LG UT8000 TV Review

The LG UT80 has a very simple design. The panel is flush with the borders, which are thin and don't stand out at all. It's largely made of plastic, and although it doesn't look bad, it's not premium at all.

This TV uses a pair of V-shaped feet, which support the TV well. The stand lifts the display about 3.3 inches above the table, so you can easily place a soundbar in front of the TV without blocking the screen. There's no alternate position for the feet, so you can't place them closer together if you have a narrow table. The feet support the TV well, but it wobbles fairly easily.

Footprint of the 65-inch model: 47.4" x 10.6".

The back of the TV is very plain. The inputs are recessed into the back panel, making them difficult to reach when the TV is wall-mounted. One of the HDMI ports faces out the back of the TV, so you'll likely need an HDMI angle adapter if you plan on wall-mounting it. There are clips just above each foot for very basic cable management.

Overall, this TV has decent build quality. There's nothing premium about it at all, but there aren't any noticeable design flaws or defects, either. The plastic body flexes easily, but this won't be an issue once you've installed the TV.

The LG UT8000 has passable native contrast. Without a local dimming feature, this TV relies on its native contrast in dark scenes. The contrast ratio isn't high enough to preserve deep blacks in scenes with any amount of brightness to them. In deeper scenes with no bright highlights, it looks better, but blacks still aren't very deep.

It doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no blooming around bright objects or subtitles in dark scenes. However, as the TV can't brighten highlights without impacting the rest of the image, dark scenes look washed out.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual zones to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. But this means that there's no distracting flicker or brightness changes as bright highlights move between zones.

Switching to Game Mode makes no noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

Unfortunately, this TV has sub-par peak brightness in HDR. It's bright enough to deliver most scenes at the brightness level the content creator intended, but with no local dimming and low peak brightness highlights and bright areas of the scene don't stand out at all.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Cinema
• Panel Brightness: 100
• Adjust Contrast: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm 50
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off

We tested the TV with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'Off.' When it's enabled, the results are notably worse, with the image looking dim and washed out in real scenes, so we recommend keeping it disabled for HDR content. For reference, you can see the results with Dynamic Tone Mapping enabled below:

• Hallway Lights: 212 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 199 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 122 cd/m²

Switching to the 'Game Optimizer' Picture Mode causes no noticeable change to the TV's peak brightness. Overall peak brightness is still too low for an impactful HDR gaming experience.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• Game Optimizer: On
• Picture Mode: Game Optimizer
• Panel Brightness: 100
• Adjust Contrast: 100
• Color Depth: 50
• Color Temperature: Warm 50
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: HGiG

The PQ EOTF tracking on this TV is fantastic. Even though it's not very bright overall, most HDR content is displayed close to the brightness levels the content creator intended. Near-blacks are raised due to the lack of local dimming, and bright highlights aren't bright at all as the TV's brightness starts rolling off very early.

The peak brightness in SDR is mediocre. It's simply not bright enough to overcome glare in a bright room, so if you have lots of windows or bright lights, the screen is hard to see.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Expert (Dark Space, night)
• Panel Brightness: 100
• Color Tone: Warm 50
• Gamma (Adjust Brightness): 2.2

The LG UT8000 has a decent color gamut in HDR. It has good coverage of the widely-used DCI-P3 color space, but coverage of the wider Rec.2020 color space is disappointing, and it can't display a wide color gamut. The tone mapping is also bad throughout when sent a 75% stimulus, which corresponds to content mastered at 1,000 nits, so most HDR content is inaccurate. In dimmer scenes, the TV performs much better:

• DCI-P3 (50% stimulus)
• Rec.2020 (50% stimulus)

Sadly, this TV has sub-par color volume. Due to its limited color gamut and low peak brightness, it can't display a wide range of colors at any luminance level, and saturated colors are dim.

Despite its other flaws, the LG UT8000 has surprisingly good accuracy in SDR before calibration. Darker shades of gray are slightly off, but it's not really noticeable. Dark blues are a bit worse, and gamma is way off, so most SDR content is brighter than it should be.

This TV is nearly perfect in SDR after a quick calibration. Its calibration system is easy to use but a bit sensitive. After calibration near-blacks are still a bit over-brightened, but it's not noticeable.

Make sure to check out the full calibration settings we used.

The gray uniformity is just okay. There are noticeable bright spots in columns across the screen; these are likely caused by the LEDs in the backlight, and it's noticeable even in near-dark scenes.

The black uniformity is excellent, but it doesn't really look good. Due to its low contrast ratio, blacks appear blue when there are any bright spots on the screen. The LEDs in the backlight are also noticeable even when displaying pure black.

Unfortunately, the LG UT8000 has poor off-angle viewing. The image degrades rapidly as you move off-center, as colors wash out and fade, and black levels rise rapidly. This makes it a poor choice for a wide seating arrangement, as anyone sitting to the side won't enjoy a clear picture.

The TV has good reflection handling, but there are a few noticeable issues. Any bright source of light reflected on the screen has a noticeable rainbow smear. The coating absorbs some light, reducing its intensity, but since this TV can't get very bright overall, it's not suited for a bright room.

The LG UT80 has decent HDR gradient handling. There's noticeable banding in almost all shades, but it's most noticeable in dark shades of gray.

This TV has sub-par, low-quality content smoothing. The smoothing features don't really do anything, so although fine details are well-preserved, macro-blocking and pixelization aren't removed.

This TV has okay sharpness processing capabilities when upscaling low-resolution content. These results are with the following settings:

• Adjust Sharpness: 19
• Super Resolution: High

This TV uses a BGR subpixel layout, which doesn't impact the image quality, but it makes text look blurry in some applications that don't support the BGR layout, which is important if you want to use it as a PC monitor. You can read more about our monitor picture quality tests here.

Its spectral power distribution shows that the panel technology doesn't use Quantum Dot technology or KSF phosphors.

The LG UT8000 has a decent response time overall. Brighter scenes look the best, as the TV has a quick response time to and from most bright colors. Dark scenes are worse, though, as it's very slow to transition from an 'off' state to a dark shade, so shadow details are blurry and there's significant overshoot, causing inverse ghosting.

Unfortunately, this TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight, and it flickers at a low frequency, causing noticeable image duplication. At max brightness, the flicker isn't nearly as noticeable, as instead of a full square wave with equal on/off cycles, the brightness only dips down briefly at 120Hz.

This TV doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature, also known as BFI. Instead, the backlight always flickers at 120Hz, which helps reduce persistence blur but introduces severe image duplication below max brightness.

The TV has an optional motion interpolation feature, but it's pretty bad in any fast-motion scenes. There are significant artifacts around any fast-moving object, but slower panning shots look a bit better.

Thanks to this TV's relatively slow response time, there's very little stutter when watching low frame rate content.

This TV removes judder from most sources without introducing motion interpolation. 24p sources work perfectly with the Real Cinema feature enabled. 60p/i sources, on the other hand, are only judder-free if you enable motion interpolation and set De-Judder to '10'.

Unfortunately, all sizes of this TV are limited to 60Hz and don't support VRR, so you'll see more screen tearing when playing games that can't maintain 60fps. Previous generations of this lineup had a more powerful 86-inch version, which had a 120Hz panel, but not this year, according to LG's specs.

This TV has superbly low input lag, ensuring a very responsive desktop experience if using this TV as a monitor or very responsive inputs when gaming.

The TV supports most common resolutions but only at a 60Hz refresh rate. It displays chroma 4:4:4 signals properly at all supported resolutions, essential for clear text from a desktop PC.

This TV can't take full advantage of the PS5's capabilities, as it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate and doesn't support variable refresh rates.

This TV can't take full advantage of the Xbox Series' capabilities, as it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate and doesn't support variable refresh rates.

It's limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth on all three of its HDMI ports, and it doesn't support HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, so you're limited to HDR10.

Unfortunately, this TV doesn't support DTS audio formats, which are often used for the main audio track on physical media.

The LG UT8000 has a decent frequency response. It gets very loud and has a well-balanced sound profile at moderate listening levels. Like all TVs, though, there's very little bass response, with no boom or thump in deep bass.

The distortion performance is decent. There's very little audible distortion at moderate listening levels, but it increases noticeable at max volume.

The LG UT8000 launches with webOS 24, which features a new AI-powered assistant built-in to the TV and built-in Google Chromecast support. This TV is part of LG's Re:New program, so the webOS interface will continue to receive platform updates for the next five years.

Unfortunately, although it supports most of the same features as the higher-end LG TVs, the slower processor on this model leads to a less-than-stellar experience with webOS. Audio commands often don't work at all, and the menu is noticeably slower and unresponsive at times.

Unfortunately, like almost all TVs on the market, there are ads throughout the smart interface, and you can't fully disable them. You can limit ad tracking and remove ads from the home screen using the 'Home Promotion' and 'Content Recommendation' settings in the 'Home Settings' menu, but there's no way to remove ads from the apps page.

The content store has a huge selection of streaming apps, and most mainstream streaming services are available.

The LG UT8000 comes with LG's Magic Remote. You can use it as a pointer, making it easier to navigate the menus if you prefer that approach instead of using the remote's buttons.

• Power cable
• Remote (with 2x AA batteries)
• User manuals