I'm not impressed by my first OLED TV

Earlier this year, I decided it was finally the time to give my living room a big glow up by upgrading my TV. Up until this point, I had only ever owned two TVs: an old model my dad put in some secondary room, and a 55-inch Vizio I got for under $300 a couple of years ago. I definitely haven't been living large when it comes to TVs, and I figured an upgrade was in order so I could get the most out of my freshly build Bazzite HTPC and my Switch 2.

I did tons of research for what kind of TV I should get: I read reviews from sites like RTINGS, visited lots of subreddits for different brands, and even visited stores like Best Buy to see models in person. There's lots of different panel technologies today, but I narrowed my choice down to either OLED or Mini LED. In OLED TVs, brightness can be adjusted down to the pixel level and perfect blacks can be achieved, while Mini LED only has several lighting zones but is cheaper and boasts higher peak brightness.

I ended up catching a deal on Woot for an OLED-powered LG C5 65-inch for exactly a thousand bucks, $300 off the normal price. This specific variant was made for the Philippines but works just fine here in the US, though I wasn't 100% sure it would before it was delivered. With the whole GamersNexus investigation into LG's persistence surveillance on users of its TVs, I kinda regret the purchase, but the return window has long since passed and I'm not nearly rich enough to afford getting another TV.

So, it's been about four months since I've had the C5, and while it's certainly better than my old Vizio, I have to say I'm a little disappointed. I'm not entirely sure I got my money's worth, and what reviewers and users have said about OLED doesn't seem to be exactly what I've experienced.

The biggest disappointment with the C5 and something hardly anyone seems to talk about is the brightness, specifically its consistency. Obviously, I was aware that Mini LED had better brightness, but in most discussions of OLED versus Mini LED, the primary focus was the maximum or peak brightness, something I didn't really care about and still don't care about now. I'm surprised that brightness consistency and variability is frequently left out of reviews and conversations about OLED displays.

Basically, OLED consumes so much power and produces so much heat that there's a limit to how bright an OLED display can get before it damages itself, so manufacturers put a cap on the power draw to ensure damage doesn't happen. This naturally puts a limit on brightness, hence this feature being termed Automatic Brightness Limiting (or ABL).

How ABL works in practice is that it divvies how brightness to each pixel depending on how much said pixel is asking for compared to how much power all pixels request. So, if 90% of the screen is pure black and 10% is pure white, that 10% has the entire power of the panel at its disposal since the black pixels use no power. But if more and more of the screen goes from black pixels to white pixels, the same amount of power has to be doled out to increasingly more pixels, meaning less power per pixel and consequently lower brightness.

What this means in practice is that real brightness is constantly being adjusted all the time depending on what's being shown on the screen. And these variations are not minor at all, they're so obvious that it was one of the first things I noticed when I got the C5. It's the most obvious in these kinds of scenarios:

• Media where there's a persistent overlay or UI, such as captions or a HUD. In shows and movies, ABL was very noticeable as captions would flicker between white and grey. HUDs in games often darken or brighten significantly as soon as the camera is adjusted or if some other UI element like a text box pops up.
• Media where there's both dark and bright colors. In one scene, you might be looking at someone holding a torch in an otherwise dark cave (a classic trope in basically all media) where colors are deep and rich, but as soon as the scene shifts to the surface at noon, everything becomes comparatively washed out. I tested this effect in Terraria because unlit areas are pitch black, and literally just standing on top of a hill or large tree was much darker than standing on flat ground, because on a hill more of the background is exposed.
• It doesn't even need to be a pitch black scene going to a very bright scene; in Mario Kart World (with its fake HDR disabled), ABL stepped in just by panning the camera from the pavement to the sky, or when I drove between indoor and outdoor environments.
• For some reason, yellow seems to be the color that really makes ABL crack down on brightness. There's fairly common loading screens in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Kirby and the Forgotten Land that are mostly just yellow backgrounds, and the brightness drop is so obvious that my wife, who normally doesn't notice or care about this stuff, pointed it out to me and asked why the TV suddenly got so dark.

I'm not particularly picky or sensitive about display stuff, I did after all use a TV that costs less than one of my main desktop monitors for a while. But the brightness stuff is honestly really awful! I'm kinda used to it now, but in a way where I tolerate happening, not in the sense that I don't notice it anymore, because I definitely do. And I have to configure HDR settings where applicable to make the effect less noticeable; for example, where possible I make the HUD as bright as possible so that its brightness doesn't vary too much.

Moving beyond brightness, color coverage and accuracy is good on the C5 as far as I can tell, but I feel like for over a grand it's not the leap I was expecting. The situation is especially complicated with the state of HDR and recommended settings for the C5 and other TVs. There's just so many things to adjust to get the right colors and visuals! How have we not figured out a simple solution for getting SDR and HDR content to look consistent and good? I thought being a display enthusiast was optional for getting good quality.

I guess my final complaint is a pretty minor one: the C5 and other OLEDs are just way too thin. At first glance, a thin TV looks and sounds really cool. In practice, it's a fragile and expensive piece of technology that becomes really hard to move by yourself. A thin 65-inch TV is still pretty heavy but there's hardly anything to grab onto other than the display itself, which you're supposed to avoid touching. Surely it wouldn't be a terrible idea to add a little more surface area along the bottom edge?

But the C5 has its strengths of course. I like WebOS (though I wish it weren't spying on me) because it's fast and convenient, lots of gaming features are supported, CEC for automatically switching inputs is really cool, hooking up my Samsung soundbar was easy and it's perfectly compatible, and the web browser is like a modern version of the Wii's browser.

Maybe my expectations are just way too high? I feel like they really aren't when I'm talking about a TV that retailed for usually $1,300 when I was initially considering it earlier this year. Meanwhile, Mini LED TVs like the Hisense U6 or TCL QM8K were about $800 to $900 for the 65-inch models, and they seemed fine to me. Sure, they can't achieve true black, but I'm not super sure I really care about that!

I'm sure maybe three to five years from now I'll be looking for a new TV, and I hope by then the whole ABL situation is at least mitigated to the point where I'm not perpetually annoyed. Otherwise, I'll be looking at Mini LED models, or even displays that use technology that's not currently available.