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If any TV can reasonably be said to have achieved classic status in recent years, it has to be LG’s OLED C series. For year after year, the C has delivered an irresistible combination of picture performance and value that has made them consistently huge hits with consumers and professional testers alike. With the latest premium OLED TVs suddenly pushing the technology to previously unimaginable new extremes, though, could it be that the dependable C series is finally starting to fall behind?
Picture quality
It takes no time at all in the OLED65C5’s company for it to convince me LG’s 2025 C series is anything but a busted flush. It delivers a level of picture quality that’s both a bigger step up from its predecessor than expected, and simply ridiculously good for a 65in OLED TV only costing £2099.
Starting with the classic OLED basics, its self-emissive OLED pixels serve up a gorgeous, borderline-flawless contrast performance that imbues every single frame of every film I watch with a sense of genuine beauty. Blacks look deep, rich and completely free of the greyness or backlight inconsistencies you get with almost every flavour of LCD TV while, at the other end of the high dynamic range, light spectrum peak whites and colours deliver exquisite intensity and punch. It’s in this latter respect in particular the OLED65C5 outperforms its predecessor, really bringing HDR content to life by hitting peak brightness levels of nearly 1200 nits.
The level of control the OLED65C5 delivers over both its darkest and brightest picture areas is exquisite, too. No shadow-detailing is lost, in even the darkest areas, and the blocking and/or fizzing noise in dark scenes that used to be a mild issue with LG OLEDs in the past is entirely gone. The stability of the OLED65C5’s pictures in near-black areas - the toughest areas for OLED TVs to handle, not least because of the subtleties of voltage control required - is basically immaculate.
Every detail and shading subtlety in even the whitest areas is clearly defined too, rather than anything looking flared out - and even the lightest colours retain beautifully fulsome saturations. Actually, colours always appear rich and vibrant across the board. This is especially true in the brilliantly calibrated ‘Standard’ preset, but the accuracy-focused ‘Filmmaker Mode’ also feels more vivid and dynamic than it does on many mid-range TVs - it really reveals just how ‘baked in’ the OLED65C5’s picture talents really are.
The apparent effortlessness of the OLED65C5’s picture brilliance is revealed, too, in how natural its pictures look across almost all of its many and varied presets. Outside of the over-cooked ‘Vivid’ preset, colours always look balanced, nuanced and credible.
The OLED65C5’s images look emphatically sharp and detailed with native 4K sources, sure - and LG’s latest Alpha 9 AI Generation 8 processor also does an outstanding job of upscaling HD sources to the screen’s 4K resolution, removing noise without scrubbing detail, and adding pixels without causing softness or colour shifting. LG’s motion-processing can be a bit heavy-handed in its default settings with some picture presets, mind you - but switching to ‘Cinematic Movement’ mode delivers an excellent compromise between slightly reducing judder when watching 24 frames per second content and making sure the picture doesn’t look too processed or overly smooth.
You can watch the screen from almost any angle without colours or contrast fading, too, unlike most LCD TVs - and subtle HDR colour blends are rendered with less banding or striping interference than I saw when I tested LG’s otherwise-barnstorming G5 OLED flagship TV. Though having said that, the very occasional presence of faint traces of banding during particularly difficult dark shots is pretty much the only niggle I find with the OLED65C5’s largely immaculate images.
It’s important to say the OLED65C5’s pictures don’t deliver anything like the extremes of brightness and, by extension, colour volume that flagship OLED and LCD TVs are achieving this year. LG’s own G5 OLED models, for instance, deliver brightness levels in their best presets that are more than 50 percent up on those of the OLED65C5. While there is undeniably some ground-breaking spectacle to be had from this new generation of flagship TVs, though, they’re all significantly more expensive than the OLED65C5 - and many of them struggle to deliver the near total glitch-free consistency LG’s new OLED mid-rangers achieve. The OLED65C5 really never puts a foot - or rather, a pixel - wrong in its quest to deliver an immersive, authentic and cinematic experience.
Sound Quality
The audio performance of LG’s C series of OLED TVs (and quite a few of its step-up G series models, come to that) has long lagged behind their picture quality - and that doesn’t change with the OLED65C5.
The main issue, as usual, is bass. Whenever the screen is asked to deliver any of the sort of low-frequency sounds Hollywood loves to throw into action, horror or sci-fi movies, the speakers built into the relatively small chunky section of the OLED65C5’s otherwise insanely thin rear start to phut, chuff and generally sound distressed. Especially if a low-end sound is a prolonged rumble rather than a momentary impact.
If you stick with the TV’s ‘straight’ Dolby Atmos playback mode, there’s also a rather subdued, constrained quality to the sound that prevents it delivering the sort of cinematic scale and dynamic range that such big, beautiful pictures deserve. The sound doesn’t spread far from the TV’s bodywork, maximum volumes are limited, and the whole thing just lacks impact and immersiveness.
Fortunately things get much better (in most ways) if you turn on the OLED65C5’s ‘AI Sound Pro’ mode. This AI-based system greatly increases how far and wide the soundstage is distributed, makes small details sound clearer and better positioned, opens up the range between the highest and lowest frequencies in a mix, introduces a major volume bump, and gives the sound more forward thrust. So that it no longer sounds as if most things are happening behind the screen.
Dialogue can sound a little bright in ‘AI Sound Pro’ mode though, especially at very high volumes, and bass still ends up bottoming out into distortion and coarseness when the going gets deep. Plus there’s a pronounced limit to how far the soundstage can expand in ‘AI Sound Pro’ mode as a meaty horror or action scene swells and grows.
Overall, though, most people will find the ‘AI Sound Pro’ a much better bet for a fulsome movie experience than the OLED65C5’s underwhelming default settings. Even if it isn’t quite enough to make the OLED65C5 more than a fair-to-middling audio performer overall.
Living with the LG OLED65C5
The OLED65C5 is one of the TV world’s most distinctive-looking TVs. The incredible thinness - less than a centimetre - of much of its rear panel instantly gives it a futuristic, cutting-edge look, while a striking dark marble-effect finish for the skinny bits of the rear panel adds a touch of opulence to proceedings. A shame, almost, that you likely won’t see it again once the TV has been set in place in your room. A compact central section of the OLED65C5’s rear sticks out an inch or two further than the dominant skinny area, but the set is still thin enough overall to make an elegant addition to either your wall or whatever furniture you want to put it on.
If you’re not wall-mounting it, the screen sits on a compact centrally attached base plate with a neat silver brushed-metal finish. Note, though, the angled front of the stand prevents you placing a soundbar right up tight under the screen as you might otherwise want.
If you’re into gaming as well as home cinema, the OLED65C5 has again got your back. All four of its HDMIs are equipped to handle 4K at frame rates up to 144Hz, variable refresh rates in both the AMD FreeSync Premium and NVIDIA G-Sync flavours, and automatic switching of the screen to its lowest latency (a handy 12.8ms) ‘Game’ preset when a game source is detected. You can call up a dedicated gaming menu screen too, which offers a useful selection of gaming aids as well as detailed information on the incoming game signal.
The OLED65C5 supports HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision versions of high dynamic range, but not HDR10+ - so it can’t be depended on to always take in the best version available of every bit of content it might be presented with.
The OLED65C5’s smart features are built on the brand’s own webOS platform. This is so clever with its content recommendation intelligence and AI-enhanced customisation and optimisation features now that it actually all feels a bit overwhelming at first. The way some of the remote control buttons now have double uses, depending on how long you press them, doesn’t help the initial ‘learning curve’, either. Take a deep breath and spend a few minutes learning your way round, though, and you’ll start to appreciate the richness of what LG is offering here. I’d also strongly recommend overcoming any shyness you might feel at talking to your TV, as LG’s voice recognition system often provides an excellent, intuitive and speedy way of bypassing the onscreen menus.
Conclusion
While last year’s C4s felt perhaps a little conservative by LG’s usual C series standards in their efforts to advance the mid-range OLED cause, the OLED65C5 instantly elevates LG back to the top of the mid-range OLED pack with an effortlessly brilliant combination of spectacle and beautifully immersive consistency. It’s worth every penny of its £2099 price - and then some.
Test Samples
Sinners 4K Blu-ray
The unsurprisingly high number of dark scenes in Sinners (it is a vampire flick after all), but also potent use of colour within those dark scenes, looks amazing when it’s shown right - but it can also expose any picture-quality flaws a TV may have. On the OLED65C5 it just looks amazing.
Blade Runner 2049 4K Blu-ray
While Blade Runner 2049 on 4K Blu-ray doesn’t boast a particularly aggressive HDR presentation (aside from one or two stand-out moments), it still serves one of the richest, most colourful and most detailed 4K HDR images around. And I’ve never seen its gorgeous pictures delivered as immaculately on a mid-range TV as they are by the LG OLED65C5.
Cyberpunk 2077 Xbox Series X
Now that CD Projekt Red’s futuristic masterpiece is running free of most of its initial bugs, it proves a fantastic title for showing what LG’s own mid-range OLED masterpiece is capable of. Its detailing, light control and colour finesse unlocks the full scale and density of the game’s world, while its handling of the game’s frame rates ensures the action always feels smooth and crisp.
While the OLED65C5 isn’t as flat-out spectacular as LG’s OLED65G5, it’s hundreds of pounds cheaper and delivers irresistibly refined, balanced and completely immersive pictures that set new standards for the mid-range OLED world. Add to this outstanding gaming talents and sophisticated AI-driven smarts, and its £2099 asking price starts to look excellent value, too.
Pictures as outstanding as those the OLED65C5 can produce deserve to be unlocked to their maximum extent by a good 4K Blu-ray player. A Panasonic UB9000 if you can afford it, or a Panasonic UB820 if you can’t.
While the OLED65C5’s sound isn’t bad overall, especially if you use its ‘AI Sound Pro’ option, it’s not as potent or cinematic as the TV’s pictures. So adding a soundbar would be a good idea. LG’s own US70TY would be a good option given that this lets you combine the soundbar’s speakers with those of the TV rather than the soundbar just taking over everything.
The OLED65C5 is such a brilliant gaming display, finally, that even if you’re not a big gamer we’d recommend partnering it with a PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, or high-powered PC.
