LG Signature W8 OLED TV review: Is this still the 4K TV to beat?

It's raining high-end TVs

Regardless of which research report you believe in, the current leaders in the premium TV market (i.e., screen size of at least 55 inches) are Samsung, LG, and Sony. According to research firm GfK, Samsung - the biggest TV maker in the world for the last 12 years - has a 40% market share of the premium segment. But this figure includes TVs that cost less than US$2,500. Take those away and IHS Markit argues that in 2017, it’s Sony and LG that are making the most money in this premium category, with a 36.9% and 33% revenue share respectively.

If you’re looking for a common thread between Sony and LG, it’ll be that both sell OLED TVs. Since Samsung stopped investing in OLED TVs in 2015, global sales of OLED TVs, led by LG, have actually been growing steadily. According to a June report by IHS Markit, OLED TVs sales have outpaced QLED TV sales in the past two quarters. If you were to drill down further, during this period, LG sold 864,000 OLED TVs, while Samsung sold 751,000 QLED TVs.

And it’s against the backdrop of this premium TV war that I segue into my LG Signature W8PTA OLED TV review.

What is the LG OLED W8PTA?

The highest-end model in LG’s 2018 TV lineup, the Signature W8PTA (simply called W8 henceforth) is the direct successor to the 2017 W7T. I’ve covered the new lineup in an earlier report, but in case you missed it, here’s a rundown of the new OLED TVs’ key features:

1.) α processor - LG has made a new processor for its 2018 TVs and has even given it a name: α (Alpha). There are actually two chips - α9 and α7 - with the former used primarily in the OLED TVs, including the W8.

A key benefit of the α9 processor is that it allows the TV to do a four-step noise reduction process. There’s a new color correction algorithm that supposedly expands the reference color coordinates seven-fold compared to last year’s processor.

2.) 120fps HFR - LG’s 2018 OLED TVs support 120 frames per second (fps) high frame rate (HFR) for a smoother picture than what’s possible on 60fps sets. However, because the TVs don’t have HDMI 2.1, you can only get HDR (HEVC) content from the TVs’ built-in streaming apps instead of from external, HDMI-connected sources.

3.) “4K Cinema HDR” - The new OLED TVs continue to support many types of HDR formats, such as the baseline HDR10, Dolby Vision, Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG), and Advanced HDR by Technicolor.

You may also see LG using words like “HDR10 Pro” and “HLG Pro” to describe their TVs - these are just marketing terms used to describe HDR content that have gone through on-device processing. For example, the TVs can take regular HDR10 signals and use proprietary algorithms to dynamically tone-map each frame to get better brightness and contrast.

4.) Dolby Atmos - The new OLED TVs again support Dolby Atmos object-based surround sound processing.

5.) WebOS + ThinQ AI - LG’s TVs in the last few years were powered by WebOS, and the 2018 models are no different. With the newest WebOS 4.0, you still get a launch bar for easy access to apps such as Netflix, YouTube, Toggle, and features such as Miracast Overlay and Screen Share.

The biggest addition is what LG calls “ThinQ AI”. At present, ThinQ AI on LG TVs refers mainly to their intelligent voice control system. For now, the voice commands are for changing of TV settings and simple web searches; but LG has promised a firmware update later this year that will enable more advanced searches. (For example, you can say, “Show me all the movies with Tom Cruise”, and the TV will display results from the web, YouTube, Netflix, etc.)

While we saw Google Assistant integration on the TVs at CES 2018, this integration is region specific, and right now it isn’t activated here in Singapore. The various LG folks I’ve spoken to all told me that the TVs are basically Assistant-ready, and they’re just waiting for Google to officially enable Assistant support on them.

Read more: This is how artificial intelligence works on LG’s 2018 OLED and Super UHD TVs.

6.) “Wallpaper TV” (W8) - Like last year’s W7, the W8 adopts a “picture on wall” design. You’ve to wall-mount it because it’s quite literally a sheet of OLED panel. All the chips and ports are housed in a separate, Atmos-capable speaker bar (4.2-channel, 60W) that you connect to the TV with a flat ribbon cable.

Key TV settings

The W8’s picture settings aren't very different from what we’ve on the W7, and our basic recommendations still apply. Without calibration, the ISF Expert Dark (for SDR) and Technicolor Expert (for HDR) picture modes returned the most accurate image. Depending on your room’s ambient light, the brighter ISF mode or Cinema mode may also work well for you.

Like before, a couple of picture modes additionally allow for 20-point and 2-point white balance controls, but I only needed to use the latter to get an accurate grayscale. For my set at least, I saw no need to fiddle with the color management system. The most significant adjustment I made was to set the OLED Light setting to 43, but that was to better fit my testing room’s lighting condition.

For what it’s worth, out of habit, I continued to use a gamma of 2.2. I also made sure that Sharpness, Dynamic Contrast, Super Resolution, Color Filter, Noise Reduction, MPEG Noise Reduction, and Motion Eye Care all turned down to the lowest level or off. I also turned off Dynamic Tone Mapping most of the time because I didn't want the TV to mess with the tone mapping - though I must say during the time I had it on, I didn't notice any weird effects. Think of Dynamic Tone Mapping as LG's own version of HDR10+.

In the past I’d check that HDMI Ultra HD Deep Color was turned on for HDMI-connected sources, but this step is now redundant as the TV will automatically enable the setting when it detects any HDR signal.

Performance

For 4K testing, I used various clips I’ve amassed through time, played from either a custom PC or a USB drive connected to the soundbar’s USB port. Samsung’s UBD-K8500 was the player used for UHD and HDR Blu-ray movies, which included Planet Earth II, The Revenant, and Life of Pi. I also spent some time with 1080p Blu-ray movies, such as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Casino Royale, mainly to observe the upscaling performance. Naturally, to test out Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, I watched quite a bit of Netflix. Finally, a bit of time was reserved for some console gaming and input lag testing to find out how viable it is to use the TV as a gaming display.

Picture quality in a word: Great

I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but in a nutshell, everything that I liked about last year’s W7 still apply for the W8. Thanks to OLED’s inherent characteristics, perfect blacks, super-high contrast, and very wide viewing angles are pretty much a given here.

1.) Bright vs. dark room

If most of your TV watching are done in a room with high ambient light or you’re constantly dealing with reflections with your current TV, the W8 may not cope as well as, say, top-tier LED-LCD TVs that can easily output in excess of 1,000 nits. That said, unless your room is unusually bright, I don’t see the W8’s comparatively lower brightness as a deal breaker.

Just like the W7, I got very accurate colors from the W8. I happened to be testing Samsung’s 2018 Q9F QLED TV at the same time, so it’d be remiss of me to not point out that the latter produced slightly more saturated colors.

2.) Colors

The W8’s α9 processor does bring a couple of improvements not seen on past OLED TVs. For one, the chip is quite effective at reducing noise and color banding. I saw this in action more in streaming videos and some of my older non–4K rips; for 4K Blu-rays, the effect wasn’t as pronounced. In short, if you noticed rough transitions between colors (e.g., blue shades of a sky), you can try enabling the aforementioned noise reduction settings and see if they can smooth out the gradation.

The Samsung Q9F exhibited color banding too, but to a lesser degree, especially at the two ends of the color spectrum. Does it matter? Well, I’ll say that for most content types (broadcast TV, Blu-rays, streaming videos), the layperson is more likely to notice OLED’s true blacks, lack of local dimming problems (e.g., haloing), and very wide viewing angles than the QLED TV’s better color saturation. In fact, most people are likely going to say that the OLED TV’s colors look more punchy because of its super-high contrast.

3.) 4K & HDR

In addition to helping the image look better in a bright room, a bright TV will also help HDR movies and TV shows look better and more realistic. At around 800 nits, the W8 has a slightly higher peak brightness than the W7 in HDR mode, though it’s not immediately obvious to the casual viewer. Still, in a dimmed room, the W8’s HDR picture quality remains top drawer. My go-to videos for this test are Life of Pi and Planet Earth II on 4K Blu-ray and Okja on Netflix, and in all instances, I’ve never wished for a brighter TV or noticed any missing details in the shadows. The only time it faltered was when the picture was very bright, say, a snowcape or a room with white walls. In such cases, the W8’s overall picture or certain elements in the scene (e.g., a bright light blub, a sparkling diamond) would be noticeably duller than what was observed on the Samsung Q9F.

Colors in HDR mode on both TVs looked great. Using just out of the box settings without any tweaking, the W8’s colors looked the richer of the two, and jumped out a bit more due to the contrast advantage. As mentioned above, I’ll give the color accuracy edge to the Q9F, but the observable difference is really small in most real-world viewing conditions.

4.) Motion

TruMotion is LG's name for its TVs' motion interpolation feature, which is typically used to smooth out movements. Because I don’t like this smoothing effect LG’s TruMotion adds to 24fps material, my personal preference has always been to disable TruMotion but keep Real Cinema (which is under Picture Options) enabled to maintain film cadence. If I need better motion sharpness, my habit is to head straight to TruMotion User and adjust the De-Judder and De-Blur sliders to taste.

It’s worth highlighting that the TruMotion User menu now has a new setting called Motion Pro, which when enabled, uses a black frame insertion technique to improve motion resolution. Sadly, the resulting brightness dip and image flicker are too much for my liking that I won’t recommend turning it on.

5.) Gaming

With an input lag at about 21ms (in Game mode), the W8 is as good as gaming display as last year’s W7, and is on a par with the Samsung Q9F. With 4K HDR, this goes up to 30ms, which is still a very decent showing for an OLED TV. However, unlike the Samsung's 2018 TVs, the W8 doesn't support FreeSync and VRR (variable refresh rate) technologies, which means it will exhibit more instances of image tearing when the TV’s refresh rate and the game’s frame rate don’t sync up properly.

6.) Sound

The W8 continues to offer built-in Dolby Atmos decoding and comes with a soundbar with upward-firing speakers to better virtualize Atmos’ height effect. Overall the sound is powerful enough to fill a living room, but in terms of directionality, it’s obviously no match for a home theater setup that uses in-ceiling speakers and physical rear speakers. And while it can generate audio to fill a big room, it's not a replacement for a true home theater speaker setup that literally brings the theater home. Unfortunately, because the brain of the TV is inside the soundbar, you can’t do away with it entirely if you want to use your own AV receiver and speaker package.

Conclusion: So, same same (as the W7) but different?

In a nutshell, LG’s strategy this year isn’t unlike last year, and that’s to compete with Samsung at the premium end of the TV market with lots of OLED models, which prices are determined not so much through feature differentiation, but design.

Without a chassis and stand that require yearly design updates, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the W8 and last year’s W7. Both are equally thin, both use a proprietary cable that carries power and data, and both have this long and heavy soundbar which speakers emerge from both ends alongside a dramatic audio effect when you turn on the TV. In terms of industrial design, versus the W7, the W8 doesn't add anything more to the conversation.

The same goes for the WebOS interface. The UI is now at a state where LG is making more tiny refinements than drastic graphical changes (e.g., sleep timer shortcut in the Quick Settings menu, paintings as screensavers). If you’ve used WebOS 3.0 and 3.5, you’ll feel right at home with 4.0.

The ThinQ AI platform is the latest brand-new thing to appear on LG’s OLED TVs, but right now, it's at best offering you a glimpse of LG’s AI ambition. If you couldn't care less about speaking into the remote to control your TV or search for content, then the benefits of ThinQ AI in its current form are lost on you. That said, know that the TV can only get more clever, as Google Assistant support is supposedly coming.

On paper, the W8’s panel touts the same light output and gamut performance as its predecessor. But LG claims you still get a picture quality upgrade because the new α9 processor is better at things like noise reduction and color mapping than all the unnamed processors that came before it.

Native support for 120fps high frame rate video is arguably another big addition, but unfortunately, this is crippled by the lack of HDMI 2.1 inputs on the TV (you still get four HDMI 2.0a terminals). This means you can only enjoy HFR video if you get them from places other than HDMI sources, such as the TV’s own apps. Regardless, HFR content are almost non-existent at the moment.

All said, there's no question that the W8's picture quality is top drawer stuff. Perfect blacks, high contrast, very wide viewing angles - everything that I've said about last year's W7 still applies here. Which is another way of saying existing W7 owners shouldn't have any buyer's remorse, because you aren't missing out much.

But what about the rest of us?

The pragmatic choice: Go down the lineup

At S$11,699 for the 65-inch model and an eye-watering S$34,999 for the 77-inch model, the LG Signature W8 targets the rich. Thankfully, like last year's lineup, LG mainly differentiates its TVs through design, which means you’ll get a largely similar image performance if you opt for a model further down the range. If you don't need the bells and whistles I've listed above, this is the more sensible route that I suggest potential LG OLED TV buyers take.

Here’s the spec sheet comparing the W8, E8, and C8:

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