait for deals as the previous LG G4 sits around an $2,199 for an 55-inch model that launched at $2,599.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
I'm really hoping the colors on this live up to the hype. The colors on the QD-OLED sets are vastly better than the WOLED on the previous gens of C & G-level sets. I have a C2 and enjoy it, but seeing the colors on the Samsung S90/95 series makes me want that next level. Competition is the mother of innovation (and lower prices) so hopefully this is a win all around.