Are LG TV's Good?

Are LG OLED’s any good for the average gamer? The short answer is no, but it’s more than that. When choosing to be an early adopter of a new technology, you can expect some bumps and bruises, you can expect better models to come out soon after, and you can even expect the prices to drop (usually drastically), but what you don’t expect is that the product will be next to useless within about 4 years.

Sadly, that is the case with my current LG OLED (OLED65B6P). Inky blacks, low latency and all the other promises of OLED sounded too good to be true. As an early adopter of flat screens since the early 2000’s, my first true love were Panasonic Viera Plasmas. At the time, some of the best residential screens for gaming, sports and action movies. I even still have two of the higher end models that I purchased, including the V series which still works phenomenally to this day. It doens’t have HDR, 4K or extremely low input lag. More importantly, it still works and looks great.

I have also owned Sony LED’s as well as Samsung’s, which means that I have been around the block with televisions. I had never owned a LG product before but these OLED’s looked too good to pass up. It was the next wave and after waiting for the third iteration, the hope was that the kinks were sorted out

Despite LG stating that their TV’s boast a lifespan of 30,000 hours, I have only just recently crossed the 10,000 hour threshold with likely a 50/50 split of gaming and TV and it’s nearly unusable. As an adult with responsibilities and a gamer who wants to have a great escapist experience while playing games, it’s a large chunk of money to pay for something that doesn’t last.

As someone who does their due diligence before making large purchases and even sometimes small purchases, there was enough information going around about OLED being overly susceptible to burn in and permanent image retention that other types of TV screens weren't, so I purchased the extended warranty, which is something that I don’t often do.

This warranty took the standard LG one year warranty and added on two extra years for a total of three years coverage which should be enough use to see if major problems will arise. Sure enough, within only about two years bad burn in began to arise, which wasn’t a large concern of mine since I had purchased the extended warranty from the big blue electronics store. After sending out someone to look at my screen back in 2019, when I asked him what was the likely outcome, his exact words were “from what I have seen they will just give you a new TV when its this bad”

All I had to do know was wait for the claims department to contact me. Within a few days they contacted me, notifying me that the problems with my screen were outside of the parameters of their warranty. The warranty, which I read all of the fine print for before hand and asked what was covered and I was assured burn in was covered because the manager of the store who sold me the TV said “OLED’s were too new and there is too much talk of burn in” What else would fall under the extended warranty of a TV, if not the screen? What else is there?

Not only does the screen have the worst burn in or image retention that I have ever seen with my own eyes but I have been forced to turn off the HDR on all of the inputs or else the screen flickers constantly as it can’t decide if it wants to display HDR or not.

OLED burn in or image retention can’t be reversed. Sure, you can try to run a pixel refresher that most new TV’s have or you can even find some on YouTube as well but they aren’t going to fix much. When I reached out to LG, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. After my warranty was denied from Best Buy in 2019 and LG failed to do anything then, as they claimed they only offer one year warranty. I thought this time around it might be different since not only was the burn in much worse but now HDR doesn’t work.

I was hopeful that LG might stand behind their product when the problem at hand becomes much greater than just burn in. Having a 4K TV without HDR is like having a Ferrari without gas, its the feature that truly makes a TV shine. Considering I paid over five thousand dollars for this TV just a few short years ago, I thought they might want to keep me invested in their ecosystem by offering some way to make things right or at least by extending an olive branch.

Considering that after all expenses have been paid their operating profit in FY 2020 was 2.85 billion, it would be safe to assume there was some room in the budget to fix a TV that is a shell of what it could be at a third of how long its supposed to last. Although, if you are making that much money, you clearly don’t care about fixing the little things because your sales are fantastic.

Panasonic also had fantastic sales when it dominated the television market with plasma for many years before something better came along in the form of LED. The picture wasn’t as great but it was cheaper, lighter, and had more features than plasma based televisions. Shortly after, Panasonic exited the US TV market and the very same thing could happen to LG. Its only a matter of time before enough people experience the same problems I am and it’s only a matter of time before another company produces a better OLED or new technology altogether.

As a public service announcement for gamers from a gamer, don’t buy OLED if you value your money, but based on my experience with post purchase support for LG, I can easily say don’t support them as well. I for one vow to never purchase an LG product ever again. But whatever TV you want, but ultimately I am just trying to protect people from being burned.