LG’s White-OLED technology (WOLED) has been improving for years, each iteration boosting output, efficiency, and color volume. And while 2025’s C5 doesn’t get LG’s new Primary RGB Tandem tech from the flagship G5, it still boasts incremental improvements to peak and overall brightness. My measurements confirm: the C5’s separate RGB primaries generate excellent DCI-P3 coverage, real HDR content hits 1050 nits, and we get an impressive 290 nits fullscreen white. Otherwise the C5 looks a lot like last generation’s C4: same premium build quality, same inputs and full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 support, 144 Hz max refresh rate with G-Sync/FreeSync. All this to say that the C5 continues to deliver a fantastic gaming TV experience.
Incremental improvements are, of course, always welcome, but LG might be falling behind the QD-OLED competition. At the 65″ size, the C5 and Samsung’s S90F are now matched at $1400 (a great deal for each), and despite the C5 being a remarkable performer for gaming and movies, Samsung’s S90F is just that little bit better.
LG C5 – Setup, Design, and First Impressions
Whether on a TV stand or a deep desk, I really like the look of the C5. I received the 55″ version for review, and the brushed aluminum and faux marbling on the rear of the display works for me. And with the TV off, the glossy, purple-black screen looks like some sort of magical mirror. (More on that AR coating later.) LG keeps the outer, OLED portion of the display reasonably thick – 6 mm – so it doesn’t feel as delicate as Samsung’s S90F, which I thought would snap every time I touched it. The flimsy plastic cover plate and cable guide seem a bit out of place on the otherwise premium design. That plate also covers the permanently affixed power cable, an odd choice; other brands opt for a detachable cable.
Assembling the C5 on its stand, I hate to admit, was a bit of a struggle. In retrospect, I realize now that the backplate of the stand screws into the stand stand, which screws into the screen, but LG’s manual is nigh inscrutable. Because the parts don’t look anything like a traditional stand, we’re tasked with assembling rectangles with other rectangles, flipping them over and screwing a thing into a thing that doesn’t really seem like it belongs. Once in, though, I found hoisting and handling the 55″ version substantially easier than any of the 65″ televisions I’ve previously reviewed. The screen stays fairly stable with minimal wobble even with some aggressive keyboard typing, but if you’re going to move your stand/table with the C5 still on it, I’d suggest keeping a hand on the top of the screen.
For connectivity, all four HDMI 2.1 ports are full bandwidth, so 120/144 Hz is supported on every input. There’s a cluster of three USB ports, ethernet, optical SPDIF, and RF antenna. Interestingly, there’s no headphone jack, which is a feature I quite miss, although LG does support Bluetooth headphones.
Interacting with the TV: webOS and the Remote Control
Shortly before this review was released, my colleague Jaron Schneider reviewed LG’s flagship G5 model, one step up from the C5. In that review, he was miffed by LG’s backward “progress” with webOS and the G5’s remote. I, independently, echo that sentiment for the C5. It’s hard to say exactly whether LG’s webOS is more or less frustrating than Tizen (read my Samsung S90F review for details), but both have the blood-boiling sluggishness that screams low-end mobile phone. And yes, just like in Tizen, webOS throws up a loading throbber on the screen when accessing the picture menu, or going to the home screen, or doing just about anything.
Once in the Home menu, accessing apps like Netflix or Apple TV is straightforward. LG’s magic remote works with motion control, but I found myself constantly selecting the wrong option or mis-clicking because of the force needed to press in the scroll wheel. You can turn this off, but the menus don’t seem designed for standard D-pad control. For example, the app list, likely the thing you’ll be using most on the home screen, is just a long horizontal band of weirdly small tiles. It’s a really poor use of the screen’s space.
Jaron was also baffled, correctly I might add, by the decision to remove the input selection button from the remote. LG’s Home screen only shows one recent input, your latest, so it’s only good for getting back to where you were. Switching inputs proper now means pulling up the slow-loading Home Hub, selecting the input, waiting for the preview to show up (while white balance and other picture settings load in), and then clicking again to load. There’s no reason any of this should be difficult.
Hisense’s U8QG, using Google TV, is a pleasure to use in comparison: pared back, fluid, fast, and easy to navigate.
Sound
We still include a section on sound because it is important that manufacturers ship TVs with a usable audio solution; not everyone will have a surround sound setup or a soundbar, although that’s definitely our recommendation. TVs simply don’t have the form factor necessary for audio: forward facing drivers for stereo imaging and cabinet volume for deep bass. (There’s a reason our top pick, Samsung’s HW-Q990F, includes a subwoofer.) The C5 isn’t as thin as Samsung’s S90F, so LG does have some room in the chassis to play with, but the results aren’t amazing, even with our generally low expectations.
Music on the C5 sounds thin; it’s all mid-bass and treble. The down-firing stereo speakers do a good job, though, of keeping dialogue and voices intelligible – better than aiming the speakers at the rear wall, which has the opposite effect. At higher volumes, the sound doesn’t really improve, but at least there’s not any scratchiness, rattling, or obvious distortion coming from driver over-excursion.
Reflection Handling and Viewing Angles
Given that the C5 can’t quite reach the fullscreen brightness of backlit LCDs, it’s important that the screen coating is good. I really like LG’s solution here: glossy for clarity, but with a very good AR coating which does an impressive job of attenuating reflections, giving them a deep purple hue. The shot below gives a good comparison: the C5 (on the left) against Hisense’s U65QF, both against an overcast sky. Don’t mind the white balance on the C5 (this was before calibration), but even with a roughly 2x brighter panel, reflections on the U65QF can completely obliterate the visibility of scenes, evidenced by this relatively bright hallway shot from Severance.
I don’t want to pick on the U65QF too much since it’s less than half the cost of the C5. So what about more similarly priced competition like Samsung’s S90F or Hisense’s U8QG?
The image above shows a comparison of how some of our tested TVs handle reflections. I take a shot, using the exact same exposure, of the reflection of a compact fluorescent bulb for each screen. Samsung’s S90F is basically as good as it gets for reflections, followed closely by Hisense’s U8QG. The C5 isn’t quite on that level; reflections are still a bit too bright, and the purple halo is a little distracting.
I’d rank the C5 in a tie for third with Samsung’s QN90F, which is fully matte and tends to diffuse reflections over a larger area. I generally prefer glossy screens, but I think there’s a large element of personal preference here.
Off-axis viewing of LG’s WOLED panel is vastly better than VA LCD panels like the U8QG or TCL’s QM8K. Emissive displays like OLEDs can generally maintain their brightness, contrast, and white balance at shockingly large angles off-axis, whereas VA panels tend to fall off in all those metrics starting around 20 degrees. This is important if you’re sitting close to the screen, or if you want everyone on your couch to see the same picture. OLEDs also don’t have the viewing-angle dependent gamma shift for dark colors, which is a major plus for close viewing or watching any dark content.
I have the 55″ version of the C5 in for review, and I’ve found that it’s actually a pretty decent desktop “monitor” if you have a deep enough desk. But sitting right in front of it, one thing immediately stuck out to me: the C5’s picture has a fairly strong green push off axis.
The image above shows a wide-angle closeup of the LG, with the color temp calibrated and dialed in to a standard 6500K, roughly what I see sitting here at my desk. I’ve masked off the edges of the photo with the same color as the center of the screen, and it’s apparent that the periphery goes quite green. I’ll get into calibration soon, but each of LG’s “accurate” picture modes (ISF, FILMMAKER, etc.) are too red out-of-box. This might have been an effort to balance the color across the panel for different viewers, who, if they were off to the side, would be getting a picture that’s too green instead.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s something to keep in mind if you intend to use the screen up close or as a PC monitor. Interestingly, Samsung’s QD-OLED S90F doesn’t have this problem at all.
Color, Calibration, and SDR
I’m not sure if LG’s addition of a 4th, white, subpixel to goose OLED brightness made engineering the C5’s color, white balance, and gamma performance 33% more difficult, but I don’t envy the engineers who had that task. The white subpixel adds another spectral component, different from but also overlapping the standard RGB primaries.
The image above shows the difference; the spectrum at the top next to the mercury reference shows the C5’s white output, which is quite different from the RGB primaries below. The wavelength and purity (or separation) of the RGB primaries is what gives the C5 excellent coverage of the DCI-P3 space, extending the points of its gamut triangle to nearly perfect alignment.
I’m a sucker for deep, vibrant colors, so I prefer displays that extend beyond P3 (like the Samsung S90F or U8QG, both using quantum dots), but I can’t really complain about LG’s accuracy here.
It’s important that the quality of a TV’s “Game” mode doesn’t take a back seat to the movie modes. Without the need for heavy processing like motion smoothing, noise reduction, or super resolution, I expect game modes to have color and gamma performance at nearly the same level of their best film-style picture modes. In the C5’s case, my first instinct was to test LG’s “Game Optimizer” mode. Confusingly, LG opts to use “Game Optimizer” for two different purposes. The first is very important: access to gaming features like the display’s max refresh rate of 144 Hz, VRR with G-SYNC or FreeSync, ALLM, etc. The second is the Game Optimizer Picture Mode, which enables access to wildly inaccurate profiles like RPG, RTS, and FPS, which have been standard fare in PC monitors for ages.
Happily, LG gives us the option to keep Game Optimizer on without using its picture mode. I found ISF Bright and FILMMAKER give the best, most accurate default settings. Both settings, though, have trouble tracking 2.2 gamma and are far too red, which I mentioned earlier. I had to dial red all the way down to -16 to reach 6500K. Dark Detail also needs to be increased, otherwise near-black is badly clipped. Dark detail being lost is a problem in HDR as well, which I’ll get to later.
In SDR, LG controls the ABL (Automatic Brightness Limiting) behavior of the C5 with the Contrast setting. Higher contrast will allow for higher SDR peak brightness on smaller windows, but the display will more aggressively dim the screen, especially when displaying PC-style content. At a setting of 100, I measured the C5 hitting 450 nits up to a 50% window, which is excellent, but fullscreen brightness fell to only 220 nits. Dropping contrast down to 70 levels off the display to a flat 290 nits – good for a consistent, ABL-free experience for PC use. LG’s default of 85 strikes a balance between these:
SDR brightness isn’t really a strong suite for the C5. Even with a good AR coating, LG can’t overcome a 2x or 3x brightness deficit to more potent FALD backlit LCDs. Most content is still SDR, so if you’re looking for a television for a bright room, something like Hisense’s U8QG is a much better choice.
HDR
HDR on an OLED, whether that’s LG’s WOLED C5 or Samsung’s QD-OLED S90F, hits different than FALD backlit LCDs. I really liked the HDR experience on Hisense’s U8QG, but with “only” 2048 zones, it simply can’t compete at generating the extreme local contrast that 8.3 million individually controlled pixels can achieve.
I measured the C5 blasting around 1060 nits at a 10% window size in HDR. Not quite at the level of the S90F, but very good. In games that are mastered to take advantage of this, Cyberpunk 2077 being an excellent example, the experience is astonishing. Every neon light at Lizzy’s is punchy, brilliant, and deeply colorful. In a dark room, the performance is hands-down superior to LCD.
But my dark room caveat is an important one due to LG’s EOTF tracking in HDR, which is simply too dark. In both FILMMAKER and ISF picture modes, across the critical “dark” region for HDR target luminance, from a very dark 0.05 nits to about 10 nits (which is actually brighter than you’d expect), LG has missed the mark… by a lot, presenting a contrasty, but crushed and inaccurate image. My EOTF tracking measurements for both 2% and 10% window sizes show just how off the C5 is. And this is a log scale! My colorimeter wasn’t even able to measure anything at the 0.05 and 0.1 nit levels.
Perhaps this was intentional – a way to differentiate LG’s OLED offerings against LCD competition – but it causes real problems when gaming or watching movies. When watching The Gorge on Apple TV, at night with no room lights, I had trouble making out what was happening in almost every nighttime scene. I had a similar problem when rewatching Until Dawn on Netflix. It’s clear that no one would master content this way. Hisense’s U8QG does a much better job of accurate EOTF tracking; the scene above with Anya Taylor-Joy’s character crouched in a sniper position is intentionally dark, mostly below 1 nit, but detail is visible on the Hisense. On the C5, the frame is basically a floating face in a sea of black. LG does offer a “Dark Detail” adjustment, but even at its max of +3, tracking is still too dark.
For both dark room and HDR performance in general, Samsung’s S90F is a better display than the C5: brighter highlights and more accurate EOTF tracking.
Gaming on the LG C5
I was sent the 55″ version of the C5 right in the middle of my playthrough of The Outer Worlds 2, so I played the latter half of the game on the C5. In HDR, the game looks incredible – tons of fine detail, bright highlights, and super colorful – and while performance on my aging 3060 Ti isn’t the best in UE5 games, the C5 handles motion well even at lower framerates. The images I picked for this review show off some scenes from TOW2 and Cyberpunk 2077, where 1000 nit highlights really contrast against the dark remainder of the frame. On LCD, dark content can smear in motion, but OLED stays sample-and-hold perfect.
In fact, the C5 is right up there with the S90F for gaming: amazing performance throughout the VRR range, OLED near-instant response times, and LG’s Game Optimizer mode has very low input lag at 144, 120, and 60 Hz.
Response times for the C5 are basically perfect, topping the RT chart along with another OLED: Samsung’s S90F. Averaged across 60 Hz, 120 Hz, and the C5’s max of 144 Hz, I measured gamma-corrected response times at about 0.4 ms, but that comes from a few stragglers; most responses are faster than 200 microseconds. This means that the display is nearly a perfect sample-and-hold limited device, so the only way to reduce motion blur further is to increase refresh rates. A max refresh rate of 144 Hz is good, but I’d still like to see this being pushed out more. 240 Hz at 4K is something that remains limited to the best gaming monitors, as even the more expensive TV models (LG G5 or Samsung S95F) from both brands top out at 165 Hz.
The group of VA panel LCDs is more than an order of magnitude slower, and those averages include many responses in the 30 ms range, which is why VA’s tend to have a hard time showing motion without smearing/trailing, especially in dark scenes.
Most of the C5’s transitions look like the graphs above: essentially a square wave response rising or falling. But the display does overshoot the target occasionally. For the black to RGB 223 transition, the C5 plateaus to RGB 234 in 165 microseconds before landing back at the target after one 144 Hz frame. Similarly, falling from white to RGB 95, the C5 drops a little too much. The sharp, periodic dips each frame aren’t visible, but the overshoot is, leading to a bit of “inverse ghosting.” That said, unless you go out of your way to look for it, it’s not a major problem.
I take pursuit shots of BlurBusters’ TestUFO at a very fast 1920 pixels per second; it’s important, though, to use higher speeds to better differentiate the response time behavior of displays as their response times get quicker and quicker. But as mentioned before, there’s nothing to be really concerned about here: no smearing, trailing, or excessive overshoot. Other than the differing subpixel layout, it’d be hard to tell the C5 from the S90F.
LG’s Game Optimizer mode (not the picture mode) reduces latency down to excellent levels for all refresh rates. At 144 Hz and 120 Hz, input lag was about 1.1 milliseconds, a fantastic result. 60 Hz latency is also the best of the bunch tested so far: only 4.5 ms. Without GO turned on, 144 Hz lag is still good, but it gets progressively worse as the refresh rate drops (~22 ms at 60 Hz), and you can definitely feel it when gaming with a mouse. Game Optimizer doesn’t lock you into any particular picture mode, so I’d suggest keeping it on.
I had an absolute blast gaming on the C5. For pure gaming performance, OLED is simply superior to VA LCDs. Yes, FALD LCDs can throw more brightness at you, but the instant response, the extreme local contrast of 8.3 million “zones,” and excellent viewing angles makes OLED the best choice for gamers. Cyberpunk’s HDR implementation is so good that I had to wrestle myself away from just playing the game in order to take photos.
VRR Flicker
All OLED panels are susceptible to VRR flicker, and the C5 is no exception. Large and erratic frame time swings can cause the screen to rapidly brighten and darken; the cause seems to be a slightly different near-black gamma response at different framerates. The shot below compares a scene from Cyberpunk 2077 at 30 and 144 fps. Unless the screen is actively flickering, it’s pretty hard to notice this shift in real content; I chose this scene because it was particularly illustrative of the difference.
Interestingly, the gamma shift doesn’t seem to happen with the white subpixel, e.g. measuring a pure grayscale test patch didn’t show much gamma difference at any framerate. That particular AC unit and the ceiling seem to have the right mix of red and green to excite the shift. I’ll need to investigate this more.
At 30 fps, RGB values below about 30 are quite a bit darker than they should be; the C5 already has trouble with crushed detail, but the lower framerate causes even more deviation from the 2.2 gamma target, giving the picture a very different look.
That said, I didn’t have much flickering in hours and hours of play time in Cyberpunk or The Outer Worlds 2; keeping a smooth-ish, consistent framerate is key. Most of the flickering was isolated to loading screens in TOW2.
One additional thing I noticed at lower framerates was that the C5’s picture has a visible stairstep pattern. This is absolutely not a problem if you’re sitting at normal couch distances, but I wanted to mention it for PC folks and as a comparison to Samsung’s QD-OLED S90F, where I didn’t notice any unusual pixel behavior.
The Competition
If you’re willing to make the jump to OLED, but still have some budget constraints, I wouldn’t consider anything other than LG’s C5 or Samsung’s S90F, both now matched at around $1400. Yes, the one-tier-down B5 and S85F exist at $1000, but their fullscreen brightness performance is decidedly last-gen, and very dim; at that price, you can get a FALD LCD that’s 5x brighter.
Performance-wise, both are top tier. For gaming in rooms where you can control the ambient light, both make excellent choices, but I think the winner here is the S90F: brighter HDR highlights, better HDR EOTF tracking (the C5 is too dark!), and it’s better off-axis. The S90F isn’t worlds better, but it is better. The S90F won our Best Gaming TV of 2025, and that still stands.
If you need major brightness, though, the Hisense U8QG is our pick for bright rooms. Pixel response times are slower than OLED, of course, and you lose the amazing viewing angles, but Hisense has done a remarkably good job of delivering superb brightness while controlling blooming/haloing.
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