Brightness vs coating: is the LG G5 the right fix for a sunny room?

[nINEY]

Every time someone asks what to do about a bright living room, the answer that comes back is buy something brighter, and the LG G5 is the current poster child for that argument. The panel is the Primary RGB Tandem stack, four OLED layers rather than the usual arrangement, and by What Hi-Fi's account it was a real generational jump in output instead of the customary few percent. Their reviewers describe shielding their eyes during the Darkstar scramjet sequence in Top Gun Maverick, and pulling more colour graduation out of Pan than a conventional OLED managed. No nits figure appears anywhere in the piece, so take the wording rather than a number.

Here is where I push back slightly. Brightness fixes washout. It does not fix reflection. If your problem is a lamp or a window mirrored back at you in the dark parts of the frame, more output lifts the whole picture including the reflected junk, and the black floor is exactly where OLED earns its money in the first place. That is why screen finish gets argued about so hard around here, and it is a genuinely different fix to a brighter stack.

The gaming side is not in dispute. Four HDMI 2.1 inputs, ALLM, VRR, Dolby Vision Gaming, 4K/120 for consoles and up to 4K/165 off a strong enough PC. webOS covers the usual apps and the reviewers preferred the Cinema audio preset over Standard, which matches every LG set I have listened to.

So, G5 owners: in a room with real daytime light, is it the brightness doing the work or the screen finish? Those two get credited interchangeably and they are not the same thing.

 

[AustinJ 7921354wk2]

Brightness helps with daytime sport and not much else in my experience. A reflection in a dark scene is still a reflection.

 

[Amnesia]

165Hz on a TV is wasted on me, but I know PC people who bought the G5 for that line alone.

 

[zozo591]

The tandem stack matters more long term than the peak number does. If stacking layers buys headroom rather than just output, that is the story.

 

[WilliamP]

Curtains are cheaper than a television. Half the glare threads on this forum get solved with a blind and nobody wants to hear it.

 

[Jannyferr]

Compared one against a C series in a shop with the lights blazing and the gap was obvious, but a shop is the worst place to judge this.