LG QNED85T TV Review

The LG 65QNED85TUA looks alright from a style perspective. Its bezels are pretty thick, so it doesn't look very sleek like other similarly priced models from other brands. It's a pretty basic design and doesn't look very premium.

The TV comes with two plastic feet that can be adjusted into two different positions. The narrow position (pictured above) brings the feet close together, which is great if you have limited space on your table or media console. You can also widen the feet, which adds some stability and makes it easier to fit a soundbar between the two feet. The feet lift the TV about 3.23 inches above the table, so most soundbars fit underneath.

The footprint of the 65-inch stand is 46.06" x 11.69".

The back of the TV is made from plastic. All of the inputs are on the left side of the TV when facing the front, but they're in a recessed cutout that makes them hard to access if you have the TV mounted to a wall. There's a clip on the back, and each foot has a channel to funnel cables through to help with cable management.

The TV has decent build quality overall. There are no issues with quality control, but the TV is almost made entirely of plastic and doesn't use any premium materials, so it looks and feels a bit cheap.

The LG QNED85T has decent contrast overall. Its native contrast ratio is good, but setting local dimming on 'High' doesn't drastically improve black levels like it does on many other TVs, although it does help a bit. Even with local dimming enabled, blacks still become raised and washed out when bright highlights are also on the screen.

The TV has mediocre blooming performance. The amount of blooming depends on the local dimming setting you go with. Setting local dimming on 'High' increases contrast and black levels, but there's noticeable blooming around highlights or subtitles when they're against a dark background. With local dimming set to 'Low,' the blooming isn't quite as noticeable, but blacks aren't as deep.

The TV's local dimming performance isn't the greatest, mainly due to the TV being edge-lit. However, setting it on 'High' does increase its contrast ratio and gives the TV slightly better brightness, so the bulk of our testing was done with local dimming set to 'High.' 

The LG 85 Series has poor lighting zone transitions. The leading edge of bright highlights is noticeably dimmer as they quickly move across the screen, and over half of the screen is lit up when larger highlights transition at a quick pace, which is distracting.

Outside of local dimming being slightly worse, there's no visible difference in dark scene performance when the TV is set to Game Optimizer.

The LG QNED85T has just alright HDR brightness. Combined with the TV's only decent contrast, it doesn't deliver a very impactful HDR viewing experience.

Our results are with Dynamic Tone Mapping turned off. Below are the results with Dynamic Tone Mapping turned on:

• Hallway Lights: 368.5 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 287 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 131 cd/m²

Although the TV is a tiny bit dimmer in Game Optimizer, it's not noticeable. Our results are with HGiG enabled and Dynamic Tone Mapping turned off. Below are the results with Dynamic Tone Mapping turned on:

• Hallway Lights: 372 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 285 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 141 cd/m²

The TV has fair PQ EOTF tracking. Shadows and mid-tones are displayed darker than intended across the board, but the TV follows the curve closely with highlights. There's a sharp cutoff with content mastered at 600 and 1000 nits, so details in specular highlights are lost. However, there's a gradual roll off with content mastered at 4000 nits, so some details in highlights are retained.

The LG QNED85T has very good SDR brightness. It's bright enough to overcome glare in a well-lit room, but it's not quite bright enough to completely eliminate reflections in a room with a lot of sunlight.

The TV supports a wide color gamut. It has fantastic coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space and adequate coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, but colors are very inaccurate and undersaturated across the board.

With a less aggressive 50% stimulus, the TV performs better in both the DCI-P3 and Rec. 2020 color spaces.

The TV has good color volume. It does a pretty good job displaying dark saturated colors, and although it displays colors bright enough to look good, it can't display colors at very high luminance levels.

The LG QNED85T has subpar pre-calibration SDR accuracy. Reds are very overrepresented in most shades of gray, which gives the TV a noticeably warmer color temperature than 6500K. Its color accuracy is decent, but whites and most lighter shades are inaccurate. Gamma is very close to 2.2, but most scenes are slightly too dark.

The TV has fantastic accuracy after calibration, and it's easy to calibrate. White balance and color temperature are now almost perfect, and gamma is incredibly close to 2.2. The color accuracy is much better, but saturated reds are a bit inaccurate.

See our full calibration settings.

The TV has great gray uniformity. There's a little bit of dirty screen effect towards the center of the screen, and the sides of the screen are slightly darker than the center, but it's not noticeable with most real content.

The TV has mediocre black uniformity. With local dimming disabled, the screen is cloudy and blueish. With local dimming enabled, it's a bit better, but there's still patches of blue and some cloudiness.

The TV has an inadequate viewing angle, so it's not suitable for a wide seating arrangement. As you move off-center, there's significant gamma shifting, color shifting, and raised black levels, and colors look increasingly washed out as you move further away to the sides.

The TV has decent reflection handling. Its semi-gloss screen finish reduces the intensity of indirect reflections, like when glare from a ceiling light isn't directly facing the screen. Unfortunately, the TV's handling of direct reflections is only alright, so reflections caused by something like an open window opposite the screen are distracting.

The LG 85 Series QNED has good HDR native gradient handling. There's some banding in greens and dark grays, but all other color gradients have very minimal banding.

The TV's low-quality content smoothing is good. It does a good job of removing most artifacts while still preserving detail, but there are still some visible artifacts in low-bitrate content.

The TV does a decent job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. The image is clear enough that you can still make out some detail, but finer details and small hardcoded text are hard to make out.

The TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout. This doesn't cause any issues for video or gaming content, but it can be a problem for PC monitor use as it impacts the text clarity, although not everyone will notice this.

The TV has good separation between colors, which helps with color purity. This is confirmed by the TV's spectral power distribution (SPD).

The LG 85 Series QNED has a great response time, but there's still some blur behind very fast-moving objects. Unfortunately, it's slower when coming out of dark states, so there's some black smearing in dark scene transitions.

The TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, which introduces flicker that can bother people who are sensitive to it. The amount of flicker depends on whether or not local dimming is enabled. With local dimming turned on, the TV flickers at 120Hz in all picture modes. With local dimming disabled, the TV flickers at 480Hz. However, there's distracting image duplication when the TV flickers at 480Hz, so the 120Hz flicker frequency is less distracting.

The TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). This feature is meant to reduce persistence blur and improve the appearance of motion. It works pretty well at both 60Hz and 120Hz, but there's some image duplication.

This TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion. With slower moving scenes, it works okay, with only some artifacts around characters and objects. Unfortunately, it really struggles with faster-moving scenes, and there are distracting artifacts and haloing around characters.

Due to the TV's quick response time, there's some stutter when watching movies or TV shows, and it's most apparent in slow panning shots.

The TV removes judder when watching 24p movies or TV shows when the Real Cinema setting is enabled, even from sources that can only send a 60Hz signal, like a cable box.

The TV supports FreeSync and HDMI Forum VRR. It's also G-SYNC compatible, ensuring a nearly tear-free gaming experience from any VRR-enabled source.

On an NVIDIA graphics card, enabling FreeSync on the TV leads to screen-tearing, but if you turn that off and have the VRR toggle turned on, everything works as expected. On an AMD graphics card, you must have VRR set to 'Wide' for low frame rate compensation to work properly.

The LG 85 Series QNED has exceptionally low input lag when set to Game Optimizer, resulting in a very responsive gaming experience. The input lag is much higher in the other picture modes, so you do feel a slight delay when doing something like pausing a movie or TV show.

The TV supports all common formats. It displays chroma 4:4:4 properly, which is important for clear text from a PC.

There are two settings you can use to passthrough proper chroma 4:4:4. The first is to change the input label to 'PC.' The second is to enable the '4:4:4 Passthrough' setting in the 'HDMI Settings' menu. Both of these options work the same and lock you out from using the 'Noise Reduction,' 'MPEG Noise Reduction,' 'Smooth Gradation,' and 'Real Cinema' settings.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about switching to Game Optimizer to get the lowest input lag.

The TV is almost fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, and FreeSync Premium Pro. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about switching to Game Optimizer to get the lowest input lag. It doesn't support Dolby Vision gaming.

The TV supports the full 48Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 on all four HDMI ports. This allows you to take full advantage of multiple high-bandwidth devices, like if you own both current-gen consoles and a high-end gaming PC. It doesn't support Dolby Vision or HDR10+.

The TV supports eARC, which lets you pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver or soundbar through an HDMI cable. It supports all major audio formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility with external sources.

The LG 85 Series QNED has a poor frequency response. The sound is well-balanced at low volume levels, making dialogue easy to understand. However, the sound becomes very unbalanced at moderate and high volume levels, so dialogue is hard to understand. The TV produces almost no bass at all, so you don't hear much low end on this model, and it doesn't get very loud overall.

The TV has bad distortion that worsens as you raise the volume. Near and at the TV's maximum volume, the distortion is very audible and quite distracting.

The TV runs the 2024 version of LG's proprietary smart interface, webOS. The interface is fast and easy to use, and it supports user profiles, so you can customize the home page for different users.

Unfortunately, the TV has a bug that sometimes causes VRR handshaking issues. To fix this, you must disable and then reenable VRR in the Game Optimizer menu.

There are two settings in the 'Home Settings' menu, namely the 'Home Promotion' and 'Content Recommendation' settings. These settings remove the top banner ads and suggested content from the home screen. This gives your home screen a clean look, but there's no way to remove ads from the apps page.

The LG QNED 85 Series has a great selection of apps, so it's easy to find your favorite content. You can also cast content from your phone onto the TV or play videos from a USB stick.

The LG QNED85T has the same Magic Remote that comes with many LG models. You can use the remote as a pointer or use the traditional buttons to control the TV. The TV also supports hands-free voice control through microphones on the unit itself. You can use your voice to change inputs, open apps, search for content, adjust settings, and ask for the weather and time.

On the bottom of the TV, in the middle, is a single button you can use to turn the TV on or off, change inputs or channels, and control the volume.

• Remote (with 2x AA batteries)
• User manuals
• Stand covers
• Cable clips
• Power cable