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LG revealed his 2025 OLED TV lineup and among the announced models is the LG G5one of its flagship 4K OLED models. The LG G5 is the successor to the 2024 LG G4, one of the the best OLED TVs from last year, and it looks to deliver a lot of upgrades over the G4 – but there’s one LG-suggested upgrade that particularly caught my eye, and it’s not one of the biggest, flashiest features.
First, let’s talk about the shiny features. The LG G5 will be the first in the world AMD FreeSync is Nvidia G-Sync certified TV at 165Hz, a step higher than the 144Hz refresh rate of the G4, which will put the G5 in new territory compared to the G4. the best gaming tv (Although 144Hz and above is only relevant for PC gamers). It should be noted that the G5 does not support Dolby Vision and 165Hz at the same time.
The G5 features the new technology of LG Brightness Booster Ultimate, which also appears in the LG M5, the high-end wireless. 4K OLED TVs in LG’s 2025 TV line-up, and LG says the G5 (and M5) are up to three times brighter than the entry-level B-series OLED TVs (but didn’t offer more direct set-to-set comparisons comparable).
An interesting absence this year though is the use of micro-lens-array (MLA) technology in LG’s OLED range (including the G5), which helped provide the brightness upgrade over W-panels. OLED in previous models, such as the LG G4 from 2024. Yet LG still says that the G5 will be the brightest that the G series has been, suggesting that this new Brightness Booster technology is a recently “four-stack” OLED revealed panel will do a lot of leg work.
The 2024 LG G4 reached 1,489 nits of maximum brightness (measured on a 10% HDR window) compared to the LG B4’s 656 nits, so hopefully we’ll see a big boost in brightness if it comes close to being fully three times brighter.
However, while this all sounds good, it’s actually another area of brightness that makes the G5 an exciting prospect, and the one I’m most eager to see in action – and that’s its fullscreen brightness. LG claims that the G5 will have up to 40% higher fullscreen brightness than its predecessor, the G4, and that it could be a game changer.
Fullscreen brightness in a nutshell
Brands often quote peak brightness numbers when discussing a TV’s brightness levels, with similar Hisense and TCLwhich do some of the i the best mini LED TVs on the market, citing numbers up to 10,000 nits. While OLEDs are a way out of this number, there are signs that OLEDs could begin to hit 3,000 nits, with Philips among the first to say that their sets can hit this figure.
The maximum brightness measurement, however, is done by shining a bright light on a very small section of the screen, between 2-10% of the total screen area. But when it comes to watching TVs, fullscreen brightness (that is, how bright the whole thing can be, evenly) is so important.
Fullscreen brightness is important for many types of movies and TV shows, but the really big one is sports, where you want to see clarity and rich colors all over the screen at the same time, to get the full viewing experience. Just as importantly, fullscreen brightness is vital to help combat the reflections you might see in brighter viewing environments – say a room filled with lots of natural light – because the brighter the image, the more likely it is to overwhelm any reflections. , so you can focus only on what you need to see.
Full screen brightness has never been OLED’s strong point, often hovering between 200-300 nits on the most flagship OLEDs, compared to the 600-800 nits you’ll get in a high-end mini-LED . He takes inventive measures such as the Samsung S95D‘s, 2024 Winner of the TechRadar Choice Awards for TV of the YearAnti-glare technology OLED Glare Free to effectively beat reflections, and this is just using a matte screen instead of increasing the brightness.
LG G5 – the “brightest” OLED ever?
When we measured the fullscreen brightness of the LG G4, it gave a result of 257 nits in the Filmmaker mode, which is impressive for an OLED, but it was still much less than the 318 nits obtained by the QD-OLED. Samsung S95D. And both models were significantly darker than the like Hisense U8N and Samsung QN90Dmini-LED sets that achieve results of 805 and 659 nits in Filmmaker mode respectively.
While OLED is unlikely to hit mini-LED-level full-screen brightness anytime soon, a 40% full-screen brightness increase in the G5 is still intriguing. If correct, we should expect the LG G5 to hit more than 350 nits in Filmmaker Mode, and while that’s still not mini-LED levels, it’s a significant increase from mid-range OLEDs and flagship OLEDs. the previous years, and should have been very visible to the naked eye.
It’s worth noting that this is also estimated based on the figures for Filmmaker Mode, one of the dimmer default picture modes available, but one we like here at TechRadar because of its accuracy. Brighter picture modes like Standard and Cinema are probably even brighter, and I found during my own testing that these can be essential under our bright test room lights.
We were very impressed with the LG G4’s overall picture quality, awarding it five out of five in our LG G4 review and while there were reflections present, the overhead lighting wasn’t much of a problem. So if the LG G5 can improve on this even further with a higher overall brightness, it could add to the rare group of OLEDs that can handle any brighter room, making it a more versatile set overall.
Final thoughts
In the last two years, LG has not been the top dog in the OLED world in our test; Samsung has. While LG provides more OLED options, Samsung’s models were so good, we chose them Samsung S90C and Samsung S95D as our TV of the year in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Brightness was a key factor in both of these cases, as both models pushed OLED brightness levels to new heights that we couldn’t ignore. Crucially, though, that didn’t mean we didn’t like LG’s OLEDs any less – they were just right for the post.
If LG can really push the G5 to a brightness we haven’t seen before, especially fullscreen, we could see LG take back its OLED crown in 2025. I for one am looking forward to getting my hands on the G5 to see if it can innovate . OLED even more, and the first thing I have to do is put some lights on to see if its new brightness is the real deal.
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