LG 65GX 4K Smart OLED Television 65″

The LG GX Gallery Series OLED is a feat of engineering and a home cinema lover’s dream. If you have the money for an installer to properly hide the cables and a home theater to put it in, it’s an immaculately beautiful TV both inside and out.

The LG Gallery Series GX OLED is a home cinema lover’s dream come true – an exemplary flatscreen that uses all the latest specs and standards, from Dolby Vision and Atmos to Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, from Chromecast Built-in to AirPlay 2.0.

While the outside is a marvel of engineering, inside you’ve got the all-new LG Alpha a9 Gen. 3 processor that adds better facial recognition and multi-step noise reduction to LG’s already-great HD-to-4K upscaling and much-improved motion processing technology.

It’s not absolutely flawless as it still can’t reach the brightness levels of some LED-LCD TVs and has some audio balancing issues, but otherwise it’s still a slick flatscreen for folks who don’t mind spending a bit more money on their next TV purchase.

Design
The comparison to the older W-Series OLED makes sense not only because it shares a similar design, but because it also shares some other key similarities with the new Gallery GX Series: they both need to be wall-mounted and, if you want it to tuck the wires inside the wall, they both have to be professionally installed, too. Thankfully LG does include the no-gap wall-mount inside the box so there’s no need to buy it separately and you can, apparently, also buy optional legs if you want.

Smart TV (webOS with ThinQ AI) 
While some smart TV platforms are starting to feel a bit stagnant, LG’s webOS keeps finding new ways to keep things fresh. This year, it’s upping the capabilities of its own personal assistant on top of continued support for Alexa and Google Assistant.

The marquee feature that’s been added is the ability for LG’s ThinQ AI to recommend shows, follow specific sports teams and remind you when they’re playing… which admittedly sounded better at CES when we still thought we’d have sports this year. None of this contradicts or steps on the toes of Alexa or Google Assistant as ThinQ AI really just wants to be your go-to entertainment concierge rather than an all-encompassing personal assistant.

Performance
As you’d expect, content across the board looks amazing on the GX OLED. HD/SDR content looks better than ever before thanks to the new image Alpha a9 Gen 3 Processor and 4K/HDR content has the pixel-perfect black levels and color accuracy you’ve come to expect with an OLED.

But by far our favorite improvement is the significant boost to motion handling in more picture settings this year. It’s still a bit over-aggressive in the dynamic mode, but we didn’t have to adjust a single setting on the exceptional Expert ISF (Bright Room) setting that’s perfect right out of the box. There was no soap opera effect in any of the content we watched while action sequences remained easy to follow.

Sound
If you’re looking for pitch-perfect audio, you won’t find it on the LG Gallery Series – the built-in speakers are kind of a soft spot in an otherwise great design: unfortunately, due to design constraints, the TV only sports thin, low-powered speakers that just don’t match the premium performance of the OLED panel.

Now it’s not that the Gallery Series has the worst sound quality we’ve heard on a TV this year – it certainly doesn’t – but the weak midrange is simply dominated by the overcompensating lows and highs. The result isn’t unlistenable and can be improved by turning on volume levelling, but for a TV that costs as much as this does it’s disappointing.

Other panels to ponder…
Unless you’re married to a perfectly clean aesthetic or absolutely refuse to buy an entertainment center for your living room, you can save hundreds by buying the LG CX OLED instead of the Gallery Series. They use the same panel and the same processor, and have all of the same features – the only two differences are price and design, both of which are relatively substantial.