Banding?
I just bought this TV about 2 weeks ago. The TV over all is great with the exception of the banding. I most notice it when I’m gaming. I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and during the night scenes or anytime it’s dark the banding is pretty bad. I use the calibrated picture setting. Is there any way to fix this? I bought the TV through Costco and I have 90 days to return it. But I like the Tv, this is just a very distracting issue. Thanks!
- 10-100
Pixel size
The size of one of the LG 55EC9300's individual pixels is small. And because it is a 1080p TV, you can see a screen door effect if you sit relatively close. This isn't as bad as the screen door effect on old 720p plasma TVs, but it could bother some people. This is also why all of the pictures in our review have slightly more moiré than usual.
To illustrate this, compare the following close-ups of the pixels on the EC9300 OLED vs the LF6300 LED (both displaying a white picture).
LG OLED EC9300
LG LED LF6300
ABL (Automatic Brightness Limiter)
OLEDs have an ABL that behaves very similarly to plasma TVs. The more white it needs to display on the screen, the darker it will be. Here is a table for a few measurements we took at varying window size (a white square that covers a certain % of the whole screen).
Window size Luminosity 2% 342.7 cd/m2 5% 337.5 cd/m2 10% 335.7 cd/m2 18% 335.1 cd/m2 25% 334.0 cd/m2 50% 191.0 cd/m2 100% 94.6 cd/m2 You can see that the luminosity stays constant up to about a 25% window, then it drops rapidly.
For most content, you can't really see that issue. For watching hockey though, it is quite noticeable because the whole screen gets darker. You can also see it when a bright commercial starts after a dark movie.
Also, it messes up the gamma curve, which makes calibrating more difficult.
It also explains why the brightness of the pictures in our review doesn't match other TVs that we reviewed.
Dark gray uniformity and image retention
While the 50% gray uniformity was good, the darker shades of gray had more problems. Not only that, but they were also changing over the course of a few hours/days. When we first turned on our set, it had very big spots and bands all over the screen (unfortunately, our camera setup wasn't ready to capture it). Fortunately, it cleared up after a few days. Here are a few pictures that were taken after a few days of usage.
10% gray #1
10% gray #2
20% gray #1
20% gray #2
The #2 pictures were taken a few hours after the #1. You can see something very interesting in the #2 pictures: image retention of our checkboard pattern. We only displayed the checkboard pattern for a few minutes before taking the picture, but it still produced a little bit of image retention. It went away after about 10 minutes of normal content.
You shouldn't really worry about image retention. We got a similar effect on a lot of plasma TVs that we tested in the past, and even a few LCD ones.
Motion Blur
The LG 55EC9300 has an almost instant pixel response time (we measured 0.3ms on average on it, see full measurements). This translates to absolutely no motion blur trail following moving objects, which is great. That doesn't mean you won't perceive motion blur, though.
There are two components of motion blur left:
- Blur inside the footage itself. A lot of movies use a slow shutter speed to give the impression of something moving fast. The TV can't do anything about this.
- The frame time. This is related to the frame rate of the video. The lower the frame rate, the more blur we perceive. This is why motion interpolation works at reducing the perceived blur (it increases the frame rate). But even without increasing the frame rate (if you don't like the soap opera effect), TVs can do something about this kind of blur. Something that the EC9300 can't do, because it uses the sample-and-hold display method, without black frame insertion (BFI) or pulse width modulation (PWM).
The EC9300 is flicker free (see our oscilloscope measurement here, at varying values of 'OLED Light').
This is similar to all 2015 Sony TVs by default:
Sony X930C default
Sony X930C default
But the Sony TVs can make the screen flicker if you want, which clarifies the movement (at the cost of darker picture and visible flickering).
Sony X930C Clearness 5
Sony X930C Clearness 5
Samsung does it by default, although via a PWM, and the effect is not as strong as what Sony TVs can do. So the variation depends on your backlight luminosity.
So while the EC9300 has perfect motion from a response time perspective, your perceived blur will depend on the frame rate of the video you are watching. And unfortunately, you cannot make the EC9300 flicker to clarify things further, the way you can with some LED sets.
