LG’s new TVs have more ways than ever to screw up picture quality – but also more ways to get it right

The 65-inch LG G5 OLED TV standing on a grey table. On the screen is an image from boxing TV show 'A Thousand Blows'

(Image credit: What Hi-Fi?)

LG’s 2025 TV range, which includes the new C5 and G5 OLEDs, will be hitting shops any moment now, and one of the brand’s key talking points is personalisation. Quite astonishingly, the brand proudly claims that there are now 1.6 billion picture options – and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

LG’s heart is in the right place on this, I think. It wants to encourage people to move away from the TV’s out-of-the-box settings and find something that appeals to them specifically; but there are now just too many ways to get it ‘wrong’.

Admittedly, LG includes some very user-friendly guidance when it comes to choosing your preferred picture settings. It does this primarily by showing you a series of images with different settings applied so that you can then choose those that you prefer, and have the TV design a unique picture preset based on those. These still images aren’t particularly reflective of actual movie content, however, and it’s all too easy for the images you ‘like’ to combine into a picture preset that delivers content in way that is a million miles away from what the creator intended.

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I’m just not sure to what degree the average user wants this level of choice. I think most people just want to be told what settings are 'right' and will get the most out of their expensive new telly.

Thankfully, then, if an owner can resist falling down the picture settings rabbit hole, the new LG TVs also include new ways to get picture quality ‘right’. The main one of these is the Dolby Vision Filmmaker Mode, which now works with the Ambient Light Compensation feature to adapt the picture to the brightness and colour of the light in the room. On its own, the Dolby Vision Filmmaker Mode takes the existing Dolby Vision Cinema preset and further reduces active picture processing to deliver an even more accurate image. If the Ambient Light Compensation can then accurately adapt that image to changing room conditions, it should be the only setting you need for Dolby Vision content.

The Ambient Light Compensation feature can, of course, also be applied to the standard Filmmaker Mode, so you’re also covered for content that isn’t in Dolby Vision.

I just hope that the Ambient Light Compensation works as well as it should and that LG flags it and the Filmmaker Modes as a way to get an always-accurate picture. I'd much prefer that than it pushing really hard on the picture personalisation, which I think could result in some dreadful picture settings.

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Tom Parsons has been writing about TV, AV and hi-fi products (not to mention plenty of other 'gadgets' and even cars) for over 15 years. He began his career as What Hi-Fi?'s Staff Writer and is now the TV and AV Editor. In between, he worked as Reviews Editor and then Deputy Editor at Stuff, and over the years has had his work featured in publications such as T3, The Telegraph and Louder. He's also appeared on BBC News, BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4 and Sky Swipe. In his spare time Tom is a runner and gamer.