LG G5 OLED (OLED65G5) review: Oh what a lovely TV war

The arrival of any new LG OLED TV is guaranteed to set home cinema fans’ pulses racing but anticipation for the LG G5 OLED has been even higher than usual.

The reason? It marks the debut of a new type of TV panel design claimed to substantially enhance LG OLEDs’ brightness and colour response. Can LG truly master all the new tools at its disposal at the first time of asking, though? Read on to find out.

LG G5 OLED review: Key specifications

LG G5 OLED review: What you need to know

The LG G5 is one of the most premium options in LG’s 2025 OLED lineup. It’s not quite the flagship series; that honour belongs to the M5, which has wireless video connectivity. However, the G5 does benefit from the same “Brightness Booster Ultimate” technology as the M5.

That’s LG marketing speak for a combination of a new second generation of LG’s powerful Alpha 11 processor with a Primary RGB Tandem four-stack OLED panel design.

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LG G5 OLED review: Price and competition

The OLED G5 sits towards the top of LG’s 2025 range and is priced accordingly. The 65in I’m reviewing here costs £3,299, with the new 48in screen size costing £1,799, the 55in priced at £2,399 and the 77in, 83in and 97in options costing £4,499, £6,999 and £24,999, respectively.

The arch rival of the OLED G5 will be Samsung’s S95F Quantum Dot OLED, which also launches this month and promises exceptional brightness and colour range.

Focusing on models available at the time of writing, the 2024 Samsung S95D can be picked up for relatively aggressive prices, including £1,999 for the 65in model. Panasonic’s Z95A OLED meanwhile, uses a combination of last year’s Micro Lens Array OLED panels, proprietary heat sinking, a potent multi-channel Dolby Atmos sound system and Hollywood picture tuning to offer a premium alternative that can currently be had for £2,699.

If you’re quick, you can still pick up last year’s LG G4 for discounted prices, except for the 97in model. The 65in option is available for under £2,000, with the other sizes priced as follows: £1,399 (55in), £2,799 (77in) and  £5,199 (83in).

Bear in mind that none of these 2024 TVs benefit from the new brightness-boosting Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel technology. 

LG G5 OLED review: Design, connections and control

LG has sensibly tweaked the design of the G5 to avoid the G4’s frame reflection issue. So while the outside edge of the frame still sports a gleaming silver finish, its narrow front-facing bezel is predominantly black and tucked behind the same glass sheet as the main picture area, making it almost invisible.

As with the G4, the two most mainstream sizes of the G5 (55in and 65in) are available in two versions: one that ships with a wall mount, and one that ships with a pedestal-style desktop mount. There is also a wall-mount option available for the new 48in screen size.

The wall mount option feels the most natural one for a design with such a narrow frame and slender, flat rear – especially as the pedestal stand’s matt, deep grey finish doesn’t match the shinier finish of the screen’s outer edges. The desktop mount is very well built, as well as being able to support the screen at two different heights and offering cable management through its hollow neck.

The G5’s connections are as excellent as we’ve come to expect from LG OLEDs. All four HDMI ports are of the top HDMI 2.1 specification and can cope with a comprehensive roster of cutting edge gaming features. There’s also a trio of USB ports, an optical digital audio output and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (5.3) connectivity.

At first glance, the G5’s Magic Remote looks the same as those provided with many previous OLED generations. It offers the same point and click functionality, too, as well as LG’s trademark vertical wheel for navigating the TV’s vertically arranged onscreen menus. Looking closer, though, reveals a new AI button that gives you faster access to the TV’s AI-based smart features and guides.

LG G5 OLED review: Smart TV platform

The G5 OLED’s webOS 25 smart system continues to expand on the AI-bolstered features and engaging user system that have made webOS such a firm smart system favourite.

It leans into its impressive support for multiple user profiles, advanced content recommendation systems, AI-based picture and sound enhancements/personalisations, and a built-in customer service system. Personalised user profiles for different members of your household can now be accessed via voice recognition, for instance, while the degree of picture and sound profile personalisation for each profile has been greatly increased.

LG’s AI optimised content recommendation and search system feels as intuitive as ever and the guide to getting the most out of webOS feels more helpfully integrated into the interface. Meanwhile, the built-in AI-driven Q&A database continues to prove remarkably handy in figuring out what a feature does, or how to improve some aspect of the TV’s functionality.

WebOS offers a pretty comprehensive collection of streaming platforms among its apps. The only significant omissions are Freeview Play and Freely – though by the time the TV goes on sale, it should at least independently support all of the catch up apps from the UK’s main terrestrial broadcasters.

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LG G5 OLED review: Image quality

While the most exciting new stuff developed for the OLED G5 predominantly focuses on improving its high dynamic range performance, there are still a few handy HD and SDR improvements to report.

The new Alpha 11 Gen 2 processor, for instance, delivers a big improvement in LG’s upscaling of HD content to the TV’s native 4K resolution. Upscaled pictures look noticeably sharper and more detailed, as well as benefiting from a substantially better ability to detect the difference between noise/compression artefacts and real picture information – including grain – in an HD or even SD source. There seems to be more refinement in the upscaled colour palette, too.

Out of the box motion handling with 24p movies is also improved. Even the Natural motion processing option that’s the default with the eye-catching Standard picture preset now manages to take the edge off 24p judder without looking too soap opera like or generating heavy amounts of haloing and flickering side effects. If the Natural setting is a little heavy for you, I’d recommend switching to the excellent Cinematic Movement motion processing option.

These processing-driven improvements are joined by all the customary LG OLED strengths of immensely subtle light control and colour tone finesse, as well as a couple of benefits from the Primary RGB Tandem panel. Colour tones are more consistently rich, especially in very dark areas, while general brightness and contrast are all enhanced by the way the panel delivers its extra brightness without losing any of the inky but also beautifully subtle black and grey tones for which LG’s OLED TVs are justly renowned.

LG’s experience and processing knowhow ensures that while SDR’s brightness range is stretched further on the G5 than it has been on previous LG OLED TVs, nothing feels out of balance, stressed or unnatural.

Even the Filmmaker Mode that’s supposed to deliver absolute accuracy to mastering standards can’t completely resist chasing the new panel’s brightness. Measurements in Filmmaker Mode reveal an unexpectedly high SDR white level figure of more than 460, while two-point and multipoint greyscale tests both record average DeltaE 2000 error figures of 5.2 and 4.5 respectively. These numbers are both slightly beyond the 3 level that deems errors imperceptible to the human eye. 

Regular total accuracy service is resumed with Filmmaker Mode Colour Checker, Saturation Sweep and Luminance Sweep colour tests, which record average DeltaE 2000 errors of just 2.7, 2.5 and 2.2 respectively. The G5 also get within 0.2 of 100% coverage of the Rec 709 and sRGB colour spectrums, as well as reproducing an impressive 95.1% of the Adobe RGB gamut.

LG opting to take a little more advantage of the new panel’s brightness for the G5’s Filmmaker Mode than video purists might like becomes easy to take when you soak up the consistently gorgeous looking results. It’s also possible that LG is deliberately pushing brightness a touch with the SDR Filmmaker Mode to stop the new ultra-contrast panel leaving dark picture areas looking a bit too dark. In any case, I’m struggling to imagine anyone who buys a G5 feeling anything other than ecstatic about its SDR performance.

LG G5 OLED review: HDR performance

The G5’s Brightness Booster Max technology is made for HDR images, so it shouldn’t come as a massive surprise to find it delivering jaw-droppingly great results.

Focusing on the new strengths delivered by the latest processing and, especially, OLED panel design, Calman Ultimate tests show the G5 pumping out as much as 2,300cd/m2 in Filmmaker Mode on 1%, 2% and 5% HDR windows, or up to a monstrous 3,050cd/m2 on a 5% window in the panel-pushing Vivid preset. These figures are up by almost a third on those of 2024’s G4.

Arguably even more eye-catching and certainly more surprising than the LG G5’s brightness is the stunning vibrancy and saturation of its colour. Calman Ultimate tests show it covering more than 99% of the DCI-P3 digital cinema colour spectrum and almost 84% of the BT.2020 spectrum.

These test results are backed up with real world content, which for the most part looks a whole other level of brilliant to anything we’ve seen from LG’s OLED department before. Which is saying something given how critically acclaimed LG’s OLED TVs have been for years.

A healthy chunk of the G5’s pictorial magnificence is down to the extra brightness and colour opened up by the Primary RGB Tandem panel (which uses two blue emitting layers to separately light the screen’s red and green layers) and improved Alpha 11 processor.

The way the extra brightness adds intensity to bright HDR whites and colours is nothing less than spectacular, especially in the TVs’ ridiculously watchable Standard preset, while colours look lush, vibrant and bold but also full of subtlety, immaculately balanced and gorgeously cinematic.

Colours retain much more saturation in very dark scenes than they do with the G4, and skin tones enjoy a more nuanced and less jaundiced look. It’s very noticeable, too, that the G5 retains more brightness with HDR images that flood the whole screen with brightness (our Calman Ultimate tests show nearly 400cd/m2 on a full-field HDR test window), which helps the HDR experience feel much more consistent.

The G5’s stunning control of light – right down to individual pixel level, of course – extends to improved shadow detailing and near-black clarity versus the G4, while 4K pictures also benefit from a slight up-tick in sharpness and the improved Natural motion setting.

While LG doesn’t deploy it as standard with any of the G5’s presets, the brand’s AI Picture Pro mode has also received a suitably intelligent upgrade. This means you won’t be as aware of it when watching 4K HDR sources, as it’s become smarter about knowing when it can/should make much of a difference and it can’t/shouldn’t. When it does kick in, though, its effects tend to be more nuanced and helpful, rather than coarse and distracting.

The G5’s picture presets provide an excellent array of different looks and flavours, with the Filmmaker Mode on hand to do a sterling job of making the G5 deliver accurate, ultra-nuanced images. This mode doesn’t take full advantage of the Primary RGB Tandem panel’s extreme capabilities, but the panel’s extra light and processing management still helps images look even more involving and beautifully, carefully mastered than they did on the G4.

The best way I can sum up all the HDR improvements is that they all feel as if they’ve been used holistically, to improve the picture, rather than just showing off by “turning everything to 11”.

There are some small issues with the G5 OLED’s HDR performance if you look hard enough. It doesn’t support the HDR10+ format, so can’t benefit from the extra scene-by-scene picture information this HDR format provides. The main issues, though, are that the image’s colour tone can shift a bit, taking on a warmer tone, if viewed from a wide angle, and that the Filmmaker Mode can occasionally show mild signs of colour striping over what should be smooth colour blends.

While shadow detailing and handling of near-black noise are excellent, very dark parts of a picture can sometimes feel just a little too dark, and finally while the Standard preset is mostly a dazzlingly good way of enjoying the G5’s new picture extremes, just occasionally it can throw up a peaky skin tone or exaggerated skyscape. However, these rare and minor niggles are only noticeable because for the vast majority of the time the G5 pictures look so extraordinarily good.

LG G5 OLED review: Gaming

The LG G5 is a phenomenal gaming display. All four of its HDMI ports support the 2.1 specification, but there are some differences depending on the screen size you go for. The 65in model test here supports 4K at up to 165Hz, as do the 55in, 77in and 83in models. The 48in option is limited to 4K resolution at 144Hz, while the 97in monster only supports 4K up to 120Hz.

There’s variable refresh rate support in the core HDMI, AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync formats, along with auto game mode switching, and once in its Game mode, the G5 takes as little as 12.9ms to render incoming gaming feeds.

A Dolby Vision game mode ensures that lag remains low if your console or PC supports Dolby’s premium HDR format, and there’s also support for the HGiG system where the TV turns off its own HDR tone mapping so as not to interfere with the HDR output from a pre-calibrated console or PC.

LG’s Game Dashboard menu provides information on the incoming graphics feed and a selection of gaming aids, including the facility to brighten dark parts of the picture and call up an onscreen crosshair.

The single most important gaming feature of the G5 OLED, though, is that game graphics look and feel (in terms of their responsiveness and clarity) so fantastically good that you may never want to return to the real world again…

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LG G5 OLED review: Sound quality

While the display part of the OLED G5 benefits from new hardware, the speaker systems appear more or less unchanged. That doesn’t mean the TV sounds the same as the G4, though.

LG’s audio department has been tinkering away with the TVs’ AI Sound Pro mode. As with the G4, this unlocks 11.1.2 virtual surround sound upmixing – but it does a much better job of it. Sound effects are now positioned much more accurately, appearing to come from pretty much exactly the right place on the screen.

The careful soundstage crafting expands a good distance beyond the screen’s boundary too, creating a wall of sound that includes a palpable sense of height as well as width without sounding fragile or feeble. On the contrary, action scenes and impact/gunfire/explosion sounds are delivered with noticeably more potency and impact than they enjoyed with the G4.

Unlike the previous attempt to expand the scale of the G series soundstage in AI Sound Pro mode, the G5 manages to deliver its cleaner, more precise staging without weakening its low-frequency presence. That’s not to say I wouldn’t still like LG to add a more substantial dedicated bass speaker to future OLED G lines, but at least the G5’s bass is less prone to crackling and other distortions than that of its predecessor, and seems keener to get involved in the action.

While I’m currently pretty neutral about the AI Picture Pro mode, I consider the AI Sound Pro mode pretty much essential. Turning the mode off leaves the G5 sounding much less powerful, dynamic and expressive.

LG G5 OLED review: Verdict

In case you haven’t realised yet, I love the new LG G5 OLED. For the second time in three years, new hardware delivers a real leap forward in LG’s OLED performance, opening up a new frontier of not just brightness and contrast but also colour range. A new frontier that LG’s latest video processor puts to brilliantly thoughtful rather than mere showboating use to create pictures so addictively cinematic they ought to come with a health warning.