LG EF9500 series review: The best high-end TV gets flat-out better

If you have the money, and you want a 65-inch TV, you should buy the LG 65EF9500. It has the best picture of any TV I've tested so far, and it's flat. For that reason alone I like it better than its curved counterpart, the EG9600, which costs the same.

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LG EF9500 series

The Good

The LG EF9500 OLED TV's picture quality is better than that of any LCD or plasma TV we've seen, with perfect black levels and exceedingly bright whites. It's equally adept in bright and dark rooms; showed accurate color, excellent uniformity and solid video processing; and looks better from off-angle than any LED LCD. The TV looks striking in person, with an insane 0.25-inch depth on most of its body. It's flat, not curved like other OLED TVs, and supports future HDR sources via HDMI.

The Bad

The EF9500 is more expensive than pretty much any other TV of its size. Its light output, video processing and some aspects of screen uniformity aren't quite as impressive as some other TVs.

The Bottom Line

If you have the money and want 55-inch or 65-inch TV today, you should buy the LG EF9500.

The longer version? Maybe you have the money and like curved TVs. Because, let's face it, flat vs. curved is more of an aesthetic decision than anything else. Fine, get the 65EG9600 curved TV. Maybe you want a 55-inch TV instead. I'm not rich, so I'd pick the 55EC9300 or, when it sells out, its basically identical replacement, the 55EG9100. Both are quite a bit cheaper than the 55EF9500 but lose that model's next-generation chops, namely 4K resolution and HDR capability. Of course, if you have the money and want those future-ready extras, go for it.

If you're in the UK, the flat EF9500 series reviewed here is known as the EF950V series. In Australia only the curved version (EG960T) seems to be available now; I'll update this section when I find out about availability of the flat version in that country.

Every inscrutable model number I just reeled off is attached to an OLED TV built by LG. Because it's so difficult to produce, only LG manufactures OLED TVs today. OLED has the best image quality of any display technology we've tested. That includes all LED LCDs, such as Samsung's SUHD models, despite the fact that some of those TVs can get brighter, or use quantum dots, or whatever.

All of these OLED TVs are still exceedingly expensive, and even though LG's recent price reductions are making the technology more affordable, it'll be at least another year before OLED competes against LED LCD on price. For some people, its advantages might be worth the money today, but for most of us, the price is still too steep. Then there's the fact that LED LCD sets come in a much wider range of sizes than OLED -- if you want something smaller than 55 or bigger than 65, it doesn't exist or it costs a mint.

But if you're shopping for a high-end TV in one of those two sizes, and want the best picture you can get, skip all those expensive flagship LED LCDs and go with the O.

Series information: I performed a hands-on evaluation of the 65-inch LG 65EF9500, but this review also applies to the 55-inch LG 55EF9500. Both sizes have identical specifications, and according to the manufacturer, should provide very similar picture quality.

Design

Even with the picture off, the EF9500 looks great. It has the same vanishingly narrow border around the screen as its curved linemate which, at 0.4 inch wide, makes the TV seem all screen. The curved version does feel more futuristic, but a flat TV sure looks better when mounted on a wall.

A sliver of silver around the rim is visible from the front, and the only other adornment to the TV itself is the illuminated LG logo set into a mirrored semicircle on the bottom. You can dim it or turn it off completely, and if you reach behind the logo you'll find a little joystick that provides volume and input control, as well as menu access.

The trademark thinness of OLED is only enhanced by the flat form factor. The top half of the TV measures 0.25 inch thick -- pretty amazing, but still not quite as slim as Sony's XBR-X900C at 0.2 inch. As usual, the need to house electronics, a power supply and inputs necessitates a thicker bulge, so the bottom half of the EF9500 widens to about 2 inches. Sans stand, the 65-incher weighs a feathery 46.7 pounds, while the 55-incher tips the scales at an even 30.

Just like the curved version, you'll need to buy a special bracket, model OTW150 ($99), to wall-mount the EF9500. Unlike most TVs, it doesn't work with standard VESA mounting kits.

Otherwise you'll use the included stand, a solid-feeling affair with a silver base and a transparent chunk of acrylic to support the TV itself. The overall effect is pleasingly "floaty" but lacks the beautiful organic sweep of the 55EC9300. For whatever reason, LG decided to color the back and the nondetachable power cord white.

The latest version of LG's Magic Remote is bigger and better than its predecessors, and I prefer it overall to Samsung's 2015 clicker. It's medium as opposed to small, and its motion control felt more precise than ever in my hand. The system was very responsive, and as usual, I really loved having a scroll wheel for blowing through lists or quickly scanning Web pages. There are a lot more buttons than before, including a numeric keypad and a much-appreciated settings key, so the lack of illumination is annoying. I also don't love the layout -- in particular, I kept hitting "3D" when I wanted settings -- but overall it's very good.

Features

OLED is much closer to the late, lamented plasma than to the LED LCD ( SUHD or otherwise) technology used in the vast majority of today's TVs. Where LCD relies on a backlight shining through a liquid crystal panel to create the picture, with OLED and plasma, each individual sub-pixel is responsible for creating illumination. That's why OLED and plasma are known as "emissive" and LED LCD as "transmissive" displays, and a big reason why OLED's picture quality is so good.

For picture-quality buffs, OLED is the ultimate display technology, but it's not perfect. In addition to unresolved questions of brightness reduction over time (LG claims a 30,000-hour lifespan, for what it's worth), OLED is more subject to burn-in than LED LCD. The manual reads: "If a fixed image displays on the TV for a long period of time, it will...become a permanent disfigurement on the screen. This...burn-in is not covered by the warranty." It advises owners to avoid displaying 4:3 aspect ratio images and other fixed images for longer than an hour at a time.

I didn't actually "test" burn-in in my review sample, but I did notice some temporary retention with test patterns. That said, it didn't seem to retain static images as badly as plasmas I've tested in the past. Just like with plasma, under normal use conditions, I wouldn't worry about burn-in with OLED.

We've written plenty more about OLED in the past, so I won't rehash it all here. Check out the links at the left if you're interested in further details.

Aside from its display technology, the other major feature is 4K resolution. LG told CNET it's not going to build 1,080p OLED TVs larger than 55 inches, going all-in with 4K. The higher resolution adds cost -- significantly more so than on an LCD TV -- and a 65-inch 1,080p OLED would surely please videophiles who don't own private islands, but for now, the 65EF9500 and 65EG9600 are the least expensive 65-inch OLED TVs.

The visible benefits of 4K resolution might be minute with 2D material, but they do provide a big improvement with passive 3D. LG includes two pairs of passive glasses with the 65EF9500, which seems a bit stingy for a TV this expensive.

HDR and wide color gamut: Among high-end TVs this year one big differentiator is whether the set is capable of displaying next-generation content, for example 4K Blu-ray, that utilizes high dynamic range (HDR) and/or a wide color gamut.

Unlike the curved EG9600 series, the flat EF9500 is fully HDR-compliant. That doesn't mean it gets any brighter than its curved brother -- we'll have to wait till 2016 at least before we see a brighter HDR OLED TV from LG -- but it does mean that it can accept HDR signals from HDMI-equipped source devices like 4K Blu-ray players. The EG9600 does not have this capability, in part because it's HDMI inputs are not upgradeable to version 2.0a.

Both series do share the ability to stream HDR sources from the Internet, however. Amazon currently offers select titles in HDR, and Netflix has said it will launch its own HDR titles sometime this year.

As for wide color gamut, the EF9500 does fairly well. According to my measurements of the Wide color space, it's capable of delivering 87.7 percent of DCI/P3 color, thought to be the successor to the high-def color space. That's a bit less than the Samsung UN65JS8500 and Samsung UN65JS9500 (both about 91 percent of P3), but closer than I would have thought given Samsung's claims about SUHD. See below for more on the EF9500's color.

Smart TV: Equipped with LG's newest iteration of Web OS, version 2.0, the 65EF9500 delivers a very good smart TV experience. I prefer it to Samsung's 2015 Tizen system overall, as well as to Android TV (available on Sony and Sharp 2015 sets). Web OS is simpler and more intuitive to use than those others, yet still maintains a degree of sophistication and customizability. Of course, Roku TV is still my favorite Smart TV system.

The biggest improvement over the original version of Web OS is speed. The new interface is markedly snappier, even with the menus' bouncy happy animations, and I had no complaints about responsiveness, even in the deep settings menus. It's worth mentioning that owners of LG's 2014 sets will get an unprecedented upgrade to version 2.0, although their TVs won't be quite as responsive as true 2015 models.

Otherwise, little has changed. Motion control is available in all of the menus and many of the apps, making it relatively easy to select items. I also appreciated the unique screen capture function. Hitting the Home button on the remote brings up a band of diagonally aligned "cards," overlaying the lower third of whatever program or app you're watching at the moment. Other systems take a similar approach, but LG's icon band is both prettier and friendlier.

Unlike with Android TV and Tizen, which only show the most recent apps, you can customize and reorder the main interface to populate it with your favorite apps. Netflix and Pandora get cards, of course, but HDMI 1 and 2 do as well, along with the Web browser and local media available from USB or DLNA (WebOS also supports Plex). Click to the left of the main band and a history of the last few apps and other functions used appears. To the right reside the additional apps and functions you can launch and/or add to the main band in the middle.

The updated "LG Content Store" is much better-organized than before, with categories for movies, TV shows 3D, apps and games, and "premium" apps (nine major ones, including Netflix and Amazon but also Go Pro, an LG partner). Choosing a movie or TV show and hitting "watch now" shows you a list of services that offer it, such as Vudu and Amazon, but as with search, Netflix and Hulu Plus are omitted. The myriad other apps are categorized, but unfortunately not searchable.

The system has most major apps, with the exception of HBO Go/Now and Showtime, but Android, Samsung and Roku all offer a wider selection. As a Rhapsody user I was excited to see that app, but it proved slow and error-prone. The Web browser is decent, and the motion remote greatly eases navigation and typing with the onscreen keyboard easier. Still, you'll want to use your phone, tablet or PC browser first.

Voice search seems as accurate as most such systems, but if you're like me you'll abandon it after a few failures at recognition, which are inevitable. The search results screen (whether from voice or text) breaks out YouTube and Internet separately, and when it gets a direct hit on a TV show or movie, it surfaces hits from Amazon Instant as well as Vudu. Unfortunately, results from Netflix and Hulu Plus don't show up, and the Amazon results are imperfect. A "Dora the Explorer" search I tried (for my daughters, I swear!) only showed me one episode immediately, and I had to hit the obscurely named "Detail Info" button to see more options, which appeared on a poorly designed page with episode numbers instead of easily accessible descriptions. Once again, Roku's universal search wins handily, and Android TV is better, too.

4K streaming apps: I checked out 4K streaming on the built-in Netflix and Amazon apps, and they worked as expected -- and Amazon seems to have improved to the point where it almost instantly gave me the highest-quality version. As usual, I didn't see a massive image quality improvement over those services' HD streams, and in previous tests I've performed, neither 4K streaming services' image quality could quite match the best 1080p Blu-rays. And of course content is scarce, although both services have added numerous 4K titles, in particular original series. Unlike Samsung and Vizio, LG currently lacks the UltraFlix app.

Amazon's app also allows you to watch the HDR titles on the EF9500. I'll cover them more in-depth in the picture quality section below, but in the meantime, it's worth mentioning that I appreciated the little "HDR is now on" bug that appeared whenever I started streaming an HDR title.

New for this year, LG's YouTube app is capable of delivering videos in 4K resolution. Unfortunately the app -- unlike the YouTube website or the app on Samsung's 2015 4K TVs -- doesn't indicate what resolution the video is streaming in, so it's tough to know what you're really watching. I checked out a few of the 4K videos there, including "Honey Bees" and "Beauty of Nature," and they looked sharp enough.

I also tried a quick experiment using Florian Fredrich's 4K resolution pattern. Streaming via LG's YouTube app it delivered the full resolution of 4K, which is better than I saw on the Nvidia Shield's 4K YouTube app. Samsung's JS9500 delivered the full resolution via streaming too, although lesser Samsungs I've tested, and LG's EG9600 curved OLED TV, did not. It's tough to pin down exactly why these differences occurred, but just remember that streaming mileage, even with 4K, will vary.

Picture settings: LG offers plenty of presets and lots of tweaks for calibrators, particularly in the Expert 1 and Expert 2 settings banks. The main determinant of light output is an OLED LIGHT setting, similar to a backlight control on an LCD TV. The set also offers a few dejudder/smoothing presets and a custom mode that allows you to dial in as much or as little blur and/or soap opera effect as you desire. Two-point and 20-point grayscale, a full color management system and selectable gamma (including BT.1886) round out the calibrators' toolbox.

It's worth mentioning that the HDR source I tested, namely the Amazon app, grayed out the picture settings and made it impossible to adjust any of them. On Samsung's HDR-capable sets, it was possible to make some picture adjustments. See the HDR testing section below for more.

Connectivity: I was disappointed to see only three HDMI inputs on the white backside of the 65EF9500 when most medium- and high-end TVs today have at least four. It's not a deal-breaker by any means, but in my opinion a TV this expensive should have at least four HDMI inputs. At least they're all equipped with HDMI 2.0 (technically they're HDMI 2.0a) and HDCP 2.2.

There's also a setting called Ultra HD Deep Color. It allows HDMI inputs 1 and 2 to accept 4K/60 signals at 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 chroma subsampling rates, and 10 bits. Sources with that level of color are very rare so I didn't test the feature for this review, but it could be useful in the future.

Other connections include three USB ports (one of which is version 3.0), an analog AV input with composite video, another with component-video; an optical digital audio output, an Ethernet jack, a headphone output and a RS-232 connection for custom installation systems.

Picture quality

If you've read any of my (or other reviewers') write-ups on OLED TVs before, you know what's coming in this section. This TV's unmatched contrast ratio is the main thing that makes it superior to today's LCD-based TVs, as well as to best the plasma TVs of yore. It's so important, in fact, that while LG's OLED falls a bit short of its current competition in a few other areas, its significantly superior contrast without the trade-offs of local dimming gives it a better picture overall.

The main reason I like the picture on the EF9500 better than the EG9600 is because it's flat instead of curved. True, the slight distortions introduced by the curved screen aren't noticeable on a day-to-day basis, and in some rooms the curve can help reduce reflections. But they're distortions nonetheless, and I just prefer flat screens. It doesn't hurt that the EF9500 delivered slightly more accurate color and gamma after calibration than its curved brother, and enjoyed a couple of other advantages including better 3D for some reason.

Otherwise, the two OLED's are equally superior to any other TV I've ever tested. Unlike the best local dimming LCDs, they don't show any blooming, and they maintain excellent color and contrast from off-angle. Sure they don't get as searingly bright or perform quite as well in terms of video processing, and there's a minor uniformity issue with darker edges in some matrial. And as usual with 4K, you can't really tell the difference unless you're sitting very close. None of those issues spoil the EF9500's superb picture.

One quick note: Since the two TVs are very similar and I performed many of the same tests upon both, people familiar with the EG9600 review may experience a sense of déjà vu reading this one.

Click the image at the right to see the picture settings used in the review and to read more about how this TV's picture controls worked during calibration.

Black level: Inky, deep and perfect, the EF9500 delivers the complete lack of light I've come to expect from dark areas of an OLED screen, and the corresponding pop of excellent contrast.

My first selection was the exceedingly dark "Gravity" Blu-ray, and the OLED TVs differentiated themselves immediately with the perfect black surrounding the Warner Brothers logo and the white-on-black words that followed, a description of the extreme conditions deep space. In my dark room, I couldn't tell where the screen of the OLED TV ended and the black wall behind it began.

Instead of pure black, the other sets showed varying degrees of dark gray, and the Sony and Samsung betrayed a faint halo around the words -- the calling card of the blooming evident in full-array local dimming LCD TVs. The blacks of the LG LCD and the Panasonic were brightest (worst) with the Vizio in the middle and the Samsung and Sony were basically the same at producing the darkest "black" among the LCDs. From my sweet spot on the middle seat in front of them, those two did look as good as any LCD TV at producing deep black, but of course they got worse as I moved off-angle, while OLED's black stayed true.

The film's starfields are particularly challenging for the LCD TVs and served to show OLED's advantage further. In Chapter 2, with the space-suited astronauts tethered against the void (19:04), the OLED sets maintained the perfect black in letterbox bars and in space, while the others were lighter. And in shots where a bright area approached the bars, the local dimming LCDs grew lighter still, and again showed some blooming.

For more on blooming, uniformity and how OLED TVs compare against local dimming LED LCDs, check out the Black Level section of the EG9600 review. I saw basically the same effects on the flat version.

I mentioned slightly worse shadow detail on the EG9600 compared to that of some competitors, but that's not an issue with the EF9500. The copious near-black details in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" looked just as realistic and true on the OLED as on other sets in my lineup, for example in the folds of the clothing and the hair of the toughs in Chapter 1. I attribute the difference to the EF9500's improved calibration.

Color accuracy: The EF9500 has no issues in this category. According to my measurements, it's one of the most accurate displays available, both before and after calibration, which is an improvement on the EG9600. I didn't have that display on-hand for a direct comparison, but from what I remember, the two looked remarkably similar in program material.

The largely black-and-white "Sin City" looked very good, but there did appear to be a slightly greener cast to white and gray areas than the other sets in my lineup. It wasn't bad by any means however, and not the kind of thing I'd notice outside of a side-by-side lineup. When I put up a grayscale pattern for visual reference, the difference was much less obvious, and the LG wasn't any less accurate-looking than other TVs in my lineup.

Next I turned to the lush tones of "Samsara," one of the best-looking discs I've ever seen. The bright colors looked great on the EF9500, from the gold and yellow costumes and heavily painted faces of the Balinese Legong dancers, to the green of the lush landscape around the orange Bagan temples in Myanmar. Near-black was also very accurate. In truth, all of these calibrated TVs deliver exceedingly good color, but in many scenes OLED's extra contrast did lend a bit more saturation and impressiveness.

The EF9500 also performed very well on advanced color tests, scoring average Delta errors of 1.18 for saturation, 1.56 for luminance and 2.38 for the color checker (anything less than 3 is considered below the threshold of perception). (Thanks to Chris Heinonen of Reference Home Theater and The Wirecutter for letting me use his CalMan workflow, which made those measurements possible.)

Video processing: The EF9500 is solid in this category, but it still falls short of the better high-end LCD TVs. It is capable of delivering correct 1080p/24 film cadence, but like other LG OLED TVs, introduced too much judder in some scenes using the default "Off" TruMotion setting.

Slow-speed pans didn't show the issue, but once the camera movement became more rapid, the extra judder and jumpiness became somewhat jarring. My nominal test for film cadence, the medium-speed pan over the Intrepid from "I Am Legend," looked generally fine, although looking closely it was very slightly jerkier than the other displays.

As I saw previously, "Skyfall," with its more frenetic camera movement, revealed the issue more clearly. As the camera sweeps across the abandoned lot in Chapter 17, for example (1:17:17), the facade of the building judders strongly, and the derelict bicycle and pole in the foreground appear similarly too jumpy. The pan across the stone gate at the entry to Skyfall manor (1:47:30) also appeared a bit jumpier than the other sets, albeit to a lesser extent.

Fortunately the User setting works well to ameliorate the issue. I adjusted the de-judder and found the "2" setting the best compromise; while "3" and higher introduced unacceptable smoothing, while "1" and "0" were slightly too jerky. When I originally tested the EC9300 I noticed uneven stutter in User mode, but it wasn't evident on the EG9600 or EF9500. So for most material (including 4K/24; see below), I'd recommend going with User at 2 de-judder.

A secondary benefit to using User is improved motion resolution: the set achieved 600 lines in the Custom setting with "de-blurring" at 10, more than double what it hit with TruMotion Off. That said, maximum motion resolution was lower than any of the other sets, mainly because all current OLED TVs use sample and hold technology without the kinds of backlight flashing and other augmentations employed by high-end LCDs. In my book 600 is plenty, and I actually have a tough time seeing any blurring even with TruMotion turned off, so this isn't a major issue in my opinion.

Like the EG9600, the EF9500 did show some issues in some demanding test patterns, for example artifacts in resolution patterns and jaggies in some areas, although for whatever reason, they were milder on the curved TV. Again, I suspect LG is engaging some kind of not-helpful processing that can't be disabled. But since I saw almost no evidence of these issues in program material, and they were pretty esoteric in general, I don't consider it a big deal.

Input lag was on the happy end of Average territory at 50.3ms in Game mode. I measured an almost identical 49.7ms in Expert mode with TruMotion turned off, while turning it on caused lag to jump to 126.4ms.

4K sources: Actual 4K movies and TV shows are still scarce enough that I didn't spend nearly as much time testing 4K sources as I did 1080p, but it's getting more common. I enjoyed a variety of 4K clips from numerous sources, including Netflix and Amazon streaming, YouTube streams and downloads, and 4K demo boxes and files (primarily supplied by TV makers). In general, the 65EF9500 looked superb.

I used a 4K distribution amplifier to compare it directly against the other 4K sets in the lineup and again it beat the others handily, primarily thanks to superior contrast and pop, particularly from off-angle.

With one 4K sequence, during " Timescapes" around the 8:14 mark as the camera tracks the flight of a pelican against the sunset, I did notice the LG's motion issues again. With TruMotion Off, the background moved haltingly, to the extent that I'd notice even if the other three sets, with their smoother rendering of the scene, weren't there to compare. Again, the LG's User setting and de-judder at 2 seemed like the best compromise.

I also checked out a variety of 4K test patterns from both my DVDo test pattern generator and courtesy of Florian Friedrich (www.quality.tv) and the LG OLED looked as good as the other sets in our lineup in most areas. In a couple of Florian's most challenging tests, I did notice some differences, for example in the pixel phase, phase modulation and zone plate tests on a couple of the TVs, but the EF9500 was clean.

The EF9500 also looked fine in the moving text test, just as clean as the Samsung JS9500 SUHD set. Notably, the EG9600 showed more artifacts and breakup on this test, so it seems LG has improved processing a bit between the two.

HDR sources: After Samsung's SUHD TVs, LG's 2015 4K OLEDs are the second group of TVs to work with HDR content. Such content is virtually nonexistent today, however. Samsung provides a few movies via the M-Go service, but the only way to watch HDR now via the LG TVs is via the built-in Amazon Instant Video app.

Amazon currently has just a handful of a titles available in HDR, all original series, including "Transparent," "Bosch," "Mozart in the Jungle," and the pilot of "Casanova." We gave them a spin, comparing how they looked directly against the HDR versions on the Samsung JS9500. The experience proved again that Amazon's HDR still suffers some real-world kinks.

On the EF9500, even the dark "Bosch" looked washed-out and too bright, with grayish blacks in the shadows and night sky that shouldn't have a place anywhere near any OLED. Colors were also undersaturated; from skin tones to plants to the navy blue of Bosch's police windbreaker to the golden-brown of his dog's fur.

In every scene from every Amazon HDR show we watched, the Samsung's version looked markedly better. I'm guessing the issue lies with LG's HDR picture settings, and annoyingly those settings were locked; as I mentioned above, the menu doesn't allow you to make any adjustment to picture settings when playing Amazon HDR content.

I also checked out some test material provided by Mr. Friedrich, and the LG didn't have the same issue. Playing back the same HDR file on the EF9500 OLED and the JS9500 SUHD, subtler differences emerged. As the sun came out from behind darkened clouds -- a classic HDR highlight -- it looked a bit brighter on the Samsung, and indeed measured about 20 percent brighter via my light meter (103 vs. 79 footlamberts [fL], a measure of light output). On the flipside I did notice some blooming on the Samsung in the dark clouds next to the sun, an issue the OLED didn't share. Overall, I preferred the look of the OLED.

Colors looked more vibrant on the Samsung at first, but then I checked and it turned out that the LG failed to automatically engage the wider color space. Happily, with Florian's content, picture settings on the LG playing HDR were not locked. So I corrected the color space and afterward the two looked more or less the same in terms of color. Comparing both sets' rendition of HDR to the same scenes in SDR, HDR looked much better in every way.

Obviously it's still very early days for HDR, and these are among the first models to support the new vanguard of video quality (for the record the Sony XBR-75X950C and Panasonic TC-55CX850 also support HDR, but I didn't test them for this review). I'm guessing LG and Amazon will fix their issues soon, and things will likely ramp up when Netflix and Ultra HD Blu-ray offer HDR themselves. In the meantime, my quick tests prove that, if nothing else, OLED and LED LCD are both capable of making HDR look good.

Uniformity: Here's where I found the biggest differences between the best LED LCDs and LG's OLEDs, with OLED winning handily. I include off-angle viewing in this category, and compared to any of the non-OLED displays, the EF9500 was much, much better at maintaining image fidelity when seen from seating positions other than the sweet spot directly opposite the middle of the screen.

With OLED, I barely noticed any drop-off when I slid to other positions on the couch, stood up, or otherwise moved from the sweet spot. Black levels, contrast and color all looked great regardless of viewing angle. I did notice shifts in color in white fields, however, from both vertical and horizontal off-axis positions, but again, not nearly as drastic as on the LCDs.

With LED LCD, as usual, all of these picture characteristics worsened to a greater or lesser extent as soon as I moved to a different position. Colors grew paler and less saturated and on some TVs shifted toward blue or red. Black levels looked grayer, robbing the image of pop and contrast. And blooming became much more apparent.

Uniformity across the screen of the OLED was very good, but not perfect. First off, the right and left edges of the screen sometimes appeared darker than the rest. It was most obvious in test patterns that filled the screen completely with a gray field, particularly when they were a step or two brighter than black. In the darkest such patterns, I also noticed vertical banding -- alternating bright and dark stripes -- across the screen, and when they grew lighter, they started to disappear. I saw both of these issues in previous reviews of curved OLED TVs (I called it "vignetting" in the EG9600 review) and wondered whether the curve was at fault. That doesn't seem to be the case, since they also crop up on the flat EF9500.

In regular program material, the darker edges of the were only visible in rare instances when watching very dark content, and even then its appearance was sporadic and almost always subtle. As Ryan tumbles through the starfield in Chapter 2 of "Gravity," for example, the far right edge of space appeared just a bit darker than the adjacent void (17:13). One of the desert time-lapses in Samara briefly showed a similar effect.

That said, the darker edges were only evident when I looked for it, and not anywhere near as annoying to me as the flashlighting and blooming on many LCD sets.

Bright lighting: The EF9500 was great in bright-room situations, too. Its screen finish does an excellent job of maintaining black levels, and among the other glossy screens it actually deadened reflections the most, including the EC9300 -- although reflections were still brighter than on the matte screen Vizio. It also put out substantially more light than any plasma TV, and a bit more than the 55EC9300.

As I mentioned above, the EF9500 isn't quite as bright as the most powerful LED LCDs, but it's still plenty bright. According to my measurements with window patterns, performed in each TVs' brightest picture mode, the LG EF9500 measured 126 fL compared to 177 for the Samsung JS9500 and an insane 306.8 for the Sony XBR-75X950C. If you have an exceedingly bright room and just want the brightest TV you can get, either of these two LED LCD light cannons might be a better choice than the OLED. The other LED LCDs were all relatively close to the LG OLED in light output.

Window patterns, which place a white rectangle (the "window") amid a black surround, are the most realistic measure of light output, but full-screen patterns, which fill the entire screen with white, provide another valuable data point. Because of power supply constraints, plasma and OLED TVs cannot get as bright with a full screen as their LED LCD counterparts.

Three of the LED LCDs in my lineup maintained more or less the same light output regardless of whether I measured a full or window pattern; the others (the Sony and Samsung again) were dimmer with a full screen but still searingly bright. Meanwhile the two OLEDs lost between 65 to 75 percent of their brightness when going from window to full brightness patterns. The EF9500's 126 fL with a window pattern dropped to 43 with a full-brightness pattern.

Is this loss with brighter material a big deal? Not in my book. Even if you watch nothing but hockey and downhill skiing -- two examples of real content where the screen is mostly filled with white--you won't notice much or any dimness unless you have an LED LCD side-by-side for comparison. OLED is still brighter than the brightest plasma and brighter than many LED LCDs, and has plenty of horsepower for even the brightest rooms.

Screen shape also affects bright-room performance. In my experience the main benefit of curved screen is to help reduce reflections. A flat TV "catches" more of the surrounding reflections, increasing the chance that a particularly bright object -- like a window or a lamp -- is reflected back to the viewer. Curved TVs, like the EG9600, miss more of those reflections. On the other hand the curve can actually increase the apparent size of reflected objects it does catch, for example a bright shirt worn by a viewer, stretching them into funhouse mirror shape.

If you have a room where the TV will be placed opposite bright objects, you might be tempted to choose the curved version. Unfortunately however, real-world reflections are very difficult to gauge on paper. The only way to really tell which one will be better in at reducing reflections is to demo both in the same room.

3D: Somehow, the EF9500 performed much better in my 3D tests than the EG9600. In fact, it provided probably the best 3D image I've ever seen. That's due to its combination of 4K resolution and passive 3D, which eliminates the resolution loss inherent in passive 3D with a 1080p screen, and provides all the benefits of passive over active (including a brighter image, less crosstalk and of course simpler glasses you don't need to turn on and pair).

When I tested 3D on the EG9600, I noticed it was finicky in terms of where I was seated. If I was too close, or my viewing angle too far above or below the dead center of the screen, I saw lots of crosstalk -- that ghostly double image that's the bugaboo of stereoscopic 3D.

With the EF9500, that problem is largely gone. My first viewing test was the "GK films" logo from the beginning of "Hugo," which consists of bright letters against a black background and plenty of depth. On the EF9500 I didn't see any crosstalk from my standard seating distance of 8 feet; in fact, I didn't see any until I almost had my nose to the screen, at about 3 feet. The image was also very tolerant of vertical and horizontal viewing angle; I had to move pretty far above or below the screen before the crosstalk reappeared.

I'm not sure why I saw this difference between the two OLED TVs. Perhaps the EG9600's curve somehow makes the TV more susceptible to crosstalk, but that seems unlikely since the 55EC9300 showed just as little crosstalk as the EF9500. Maybe LG made some change to how its TVs handle 3D. Unfortunately, I didn't have the EG9600 review sample on-hand anymore to conduct further tests.

Compared to the other 3D-capable sets in my lineup, the EF9500 looked the best. It showed less crosstalk than any of them, including LG's own passive 4K LED LCD, the UF9500. The exception was the 55-inch EC9300 OLED, as I mentioned, but of course it showed the line structure and jaggies inherent in 1080p passive 3D.

Other aspects of 3D picture quality on the EF9500 were superb. Its passive 3D allows its brightness to shine through for greater pop (especially against that perfect black backdrop) than the active-3D-equipped LCDs. Colors looked excellent as well. As usual I appreciated the lighter passive glasses, and found them more comfortable compared to the active versions found on the other TVs.

How we test TVs