LG has revealed its 2025 OLED TV lineup and among the models announced is the LG G5, one of its flagship 4K OLED models. The LG G5 is successor to 2024’s LG G4, one of the best OLED TVs of last year, and looks to provide several upgrades over the G4 – but there’s one upgrade suggested by LG that’s caught my eye in particular, and it’s not one of the biggest and flashiest features.
First, let’s talk about the flashy features. The LG G5 will be the world’s first AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-Sync certified TV at 165Hz, a step up over the G4’s top 144Hz refresh rate, which will put the G5 in new territory compared to the best gaming TVs (although 144Hz and above is only relevant for PC gamers). It’s worth noting though that the G5 won’t support Dolby Vision and 165Hz at the same time.
The G5 will feature LG’s new Brightness Booster Ultimate tech, which also appears in the LG M5, the high-end wireless 4K OLED TV in LG’s 2025 TV lineup, and LG says the G5 (and M5) are up to three times brighter than the entry-level B-series of OLED TVs (but didn’t offer any more comparisons to more directly comparable sets).
One interesting absence this year though is the use of micro-lens-array (MLA) tech within LG’s OLED range (including the G5), which helped provide the brightness upgrade over W-OLED panels in previous models, such as the LG G4 from 2024. Yet LG still claims the G5 will be the brightest the G series has been, suggesting this new Brightness Booster tech and a recently revealed ‘four stack’ OLED panel will be doing a lot of the leg work.
2024’s LG G4 hit 1,489 nits peak brightness (measured on a 10% HDR window) compared to the LG B4’s 656 nits, so hopefully we’ll see a big brightness boost if it’s going to get close to being fully three times brighter.
However, while this all sounds great, it’s actually another area of brightness that makes the G5 an exciting prospect, and the one I’m most looking forward to seeing in action – and that’s its fullscreen brightness. LG claims that the G5 will have up to 40% higher fullscreen brightness than its predecessor, the G4, and that could be a gamechanger.
Fullscreen brightness in a nutshell
Brands often quote peak brightness numbers when discussing a TV’s brightness levels, with the likes of Hisense and TCL, which make some of the best mini-LED TVs on the market, quoting numbers up to 10,000 nits. While OLEDs are a ways off this number, there are signs that OLEDs could start to hit 3,000 nits, with Philips among the first to say its sets can hit this figure.
Measuring peak brightness, however, is done by shining a bright light in a very small section of the screen, between 2-10% of the screen’s total area. But when it comes to watching TVs, fullscreen brightness (ie, how bright the whole thing can be, uniformly) is just as important.
Fullscreen brightness is important for many types of movies and TV shows, but the really big one is sport, where you want to see clarity and rich colors across the whole screen at the same time, to get the full viewing experience. Just as importantly, fullscreen brightness is vital in helping combat the reflections you might see in brighter viewing environments – say a room filled with a lot of natural light – because the brighter the image, the more likely it is to overwhelm any reflections, so you can focus just on what you’re supposed to be watching.
Fullscreen brightness has never been OLED’s strong suit, often hitting between 200-300 nits on the most flagship of OLEDs, compared with the 600-800 nits you’ll get on a high-end mini-LED. It takes inventive measures like the Samsung S95D’s, 2024’s TechRadar Choice Awards winnner for TV of the Year, OLED Glare Free anti-reflection tech to effectively beat reflections, and that’s just using a matte screen rather than increasing brightness.
The LG G5 – the ‘brightest’ OLED yet?
When we measured the LG G4’s fullscreen brightness, it yielded a result of 257 nits in Filmmaker mode, which is impressive for an OLED, but was still far less than the 318 nits achieved by the QD-OLED Samsung S95D. And both models were significantly dimmer than the likes of the Hisense U8N and Samsung QN90D, mini-LED sets that achieved results of 805 and 659 nits in Filmmaker mode respectively.
While OLED is unlikely to hit fullscreen brightness at mini-LED level anytime soon, a 40% fullscreen brightness increase in the G5 is nonetheless intriguing. If correct, we should expect the LG G5 to hit over 350 nits in Filmmaker Mode, and while that’s still not mini-LED levels, it’s a significant increase from mid-range OLEDs and flagship OLEDs from previous years, and should be very visible to the naked eye.
It’s worth noting that this is also estimated based on figures for Filmmaker Mode, one of the dimmer preset picture modes available, but one we like here at TechRadar because of its accuracy. Brighter picture modes such as Standard and Cinema are likely to be even brighter still, and I find that during my own testing, these can be essential under our bright testing room lights.
We were highly impressed with the LG G4’s overall picture quality, awarding it five out of five in our LG G4 review and while there were reflections present, overhead lighting wasn’t much of an issue. So if the LG G5 can improve on this even further with higher overall brightness, it could add itself to the rare group of OLEDs that can handle any brighter rooms, making it a more versatile set overall.
Final thoughts
In the past couple of years, LG hasn’t been the top dog in the OLED world in our testing; Samsung has. While LG provides more OLED options, Samsung’s models were so good, we chose the Samsung S90C and Samsung S95D as our TV of the Year in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Brightness was a key factor in both these cases, as both models pushed OLED brightness levels to new heights that we couldn’t ignore. Crucially, however, this didn’t mean we didn’t like LG’s OLEDs any less – they just got pipped to the post.
If LG really can push the G5 to a brightness we’ve not seen before, especially fullscreen, could we see LG regain its OLED crown in 2025. I for one am looking forward to getting my hands on the G5 to see if it can innovate OLED even further, and the first thing I’ll be doing is putting on some lights to see if its newfound brightness is the real deal.
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james.davidson@futurenet.com (James Davidson)
