As far as feasts for the eyes go, the 2023 LG OLED TVs are Thanksgiving dinners. CES is always when we get to check out the full slate of the year’s upcoming max fancy televisions, and LG are always at the forefront thanks to their expertise in manufacturing their own panels. This year’s releases include upgrades to their Z, G, and C lines of televisions, and manage to wring a whole lot more light out of those little diodes, improving color contrast and revealing more little details in every scene.
If you’re not familiar with LG’s OLED TV lineup, the Z series includes their top-tier 8k TVs, while the C series is more of the everyday premium lineup — the one most folks will be looking to if they want to make a big splash on their next TV, but don’t have the unlimited sums the Z series requires. The G series is their Gallery lineup (which we first saw at CES 2020), taking the physical design of the TV frame itself into higher consideration.
All of the 2023 LG OLED TVs will benefit from the new α9 AI Processor Gen6. A lot of the machine learning features of the new processor still focus on improving content that isn’t filmed in 4k or 8k. AI Picture Pro handles upscaling and using enhanced dynamic tone mapping in smarter ways to make the image look sharper without making it look like something else altogether. The new processor also powers LG’s AI Sound Pro audio processing, which creates virtual 9.1.2 virtual surround sound from the built-in speakers — pretty cool way to wring the most out of the onboard TV speakers, even if a lot of folks making this kind of splurge will be building out their own surround sound setup.
Partly thanks to the new hardware, all the TVs will be much brighter, but that’s true even more so for the G3. Using LG’s Brightness Booster Max technology, the picture brightness can be dynamically adjusted pixel-by-pixel to get the most of any image. That also helps to make the TV a little more efficient by only cranking up the brightness where needed, although it’s still going to take a whole lot of power to make those pixels light up this bright — 70 percent brighter than your average OLED TV.
The G3 also keeps a low profile to mesh with the decor. LG says they’ve given it a One Wall Design — no gap between the TV and the wall when mounted, so it looks as much as possible like part of the wall, short of you actually carving out a part of your wall to set the TV into. Something to consider if interior design is a big part of your TV buying decision.
Despite having their own suite of audio and video processing software, all the 2023 LG OLED TVs also have support of Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, gold standards that help make sure these TVs can faithfully play back anything filmed with the best possible equipment. There’s also HDMI 2.1a support, with these TVs the first to support Quick Media Switching Variable Refresh Rate — makes switching between inputs seamless, without a black screen flashing while the image loads. Don’t know how much that bothered anyone, but if you can improve something, why not?
Seems like LG also made their new OLED TVs solid gaming monitors, considering PCs as much as consoles.The 2023 LG OLED TVs support both NVIDIA G-Sync and AMD FreeSync, tying refresh rates to frame rates to keep the image smooth. That’s handled through the Game Optimizer, which adjusts settings in the background, so you can game away without having to fiddle with menus and settings on your own.
2023 LG OLED TVs Availability and Pricing
No announcements were made regarding the availability or pricing of the 2023 LG OLED TVs — they’ll just be on the CES show floor blasting eyeballs for now. They’ll likely become available sometime across spring and summer, with prices in the thousands.