LG 48 C1 OLED Monitor Review

The LG C1 48 is a premium TV with a nice design. Since it's a TV, it looks different than any monitor as it comes with a metal center stand that raises the screen off the table a bit. It has thin bezels all around and should look good in any setup.

The LG C1 48 feels extremely well-built. It's made out of metal and solid plastic and feels premium throughout. There's no noticeable flex, and the screen is very stable on the stand.

As is the case with most TVs, the stand of the LG C1 48 doesn't offer any ergonomic adjustments. The back of the TV is made of metal on top, and the part where the inputs are is plastic. Luckily, you can run your cables through the stand to keep your setup clean.

The LG C1 48's stand is wide and supports the screen well. It has a very wide footprint, bigger than most monitors, so you need a large table to place it on. It raises the screen enough that you can put a keyboard or mouse in front without getting in the way of the screen. The replacement to this TV, the LG 42 C2 OLED, has a different stand with wide-set feet, so it's easy to route the cables from your mouse and keyboard underneath.

• Remote (with 2x AA batteries)
• Cable tie
• User guides

OLEDs like the LG C1 48 can turn off individual pixels, resulting in a near-infinite contrast ratio. Blacks look deep and inky when viewed in the dark.

Since the LG C1 48 can turn off each pixel and doesn't have a backlight, it doesn't have a local dimming feature. It produces perfect blacks with no visible blooming; the video above is provided for reference.

The LG C1 48 has mediocre SDR peak brightness. This is somewhat normal for an OLED, and even though it's an improvement over the LG 48 CX OLED, it's not as bright as newer OLED TVs like the Sony 42 A90K OLED. It's not bright enough to fight glare in really well-lit rooms. We tested the brightness after calibration in the 'Game Optimizer' Picture Mode with the input labeled as 'PC'. The Peak Brightness setting is disabled with either of these settings enabled.

We also measured the real scene brightness using other settings:

So overall, using the 'Game Optimizer' Picture Mode and labeling the input as 'PC' results in a dimmer image, and the Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL) is a bit more aggressive than outside of 'Game' mode. In other picture modes, you can get a brighter screen at the cost of input lag, but for most people, it's more important to have low input lag when using it as a monitor.

The LG C1 48 has good HDR peak brightness. It gets extremely bright with small highlights, but it gets dimmer with larger areas of bright colors due to the aggressive Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL). The brightness tracks the EOTF very well, as almost all scenes are displayed at the correct brightness level. There's a very sharp cut-off at the peak brightness, causing a loss of fine details in bright scenes.

These measurements are in the 'Game Optimizer' HDR Picture Mode with Peak Brightness set to 'High'.

The LG C1 48 has fantastic horizontal viewing angles. The image remains accurate if you view it from the side, or if you sit too close

Note: These results vary from the TV review because of the different ways we test monitors and TVs.

Once again, the LG C1 48 has very wide vertical viewing angles. The top and bottom edges remain accurate if you sit close.

Note: These results vary from the TV review because of the different ways we test monitors and TVs.

The gray uniformity of the LG C1 48 is fantastic. Solid colors look uniform across the screen, and there's hardly any dirty screen effect in the center.

As the LG C1 48 can turn off individual pixels, black uniformity is perfect and there's no blooming around bright objects.

The LG C1 48 has great accuracy out-of-the-box. Colors are noticeably off, but setting the Color Gamut to 'Auto' effectively locks colors to the sRGB color space, so they don't appear oversaturated. White balance is a bit off, but not noticeably so, and the color temperature is just slightly on the cold side. Gamma doesn't follow the sRGB target curve very well, as dark scenes are darker than intended, and bright scenes are a bit too bright.

The LG 48 C1 OLED has exceptional accuracy after calibration. Any remaining white balance and color inaccuracies can't be spotted by the human eye, and color temperature is extremely close to our 6500K target. Gamma improved, but it's still not perfect.

The LG C1 48's SDR color gamut is excellent. It has near-perfect coverage of the commonly-used sRGB color space, and it has good coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, which is used in photo editing.

The LG C1 48 has fantastic SDR color volume. It displays dark colors well, thanks to its near-infinite contrast. Despite its less-than-ideal peak brightness, it displays bright colors well.

The LG C1 48 has a great HDR color gamut. It covers both the DCI P3 and Rec. 2020 color spaces well, but tone mapping is off, so colors don't look as accurate as they're supposed to.

The LG C1 48 has good HDR color volume. It displays dark colors well thanks to the high contrast but struggles with brighter colors.

The LG 48 C1 OLED has fantastic reflection handling. Thanks to the glossy finish, light is absorbed really well, and even glare from strong light sources shouldn't be too distracting. The final score is different from the TV review because total reflections are counted in the scoring for TVs, but the individual results are similar between each.

Update 01/07/2022: We received a report from a user that there's color fringing when displaying yellow and green objects. We checked with a solid yellow square and noticed red fringing to the left and green fringing on the right. The same thing happened with non-primary green. This is due to the subpixel layout, and although you won't notice it with real content, it may become more noticeable during desktop use. We saw the same thing with the Gigabyte AORUS FO48U OLED, and you can see an example of the color fringing on that monitor here.

The LG 48 C1 has decent text clarity. Using a TV is different from a typical monitor because pixel density is lower, and there are different scaling options. Also, the WBGR subpixel layout isn't used by most programs. Windows suggests 300% scaling, which is just too large for most people, so the photos above are with 100% scaling. Enabling ClearType (top photo) helps improve the boldness of the letters, but it's still not ideal.

We took a photo of the text clarity at different scaling options, which you can see below.

The pixel photo above is with the blue, white, and, red subpixels turned on. It uses a WBGR sub-pixel layout, and all four pixels are never on at the same time. We took photos of the other pixel combinations:

• Blue only
• White, blue, green
• Green and red
• Red and blue
• Red only
• Red and white

The gradient handling is fantastic. Banding is minimal throughout, but it's a bit more noticeable in the darker shades. The LG 48 C1 has a Smooth Gradation setting, but we didn't test it.

Note: These results vary from the TV review because of the different ways we test monitors and TVs.

The fast refresh rate is great for gaming, but it's lower than most high-end gaming monitors. Unlike most monitors, it doesn't have any DisplayPort inputs, but this is normal, as this is a TV, and TVs don't usually have DP inputs. If you want a QD-OLED monitor that has a higher refresh rate and a DisplayPort input, then look into the Dell Alienware AW3423DW.

The LG 48 C1 natively supports both FreeSync and G-SYNC Compatible variable refresh rates to reduce screen tearing.

The LG 48 C1 OLED has a near-instant response time at its max refresh rate of 120Hz, resulting in smooth motion. There's only a bit of overshoot in dark transitions, but it's hardly noticeable. Unlike most monitors, there aren't any overdrive settings.

Since this TV's max refresh rate is 120Hz, the results are the same as the response time at max refresh rate.

Once again, the response time of the LG 48 C1 at 60Hz is near-instant. Some darker transitions are slightly slower, but motion looks excellent overall.

The LG C1 48 has a black frame insertion feature to try to reduce persistence blur caused by the nearly-instantaneous response time.

The LG 48 C1 doesn't use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). There's a slight dip in brightness every 8ms, which coincides with the 120Hz refresh rate, and it's not noticeable either.

The LG C1 48 has low input lag as long as it's in the 'Game Optimizer' Picture Mode with the input label set to 'PC'. We also measured the 4k @ 120Hz input lag in the 'Expert (dark space, night)' Picture Mode because this results in a brighter image, but we kept the input label set to 'PC' and the Game Optimizer setting enabled (different from the Picture Mode). We measured 13.7ms with these settings, so you can get a brighter image at the cost of a bit of input lag, which is still good for gaming.

LG has a Prevent Input Delay setting, which is new to their 2021 TVs. It aims to reduce the 60Hz input lag, which explains why it's an improvement from the LG 48 CX OLED.

The LG C1 48 has a large screen, and the 4k resolution helps deliver crisp images. However, when using it as a PC monitor, you need to set the input label you're using to 'PC' so you can get proper chroma 4:4:4, which helps with text clarity. You can read about it in our TV review.

The LG C1 48 supports all formats that are currently supported by the PS5, including VRR.

This TV supports all of the formats supported by the Xbox Series S|X. 1440p @ 60Hz only works if you use the HDMI override setting, which disables VRR. However, VRR still works with 1440p @ 120Hz.

Unlike most monitors, the LG C1 48 doesn't have a DisplayPort input. HDMI 2 acts as the eARC output, which you can read about in the TV review. If you're looking for something similar with more traditional monitor inputs like DisplayPort, then check out the Gigabyte AORUS FO48U OLED.

The LG 48 C1 works well with recent Macs, but the variable refresh rate feature doesn't work.

Since the LG C1 48 is a TV, you get a ton more features than most monitors. There's the LG webOS built-in, which has a ton of apps available to download, and the LG Magic Remote offers voice control. There are other image processing features, like upscaling, motion interpolation, judder-free, etc., which you can read about in the TV review.

See the settings page for the TV here.