LG NANO99 8k 2021 TV Review

The LG NANO99 looks similar to the LG QNED99 8k. It has a premium design with metal feet and a metal back panel, and it should look nice in any home setup. Unlike the LG NANO99 8k 2020, it isn't compatible with LG's Gallery Flush wall mount.

The stand consists of metal feet that support the TV well. They raise the TV 2.5 inches off the table, or 3.5 inches to the bottom of the screen, so placing a soundbar in front won't block the screen. You can also place the feet in two different configurations:

Footprint of the 65" TV in the wide position: 45.67" x 11.61".

Footprint of the 65" TV in the narrow position: 16.73" x 11.61".

The back panel is brushed aluminum that feels solid. It's smooth for the most part, and there are air vents near the top. You can route cables through the feet, which come with rubber covers, and there are clips on the back for cable management.

The photo above and the measurement are taken with the cable management clips attached, but you can make the TV sit more flush against the wall by removing them. Without them, the thickness is 1.78" (4.53 cm).

The LG NanoCell 99 Series has a fantastic build quality. It's mainly made of solid metal, including the feet, which support the TV well. There's some flex on the back panel near the VESA inputs and some wobble front to back with the stand attached, but neither are too noticeable. Overall, it's well-put-together, which is what you expect from a premium TV.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series has a poor contrast ratio. Even though IPS panels are known to have low contrast, this one is exceptionally low, so blacks look gray in the dark. The local dimming feature helps improve it, but not enough where you'll see deep blacks. Contrast can vary between units, but we don't expect it to be much higher because we saw similar results with the LG NANO99 8k 2020 and the LG QNED99 8k.

The LG NANO99 has good SDR peak brightness. It gets bright enough with real content to fight glare in most well-lit rooms, but we don't suggest placing it opposite a bright window. However, brightness varies between different scenes; small and large areas of bright colors are dimmer due to frame dimming and the aggressive Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL), respectively. You won't notice this too much with real content, but it's noticeable when there are small bright objects on a dark background, or when you're watching sports like hockey or basketball.

We tested the SDR peak brightness after calibration in the 'Expert (Dark space, night)' Picture Mode with the LED Local Dimming set to 'High', Panel Brightness and Adjust Contrast at '100', and the Color Temperature on 'Warm 50'. If you want a slightly brighter image and don't mind losing out on image accuracy, use these same settings but with the Color Temperature on 'Cold 50' instead. We measured 794 cd/m² in the 10% window with this.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series has a mediocre full-array local dimming feature, which has 96 zones on the 65 inch model. Even with local dimming enabled, it doesn't produce deep blacks like on a VA or OLED TV due to the already-low native contrast. When there are small highlights on the screen, it's too aggressive as it crushes blacks, causing a loss of fine details in dark areas, and small highlights don't pop. As you can see in the Earth scene in the real content video, there's also a loss of details in those bright objects, as it's hard to make out the difference between the oceans and land. Despite the black crush, there's also too much blooming around bigger highlights, like subtitles, which can be distracting. It does an okay job keeping up with moving fast objects, and although zone transitions are noticeable in our test pattern, it's not so bad with real content. Lastly, the overall screen uniformity is better than on the LG QNED99 8k or the LG NANO99 8k 2020, but in some dark scenes, the local dimming is too aggressive and causes some uniformity issues.

We tested it with LED Local Dimming set to 'High', which makes some highlights pop more than with 'Medium', but both settings are very similar, and you can choose the one you prefer. Overall, the local dimming doesn't do a good job at improving the picture quality in dark scenes, and it's too aggressive, causing a loss of details with both bright and dark objects.

The local dimming performs the same in Game Mode as outside of it, and there's no noticeable difference.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series has okay HDR brightness. While it gets bright with medium-sized highlights and with real content, small highlights are extremely dim and don't pop the way the creator intended. You won't get a proper HDR viewing experience with this TV. Also, its EOTF doesn't follow the target PQ curve well, as dark scenes are too dark, and most other scenes are slightly over-brightened until the slow roll-off at the peak brightness.

We tested the HDR peak brightness in the 'Cinema (User)' HDR Picture Mode with the Panel Brightness and Adjust Contrast each at their max, LED Local Dimming on 'High', and Color Temperature set to 'Warm 50'. If you find the image too dim and you want something that appears brighter, adjust the Auto Dynamic Contrast to 'High' and enable HDR Tone Mapping. This results in a brighter image, as you can see in this EOTF, but it doesn't change the peak luminosity.

We also measured the peak brightness with LED Local Dimming set to 'Medium' instead. The measurements below were taken using our Konica Minolta LS-100 Luminance Meter instead of our regular way of measuring with our Colorimetry Research CR-100 Colorimeter. We also measured the brightness with LED Local Contrast on 'High' with the luminance meter, so you can compare the results between both settings. However, due to the different testing equipment, the results on 'High' are different from our posted results above.

As you can see, LED Local Contrast 'High' is brighter than 'Medium' with most scenes, except for the 2% window. The Peak Peak 10% result is with the same settings, but with the Color Temperature set to 'Cold 50' instead, resulting in a brighter image. Overall, while 'High' does get brighter, both settings look similar to each other, and you can use whichever you prefer.

The HDR peak brightness is about the same in Game Mode as outside of it. The image looks a bit less bright, but it's hard to tell, and you really need to look for it.

The LG NanoCell 99 has some uniformity issues that could be distracting. There are dark vertical lines that are a bit hard to see in the 50% gray photo above, but if you look closely, you see the bands in the center. These are noticeable while watching content with large areas of bright colors, like in hockey or basketball, or if you're using it as a PC monitor. As uniformity can vary between units, your unit might not be as bad. Luckily, uniformity is much better in near-dark scenes.

The LG NANO99 has disappointing black uniformity. Without local dimming, the screen looks blue, and there's noticeable backlight bleed along the screen, which is somewhat expected for an IPS panel. The local dimming feature helps improve the black levels but also causes much more blooming. Note that uniformity may vary between units.

Like other IPS panels, the LG NanoCell 99 Series has wide viewing angles. The image remains accurate when viewing from the sides, but it gets darker at really wide angles. However, it's still fine for watching sports or shows with family or a few friends.

The LG NANO99 has great reflection handling. It diffuses light well, even with strong light sources, but the reflected light has a warm tone. Combined with its good peak brightness, visibility won't be an issue in most well-lit rooms.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series has fantastic out-of-the-box accuracy. There are minimal inaccuracies to the white balance and most colors, and the color temperature is also close to the 6500 K target. However, gamma doesn't follow the 2.2 target very well, as most scenes are too bright. Keep in mind that the out-of-the-box accuracy can vary between units.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series has fantastic accuracy after calibration. Colors and the white balance improved, and so did the gamma, as most scenes appear at their correct brightness. The color temperature actually got slightly worse, but it's still impressive and close enough to the target.

See our recommended settings here.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series doesn't have any issues upscaling 480p content from DVDs.

720p content, like from cable boxes, looks great, and there aren't any noticeable problems with the upscaling.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series displays 1080p content very well.

The LG NanoCell 99 doesn't have any issues upscaling native 4k content. There isn't any dithering or artifacts, but it's not pixel-perfect like on native 4k TVs.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series displays native 8k content perfectly. We verified by looking at the native 8k photo that there aren't any visible artifacts or dithering in shadows. We also confirmed by looking at the pixels that you can distinguish each pixel from each other.

There are notches in some blue and red pixels. Also, it uses a BGR subpixel layout, which doesn't affect picture quality, but can affect text clarity, which you can read about here.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series has a good color gamut for HDR content, but its Rec. 2020 coverage is limited and isn't enough to meet our threshold of being a wide color gamut. However, it has great coverage of the DCI P3 color space used in most HDR content. Although it's not a wide color gamut, you won't see much difference with a TV that does, like the LG NANO99 8k 2020.

The HDR color volume is okay. Due to its lack of wide color gamut and low contrast, it doesn't display colors at a wide range of luminance levels very well.

The LG NanoCell 99 has good gradient handling. There's noticeable banding with dark grays and greens and some with dark red. You'll notice this in scenes with shades of similar colors, like in a sunset. The Smooth Gradation setting does a good job at removing banding with the test pattern and in real content, but this also comes at the loss of fine details.

There aren't any signs of temporary image retention after displaying a high-contrast static image. The bands you see are caused by the gray uniformity issues. Note that image retention may vary between units, but it's rarely an issue.

While some IPS panels like this have some temporary image retention, this doesn't seem to be permanent as the IPS panel in our long-term test appears to be immune.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series has an excellent response time. There's minimal blur trail for the most part, but because there's overshoot in every transition, you'll notice some inverse ghosting behind fast-moving objects.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight at all brightness levels below its max. It flickers at 960Hz in every Picture Mode in SDR except for Game Mode, which flickers at 120Hz. However, it flickers at 120Hz in all HDR Picture Modes, which could cause image duplication with fast-moving objects.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. It reduces motion blur, but at the same time creates some image duplication, as you can see behind the RTINGS logo, and it dims the screen. It can flicker at 60Hz or 120Hz both in and out of Game Mode. Keep in mind that the BFI scoring is based on the flicker frequencies and not the actual performance.

The LG NanoCell 99 has a motion interpolation feature. It interpolates 30 and 60 fps content up to 120 fps, and while it looks good with slow-moving content, there are more artifacts with fast-moving content that could get distracting.

Due to the quick response time, lower-frame-rate content appears to stutter because each frame is held on longer. You can enable the motion interpolation feature to try to reduce this effect.

The LG NANO99 removes 24p judder from any source, which helps with the appearance of motion in movies.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series doesn't support any variable refresh rate technology like LG's 4k NanoCell TVs. If you want an 8k TV with VRR support, then look into the Hisense U800GR 8k.

The LG NanoCell 99 has incredibly low input lag with 1080p and 4k signals in Game Mode. It provides a responsive gaming experience, but like the LG QNED99 8k, the input lag dramatically increases with 8k content, so we don't suggest playing 8k games on it.

The LG NANO99 supports most common resolutions. It displays chroma 4:4:4 with 1080p and 4k signals up to 120Hz and 8k signals up to 60Hz, which helps produce clear text when using it as a PC monitor. It displays 1440p signals, but it doesn't display proper chroma 4:4:4 with any 1440p resolution, as text looks blurry.

The LG NANO99 doesn't have any issues displaying any signal from the PS5 or Xbox Series X, including 4k @ 120Hz content in Dolby Vision from the Xbox. It has an Auto Low Latency Mode that automatically switches the TV into Game Mode when you launch a game from a compatible device.

We confirmed the four HDMI 2.1 inputs support the full 48 Gbps bandwidth required for HDMI 2.1, as you can see here.

Unlike the LG NANO99 8k 2020, the LG NanoCell 99 doesn't have a Composite Input, so you'll need an HDMI adapter if you want to use devices like old gaming consoles. Also, it isn't advertised to support ATSC 3.0.

There's eARC support that allows you to pass Dolby Atmos via TrueHD audio signals to a compatible receiver using a single HDMI connection. Like other LG TVs, it doesn't support any DTS or DTS:X passthrough.

The frequency response is decent. It has a well-balanced sound profile, which is important for listening to dialogue, and it gets loud. However, like most TVs, it doesn't produce much bass, and you'll need a dedicated surround sound setup for the best sound experience.

The LG NanoCell 99 has okay distortion handling. While there isn't much at moderate listening levels, it increases a lot more at its max volume. However, not everyone may hear this, and it depends on the content.

The LG NanoCell 99 Series comes with LG's webOS interface. It's different from the previous version found on the LG NANO99 8k 2020 because it has a full page for apps instead of a banner at the bottom. It's user-friendly, and navigating through the menus is smooth for the most part.

We only encountered minor bugs where the TV would switch out of PC Mode with our PC connected during testing, or it would randomly switch into Game Mode. However, we don't expect these to be big issues for most people.

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

There are a ton of apps you can download through the app store.

The LG NANO99 comes with an updated version of the LG Magic Remote compared to the 2020 version. You can use its point-and-press feature like a Wii remote or mouse, making it even easier to open your favorite apps. There are also shortcut buttons to popular streaming apps and the Google Assistant and Alexa features. You can use the built-in mic for voice control to ask it to change inputs, open apps, search for content, and change settings like the backlight.

There's a single button underneath the center of the screen. It allows you to turn the TV On/Off, change inputs, volume, and channels.

• Remote (with 2x AA batteries)
• Cable tie
• IR cable (with 2x stickers)
• User guides
• 2x feet and covers (Not shown)
• 2x cable management clips (Not shown)

Like other 8k TVs, this one gets hot, and you can feel the heat coming off the screen. If you're going to place it in a wall unit, make sure there's enough room for ventilation.