LG OLED 83C2PUA TV

Handy easy to replace. Works great

For me, a TV is 50/50 picture/convenience. This is a zero on convenience. (Update 3/19/23 I’ll Never buy an LG tv again).

Forget the nonsense about “oleds don’t get that bright”. People are just saying stuff that they hear the pros saying because it’s a couple hundred nits lower than an LED set. It’s plenty bright for HDR highlights and daytime viewing. I have to squint my eyes. And if you’re like most people who work a 9-5 and mostly watch tv in the evenings – you’ll find it bright enough. Come on people.

Let’s start with the UGLY:

CEC: NIGHTMARE
I have a PS5, XBSX, Shield Pro. Whether these devices are all plugged into tv then ARC-> Yamaha receiver, -OR- everything plugged into a new Denon 760H receiver then eARC-> tv, it’s equally faulty. The tv likes to turn on my PS5 whenever I hit the input button (it shows the row of inputs first like it should, but then turns on and switches to PS5, also whenever I hit the back button from the ThinQ menu (I need to remember to hit the HOME button instead) and other odd buttons it fires up the PS5. Last night it did this when I hit the settings button ?!? Cannot get the Shield Pro to turn the tv on when it powers on. Yet, it will turn the tv on when it’s connected to my 10 year old Yamaha receiver (eARC to tv).
The Universal Control Management is terrible. So much bloated crap on this TV.

Auto-resume?!? Pause while watching netflix. 3 minutes later it starts playing. Watching something on plex- exit to home screen. 5 min later it switches to Plex and resumes movie.

ALEXA: HORRIBLE
This has to be the WORST Alexa integration EVER. My 3 year old Sony 900h connected on day one and has been FLAWLESS. Same with my $400 TCL roku tv. I say “Alexa, turn off xxx tv” and it would work 100% of the time. NOT ON THIS TV. It took me a week to troubleshoot, uninstalling apps, reinstalling (why are there 2 different LG devices on the Alexa app?!?). I’d say it works 10% of the time. Usually it says “LG tv is not responding, please check it’s network and power connection). If I grab the LG remote and hit the Alexa button and tell it to turn off it will work. But I could obviously just hit the power button on the remote.

UPDATE: try calling the Tv “tv” instead of “lg tv” . ALSO-” the tv has its own Alexa built in. Our echo dots are all named “echo” so this actually works quite well. Try calling “alexa” to the tv and issuing command. This has been working lately rather than telling my dot “echo, pause the tv”. We’ll see tomorrow. /update. (This still only works 50% of the time. Usually says ” network error”. 3/19/23)

LEARNING CURVE: STEEP AF
Make sure to register at AVSFORUM and read up/post your questions. The menu settings are very confusing and oddly placed. Read the manual, do your research. Go onto RTINGS.

REMOTE: LOVE/HATE
The pointer wheel is kind of cool and probably quicker most of the time. It’s like using a Wii remote but far more accurate and stable. The problem is when you just want to click over and select something (by pressing the wheel in). But my finger slips and instead of pressing the wheel in it turns the wheel which brings up the pointer and takes much longer to do what I need to do. There’s also no Play/Pause button, you need to press in the wheel.

I consider myself a person of average intelligence but it’s 2023 All remotes should have 3 things MANDATORY:
1. ALL buttons need to light up when lifted (like the Shield remote).
2. There ABSOLUTELY NEEDS to be a sliding LOCK BUTTON to prevent accidental button press (and kid mischief).
3. It needs to have a remote finder. Go into the app, hit a button, the remote makes a sound.
(4). It would be nice to have a few learning buttons and customizable app buttons, not just Netflix.

“Gallery” feature is a missed opportunity. It only appears if you are on an external input after the device has been powered off. Or you can select the gallery app manually. Here’s a stellar idea – why not use the gallery as the screensaver instead of the ugly fireworks or clock?

GAMING: SUPERB
Playing Horizon Forbidden West on PS5 at 60+ FPS in 4K is absolutely ASSAULTING on the eyes. It looks incredible! TV is responsive in regards to input lag and response time. When the tv is in GAME MODE, hitting the options button on the TV brings up the GAME menu which shows you all the gaming-related options and displays the current FPS on screen. Very nice.

MOVIES: OBJECTIVE
No TV is perfect. Side viewing angle is big for me. I can see the color washout sitting 12″ over on the couch while watching my Sony 900h LCD tv. Unacceptable. This TV has an AWESOME VIEWING ANGLE. Go to RTINGS to view and compare. There is no discernable color/luminance washout in any seat in my living room. You need to go off to the extreme right/left to notice it.

My dvd backups played via PLEX app on TV look incredible, thanks to the rich OLED blacks. 1080p BD rips also look fantastic (compared to my LCD SONY 900h). And of course 4k content looks great. We all know about the “inky” blacks of OLED, no need to talk about it. Image quality is the best I’ve seen.

STUTTER/(Judder?):
This is a big one for me. During panning shots, usually when there is something tall and thin not moving on the screen there is a HORRIBLE STUTTER effect. It’s jaggy and looks like the picture can’t keep up. It’s extremely jarring and takes me right out of the experience. This is due to the extremely fast response time of OLED technology. I find it extremely undesirable and a flaw. Options to mitigate this will introduce the Soap Opera effect, which is worse IMO.

SOUND OUTPUT
Sound on the tv is fine. The usual. Sound output via ARC/eARC will only output the basics: stereo, Atmos, Dolby Digital and (DD+) to your receiver. And there is a difference between this DD and the DD you will find on a DVD/Blu Ray. It’s a much more boring, stripped-down version (as with the Atmos I have heard) It’s a lower bitrate signal. But it will suffice if you’re going for a true 1-remote system. The TV will NOT OUTPUT DTS, DTS-MA, DD True HD via ARC/eARC. ***UPDATE: RECENT NEWS INFORMED THAT LG MIGHT START OFFERING DTS OUTPUT VIA ARC. IT’S UNSURE WHETHER THIS TV WILL RECEIVE THIS UPDATE*** Go onto RTINGS to check this info. Most TV’s these days do not support outputting hi res audio signals which is unfortunate. The Nvidia Shield Pro is the recommended set-top box if hi-res audio is important to you.

webOS: fine
Everyone seems to hate on the webOS. Look, they ALL have ads. I much prefer the Google Android (SONY tv, Shield) OS. But this one is fine. It offers all the apps I need: Netflix HBO MAX, Hulu, Disney +, and all the other ones, and displays them in a row at the bottom of the screen. You can easily go to what you want without looking or noticing all the other ads and crap on the tv. There is also another “ThinQ” app home screen where you can look at more crap you will probably never use. I stay away from all of this and hit my buttons very precisely otherwise one wrong move and I will launch the PS5 or some other device via CEC.

HINT: If your PS5 (maybe other devices too) does turn on, hit the (…) button on the LG remote to bring up a menu where you can put the PS5 back into sleep mode.

EYES
It took about 6 weeks for my eyes to adjust to this tv. Not sure of it was the detail, the brightness (it’s plenty bright for me) or the blue light – whatever – my eyes got strained. It felt like a dull pressure behind my eyeballs. I’m 43 and perhaps I have some eye issues, so this is objective. I’m sort of used to it now, however I do start to feel eye strain in excess of 2/3 hours. Sooner if gaming.

BOTTOM LINE: WOULD I BUY THIS TV AGAIN?
I don’t think so, especially now with other brands (SONY) offering OLED. I just don’t think I should have so much to complain about with a $2500 tv. I would expect it with HiSense, TCL, Westinghouse basement bargain garage sale tvs, but not with a top shelf LG OLED.

I would NOT choose OLED if there was another tech that offered similar gaming response time, decent black levels, and NO STUTTER during panning shots. This is like right on the edge of being a deal-breaker for me.

1/30/23 – I will update when/if things change. 3/19/23. I still hate this tv. Love the picture quality but just HATE the way it operates and all the shortcomings. No more LG for me.

Yes, I didn’t give this a great rating because the engineers made way too many amateurish mistakes in the user interface. To show why is a long review …

This TV lacks ATSC 3.0. In the end, I didn’t care much because when I downloaded the manual of a very popular competitor’s TV that “had” ATSC 3.0, the manual stated it wouldn’t decode the high def content! Wow–not very useful. So, I wondered how many other TVs had the same limitation that “claimed” ATSC 3.0 which is why I removed that as a requirement.

I personally feel that we are approaching the point of diminishing returns on how good TV displays look. Case in point, I looked at the TVs at Walmart & Target, which cost 1/3 this one and they don’t look bad. Yes, you can see some color shifting at extreme angles, but still, not bad. As for more expensive TVs, I looked at the various reviews out there and my take is that you can measure differences in display quality amongst the ones costing more or less the same, but unless the TVs are sitting side by side, I think the display difference is barely perceptible, if at all (some reviews actually mention this). In the end, I decided to focus on the user interface of the TVs, not rely on reviewer’s measurements.

Before I go into the remote and user interaction I want to discuss the poor upconversion when watching 480i TV. The jaggies are readily apparent and so bad, small text is difficult to read. It’s like all they did was double the pixels and did little interpolation. I attempted to take some pictures. One is from live TV and the other is the same program recorded (and interpolated) by my HTPC. My HTPC with 10 year old software and processor uses a very basic linear interpolation algorithm and it outperforms this TV when displaying this content.

One thing I noticed when looking at the various TVs was some remotes didn’t have numbers. Wow. I’m a TV watcher. I couldn’t imagine scrolling through channels trying to get to the one I want.

The remote is an RF one, but the TV does support an IR one (you lose the “mouse like cursor” though). The first thing you notice is the buttons are kind of small and close together. I have small hands, so I didn’t care.

The layout is bad. They didn’t even try. No excuse–they’ve been making remotes for how many decades?? The volume up/down paddle is on the left. Below it is the home button, NOT the mute button (the mute button is in the center, where the home button should be). The “go back to previous channel” button is on the left, not on the right where the channel up/down paddle is. What this means is you’ll be looking at your remote a lot.

Then you notice the various input selection “types”: up/down “paddles” for volume and channels; a ring that can be pressed up/down and maybe left/right; a mouse-like wheel; and don’t forget the “mouse cursor”. Why all of them? It’s like rather than do a quality exercise by having various people interact with it and give feedback so they could select one or two, they just used all of them. One problem is all the real estate wasted by this. The other issue is, and this is really weird: the different buttons only work in certain situations. For example, when you start typing a channel number, a list pops up with the channels it could be. You can use the ring to move the selection up/down, but NOT the mouse wheel–apparently, it’s function is (apparently only) to scroll to the next channel you are currently watching–it won’t work to move the selection up/down. And you can’t use the mouse cursor either. It’s darn right amateurish, by engineering standards. Think about using a PC/Mac app and in one spot, you had to use the up/down arrows; in another spot you use the mouse, in yet another, you used the mouse wheel. It’s maddening and makes it hard to use.

The “go back” ONLY deals with TV channels. It should go back to what was previously displayed on the TV. For example, if you were watching HDMI input 3 and jumped to TV channel 3.2, pressing the “go back” button should take you back to HDMI input 3. This is nice because it’s a hack to act as a screensaver if you pause the video on an HDMI input. This display suffers from image retention, so if you get up to make popcorn, for example, you don’t want a still image. Since there’s no “screen saver” button (hint), this hack works nicely to quickly jump back and forth. My old Panasonic TV did this and I used it all the time.

The cursor is nice (and it’s fun to use). The mouse wheel works pretty well. I think they found the sweet spot for how hard it is to turn and falsely turning it. However, the wheel is a selection button as well, and a couple of times when scrolling I inadvertently pushed too hard and selected something I didn’t want. Also, when scrolling through the up/down submenu for channel selection, I have hit that wheel causing a channel change that I didn’t want.

The remote has a bunch of largish “quick jump” buttons on the bottom for jumping to various streaming services. However, they take up valuable real estate. I’d rather they were smaller or replaced by a row of smaller buttons you could program to the stream of choice. There’s some small colored butons (have yet to determine their purpose) and maybe they would suffice.

The RF remote has a voice input. I was looking forward to trying it out, but it only works if the TV is connected to the internet.

When you power up an external device connected to HDMI, a popup appears asking if you want to go to that HDMI input. Nice, BUT, if you try to use the mouse wheel, it unselects the default “Yes”, but doesn’t select the other option (“No”). You have to use the ring for that.

One last note about the RF remote. There are a lot of clones for sale here and elsewhere. Beware. Some hint they are RF remotes when they aren’t. And every non Samsung RF one I looked at appeared to be lacking a sticker on the back with the FCC ID. To be legal for sale/use in the U.S., each device emitting RF must have an FCC ID (that you can lookup) to verify it passed FCC tests. This is to ensure the safety of you and your neighbors. Imagine someone attached to some medical equipment that is interfered with by an illegal RF remote.

So far, so good