LG NANO85 2021  TV Review

The LG NANO85 has a sleek and stylish design that looks like the LG NANO90 2021. It has metal feet that help give it a premium look, and the bezels are thin.

Update 07/08/2025: There are now two cracks in the light guide plate. The screen brightness is starting to drop, especially in the top half, and there are more and more uniformity issues. This TV will likely completely fail in the coming months.

Update 04/17/2025: Over the last two months, a crack has started to form along the bottom edge of the light guide plate, similar to what we saw on the Samsung Q60B QLED.

The reflector panel inside the LG NANO85 2021 has warped due to heat exposure, causing noticeable uniformity issues across the entire screen.

As part of our two-year test, which has so far subjected 100 TVs to over 10,000 hours of accelerated testing, we found that edge-lit TVs like this one have significant durability issues. These issues range from warped reflector sheets and cracked light guide plates to completely burnt-out LEDs. You can read the full results of our investigation here.

The metal stand supports the TV well, and there's minimal wobble. They also raise the screen high enough off the table that placing a soundbar in front won't block the screen as there's a gap of 3.35" between the table and the bottom of the screen. You can also use it in a narrow position for smaller tables.

Footprint of the 65 inch TV: 11.5" x 45.86" (wide position) or 16.61" (narrow position).

The back of the LG 65NANO85APA is made of brushed aluminum, and there are vents for airflow. Most of the inputs are side-facing, making them easy to access if you wall-mount the TV. There are detachable clips and grooves in the feet that you can use for cable management.

The TV is thin and flat, so it can sit flush against the wall if you want to wall-mount. The above measurement is with the cable management clips attached, but you can remove them for a flat screen, so the thickness without them is 1.77" (4.50 cm).

The LG NANO85 has good build quality. It feels well-put-together without any major issues. There's minimal wobble with the stand, and although the back panel has some flex, it's not too bad. Sadly, the bottom edge heats up more than the rest of the TV, and it's warm to touch, so make sure you have proper airflow beneath it if you wall-mount it.

The LG NANO85 has a low contrast ratio, which is expected from an IPS-like panel TV. Blacks look gray in a dark room, and even the local dimming feature fails to improve the contrast. The 50 inch model has a VA panel, meaning it has a better contrast.

The local dimming in Game Mode looks the same as outside of Game Mode.

The HDR peak brightness is mediocre. Small highlights get a lot brighter than in SDR, but it's still not enough for a true cinematic HDR experience, and the TV can't maintain high levels of peak brightness the longer a bright object stays on the screen. The EOTF doesn't follow the target curve well either, as most scenes are too dark. It has a slow roll-off at its peak brightness, meaning you won't lose details in small, bright highlights.

These measurements are in the 'Cinema' HDR Picture Mode with Panel Brightness and Adjust Contrast both at '100', LED Local Dimming on 'Medium', and the Color Temperature set to 'Warm 50'.

If you find the image too dim, use the same settings as above, but with HDR Tone Mapping enabled and Auto Dynamic Contrast on 'High'. This results in a brighter image, as you can see in this EOTF, but it doesn't change the TV's peak luminosity.

The HDR brightness in the 'Game Optimizer' Picture Mode is the same as in the 'Cinema' Picture Mode. Any differences in measurements are down to margin of error.

The LG 65NANO85APA has okay SDR peak brightness, but it's not enough to fight a ton of glare. The brightness varies a bit between scenes, and it gets brightest with large areas of bright colors, which helps if you tend to watch sports or want to use it as a PC monitor, but the difference is minimal.

These measurements are from after calibration in the 'Expert (Dark space, night)' Picture Mode with the Panel Brightness at '100', LED Local Dimming on 'Medium', the Color Temperature set to 'Warm 50', and all other image processing disabled. If you want the brightest image possible and don't care about image accuracy, it reaches 416 cd/m² in the 25% window in the 'Vivid' Picture Mode with the Color Temperature on 'Cold 50'.

The LG NANO85 displays a good, wide color gamut for HDR content. It has excellent coverage of the common DCI P3 color space, which is used in most HDR content. However, it has limited coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, so it's not future-proof as more and more movies will come out with this color space, so it can't display the full range of colors needed for those movies.

The LG 65NANO85APA has a mediocre color volume. Despite displaying a wide color gamut, it struggles displaying really bright and dark colors due to its limited peak brightness and low contrast. This means that colors aren't vivid in HDR.

The out-of-the-box accuracy is decent. Colors are accurate, but the white balance is off, which is more noticeable with shades that are closer to pure white. Also, the color temperature is cold, so the image has a blue tint, and gamma doesn't follow the 2.2 target well, so most scenes appear too bright, even if you're using it in a well-lit room.

The LG 65NANO85APA has excellent accuracy after calibration, although it's not as good as other TVs. Any remaining inaccuracies to the colors and white balance are nearly impossible to spot, and the gamma is much better, but it's not perfect. Sadly, though, the color temperature was hard to adjust without affecting the rest of the image, so the blue tint is still there.

You can see the recommended settings here.

The LG NANO85 has good gray uniformity. The edges are darker, which is noticeable while using it as a PC monitor with a full-screen web page or work document. There's also a bit of dirty screen effect in the center, but that's not as bad. Uniformity is improved in near-dark scenes.

The black uniformity is poor. With local dimming disabled, the entire screen is blue due to the low contrast, and there's some clouding throughout. It delivers deeper blacks with local dimming enabled, but as you can see, there's a ton of blooming as the center cross causes the large zones to turn on. It's distracting while watching movies with bright objects on a dark background.

The LG NANO85 has decent viewing angles, typical of IPS-like panels. Colors remain accurate at wide viewing angles, but you'll start to notice the screen looks darker at really wide angles. It's fine for watching content with a few friends, but it's not suggested for really wide seating arrangements. The 50 inch model available outside the United States has a VA panel with worse viewing angles.

The reflection handling is decent. As the TV doesn't get extremely bright, it's not good enough for really bright rooms, but it's fine if you have a few lights around.

The LG NANO85 2021 uses an Advanced Dimension Switching (ADS) panel, which is a type of IPS panel and performs like it. Many LG TVs like the LG NANO85 2020 use this panel. It also has an RGB subpixel layout, which helps with text clarity when using it as a PC monitor. However, the 50 inch model has a VA panel that likely uses a BGR subpixel layout, which negatively impacts the text clarity, and you can read more about it here.

The LG NANO85 2021 has a great response time. Motion looks smooth for the most part, but there's overshoot in all transitions, which leads to inverse ghosting, as you can see at the end of the RTINGS logo.

The LG NANO85 2021 uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight at all brightness levels. It flickers at 480Hz in the 'Filmmaker', 'Cinema', 'Expert (Dark space, night)', and 'Expert (Bright space, daytime)' SDR Picture Modes, which is high enough that most people won't notice it. However, it flickers at 120Hz in all other SDR Picture Modes and at all times in HDR, which creates distracting image duplication.

There's an optional backlight strobing feature, known as black frame insertion (BFI), to reduce persistence blur. The backlight can flicker at either 60 or 120Hz, depending on which settings and modes you're using. However, the crosstalk is off, resulting in image duplication. Keep in mind that the BFI score is based on the frequencies at which it can flicker, and not the actual performance.

The LG NANO85 has a motion interpolation feature, commonly known as the 'Soap Opera Effect'. It interpolates 30 and 60 fps content up to 120 fps. While it looks okay with slow-moving content, the test pattern looked like it was blurry, and the TV had trouble interpolating it. It struggles with fast-moving and busy scenes, as there are artifacts and motion issues.

Due to the relatively quick response time, low-frame-rate content appears to stutter. Enabling the motion interpolation feature can help reduce this issue.

The LG NANO85 removes 24p judder from any source, which is great for watching movies as it helps with the appearance of motion.

The LG NANO85 TV has a 120Hz panel with native FreeSync VRR support to reduce screen tearing. FreeSync works without issue across AMD graphics cards and the Xbox Series X. However, there's screen tearing in the pendulum test demo with the RTX 3060 graphics card, so it's not considered as G-SYNC compatible, but it's not advertised to support it anyways.

The LG NANO85 has low input lag for a responsive gaming experience, and you won't notice any delay. The 120Hz input lag is higher than other TVs, but it's still good enough for even competitive gamers. We couldn't get proper VRR input lag readings, which we experienced with a few TVs like the Hisense U800GR 8k. We're looking into this issue, and we'll update the review once we fix it.

The LG 65NANO85 supports most of the common resolutions under the HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, including 4k @ 120Hz. It displays proper chroma 4:4:4 with any of its supported signals, which helps produce clear text, but it doesn't display it properly with 1080p and 1440p signals at 120Hz. You can see in this 1080p @ 120Hz photo that text looks blurry. If you're using it as a PC monitor, you'll get the best results with a 4k resolution as text will look sharp.

The LG NANO85 supports any signal from the Xbox Series X and PS5, including Dolby Vision with 4k @ 120Hz signals from the Xbox, which is fantastic.

Although other 2021 LG TVs support 40 Gbps bandwidth, HDMI ports 3 and 4 on this TV support the full 48 Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1, as you can see here. This means that you can achieve high-frame-rate signals without issue, and there weren't any problems going up to 4k @ 120Hz with 12-bit color depth and chroma 4:4:4.

Some inputs are down-facing, which are harder to reach with the TV wall-mounted, but the HDMI inputs are side-facing.

The LG 65NANO85 has eARC support on HDMI 3, which is one of the HDMI 2.1 ports, so you'll only have one more HDMI 2.1 slot if you connect a receiver. The eARC support allows you to pass Dolby Atmos signals to a compatible receiver, but it doesn't support DTS, which is disappointing because many Blu-rays use this format.

The frequency response is mediocre. It performs best at moderate listening levels because the frequency response is worse at its max volume, but it gets loud. It doesn't produce much bass, but with any TV, you'll need a dedicated subwoofer for the best surround sound experience possible. The 75 and 86 inch models have different 2.2 channel speakers as opposed to the 2.0 configuration on the 65 inch model, so they'll sound better.

The distortion performance is also mediocre. Although there isn't much distortion at moderate listening levels, it gets much worse at its max volume. However, it depends on the content and not everyone will hear it.

The built-in LG webOS interface is easy-to-use and is user-friendly. There were only a couple of minor bugs during testing where it switched in and out of PC and Game mode, but this isn't a problem if you just need to watch your favorite shows.

Like most modern TVs, there are ads throughout the interface, and there's no way to disable them.

The app store has a great selection of apps available, and you can cast content from your device.

The LG NANO85 comes with the redesigned Magic Remote, which retains the same great features as past models. You can use it as a point-and-press remote, like a Wii remote, and the built-in mic allows you to ask it for a variety of commands, from opening apps to changing settings like the brightness.

There's a single button underneath the middle of the TV to turn it On/Off, change inputs, adjust the volume, or switch channels.

• Remote
• 2x AA batteries
• Cable wrap
• Cable management clip for power cable
• User guides
• Not shown: Clips and feet covers for cable management