Television technology has been making leaps and bounds in recent years and LG has been at the forefront.
This year, they've improved upon their premium OLED range yet again, taking image fidelity, gaming performance and ease of use to a stunning new level.
Image quality is the most important thing in a television, but buying new from any decent brand this year should mean you're good in that department. What's arguably more important is how convenient an experience your TV provides.
The 2021 range of LG OLED TVs feature the newly designed UI webOS 6.0:New Home which is probably the easiest way to use a smart TV ever released.
The home screen is super simple and intuitive, keeping a track of where you're up to in all your series from all your streaming services and making genuinely helpful viewing recommendations as soon as the TV fires up.
There's an awesome universal search button too, so if you type in "Arnold Schwarzenegger" it'll show all his movies across Netflix, Disney Plus and Apple, as well as give you YouTube results.
There's also voice command functionality, so you can hold down the mic button on the remote and say "show me Meryl Streep movies" then boom, it pulls up all her work across all the services too.
If you don't like pushing buttons on the remote or using your voice, it's easier than ever to connect your phone to your LG TV thanks to magic tap. There's loads of options for how to view smartphone stuff on the tele, including splitscreen if you want to be watching something else at the same time.
The remote itself of course has a Netflix button, but also Disney Plus and Amazon Prime buttons, plus hot buttons you can set to open whatever you like if you're into Neon, Spark Sports, Shudder, Docplay, Animelab or whatever.
If you've bought a smart TV in recent years and thought there's no way they can make it even easier to use, think again - webOS 6.0:New Home really is incredible. Just be warned: it makes things so easy you'll likely become a lazier person because of it.
Of course, as far as image quality goes, LG's 2021 OLED range is very likely to include the very best screens released in Aotearoa this year. Expect spectacular pure black blacks, nice bright whites and lush, vibrant colours.
LG's AI Picture Pro technology constantly recognises what's being displayed and processes it all to bring more 3D depth to every scene. There's also Dolby Vision IQ that automatically adjusts the brightness, colour and contrast on the fly to be optimised for whatever's onscreen.
Of course for your control freak tendencies, you can manually control all the settings, too.
A lot of people hate motion-smoothing and similar technologies that can give an artificial, uncanny valley vibe to films. That stuff might be great for watching anime and gaming, but it's pretty awful when applied to Seven Samurai, Casablanca or The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
Fortunately, LG has a new 'Filmmaker Mode' that strips all that artifice away. Using it when watching 4K restorations of those classic films means you get them looking better than they ever have with the beautiful OLED screen, but also feeling beautifully genuine.
That mode isn't ideal for everything you watch though and thankfully it's easy to switch and enjoy OLED Motion Pro, which was fantastic during the Olympics. This tech means all objects that whizz across the screen do so without any motion blur or drop off in detail, which is awesome in live sport.
As well as simply switching modes, if you want to go super hardcore, there are plenty of LG superfans on the likes of Reddit and YouTube with tutorials on how to manually get the TV's settings to precisely what they consider the very, very best for watching each sport.
There's also a new feature called Sports Alert which delivers notifications about fixtures, start-times and live scores with little boxes on the screen. With this on, you don't need to look at your phone, tablet or laptop to check on multiple sports events happening at the same time. Both your hands will be free to deal with hotdogs, popcorn and drinks at all times, as your eyes remain permanently on the screen.
OK, let's talk about gaming. If you're lucky enough to have a PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X or S, or a high-spec PC, you want a TV that takes full advantage of their capabilities. You want to be able to play in 4K at 120 frames-per-second.
All 2021 LG OLED models have got you covered on that front. They all offer a super fast 1ms response rate along with HDMI 2.1* which brings the key features of VRR (Variable Refresh Rate), ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) and eARC (Enhanced Audio Return Channel).
LG OLED is also the first TV range to offer NVIDIA G-SYNC* compatibility, which displays games clearer and smoother with less stutter, lag and flicker.
That all adds up to the best gaming experience you can get.
With crossplay you can play Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War with mates who are using past-generation consoles on older TVs. Then get them to pop over and see how it plays on with your 2021 LG OLED and PS5 or XSX and it'll absolutely blow their minds with how much better it is.
No matter what you want to do with your TV - whether it's watching movies, sports, or gaming - it's hard to imagine anything else will beat the quality and convenience of LG OLED in 2021.
This article was created for LG NZ. *Not available on A-Series OLED
