LG QNED80 2023 TV Review

The LG QNED80 2023 has a simple, clean design. The bezels are a bit thicker than budget TVs, but they're not distracting. Nothing stands out about its design, but it doesn't look cheap, either.

The stand consists of two V-shaped feet that hold the TV well. The feet lift the screen about 3.2" above the cabinet, so most soundbars fit without blocking the screen. There's also a narrow position for the feet (shown here) if you have a smaller TV stand.

Footprint of the 65" TV:

• Wide position: 46" x 11.7"
• Narrow position: 16.6" x 11.7"

The back of the TV features consists of a single large plastic panel. The inputs face to the left of the TV and are set into the TV, so they're hard to reach with the TV wall-mounted. LG has given a lot of thought to cable management on this TV, as there are multiple mounting points for the included clips, so it's easy to keep a neat setup behind the TV.

The LG QNED80 2023 has decent build quality. The feet are sturdy and support the TV well, allowing for just a bit of wobble. The back is all plastic, and there's noticeable flex throughout, but this is common and won't cause any issues. Overall, the materials used are a bit cheap, and there's more plastic than the LG QNED80 2022, but there are no obvious issues or problems with quality control.

The LG QNED80 2023 has terrible contrast. Blacks look gray and washed out, and dim scenes lack shadow detail. There's a local dimming feature that's designed to improve contrast, but it's terrible, and we recommend you turn it off.

Here's what the same scene looks like with local dimming set to 'High'. Enabling local dimming improves the contrast ratio to 3416:1 in simple scenes like this one, but the overall viewing experience is much worse.

With local dimming set to 'Off', there's no blooming, as the entire backlight is always on at the same intensity. Here is what the same scene looks like with local dimming set to 'High'. Again, it slightly improves the contrast, but at the expense of severe blooming in almost all scenes.

With local dimming set to 'Off', there are no zone transitions, as the entire backlight is always on. For comparison, here's what lighting zone transitions look like with local dimming set to 'High'; there's severe blooming, although it does make contrast a bit better.

The contrast and dark details look the same in Game Mode with local dimming disabled. The image and videos above are with local dimming set to 'Off', but here's what the contrast in Game Mode looks like with local dimming set to 'High':

• Blooming
• Zone transitions - static refresh rate
• Zone transitions - variable refresh rate

The LG QNED80 2023 has just okay peak brightness in HDR. Bright specular highlights in HDR content don't stand out, and HDR generally looks flat and dull.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Select Mode: Cinema
• Panel Brightness: 100
• Adjust Contrast: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm 50
• LED Local Dimming: Off

Enabling local dimming significantly increases the peak brightness of smaller highlights, but the overall picture quality is worse, and there's distracting blooming around bright highlights. Here are photos and measurements of the TV's HDR Brightness with local dimming set to 'High':

• Hallway Lights: 399 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 374 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 177 cd/m²
• Peak 2% Window: 596 cd/m²
• Peak 10% Window: 654 cd/m²
• Peak 25% Window: 548 cd/m²
• Peak 50% Window: 497 cd/m²
• Peak 100% Window: 482 cd/m²
• Sustained 2% Window: 592 cd/m²
• Sustained 10% Window: 481 cd/m²
• Sustained 25% Window: 481 cd/m²
• Sustained 50% Window: 482 cd/m²
• Sustained 100% Window: 482 cd/m²

Switching to the 'Game Optimizer' HDR Select Mode makes no noticeable difference to the peak brightness. HDR in games is still flat and dull overall, and bright highlights don't stand out.

The PQ EOTF tracking on the LG QNED80 2023 is decent overall. Shadow details are raised significantly and look washed out; this has more to do with its low contrast ratio than its HDR processing. Midtones are slightly dimmer than they should be.

Content mastered at 600 and 1000 nits hard clips when the TV reaches its peak brightness, leading to a loss of bright detail, although this TV doesn't show any truly bright detail anyway as it's just simply not bright enough. For content mastered at 4000 nits, there's a smoother roll-off, and fine details are preserved.

The graph above is with local dimming set to 'Off'; here's what the PQ EOTF tracking looks like with local dimming set to 'High'. It's significantly more accurate than with local dimming disabled, but unfortunately, it comes at the expense of massive blooming and distracting lighting zone transitions.

The LG QNED80 2023 has good peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to overcome a bit of glare in a moderately lit or even a bright room.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Expert (Dark Space, Night)
• Panel Brightness: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm 50
• LED Local Dimming: Off
• Adjust Contrast: 80

With local dimming set to 'High', it gets a bit brighter, especially when displaying small, bright highlights:

• Real Scene Peak Brightness: 390 cd/m²
• Peak 2% Window: 261 cd/m²
• Peak 10% Window: 617 cd/m²
• Peak 25% Window: 554 cd/m²
• Peak 50% Window: 452 cd/m²
• Peak 100% Window: 396 cd/m²
• Sustained 2% Window: 261 cd/m²
• Sustained 10% Window: 613 cd/m²
• Sustained 25% Window: 392 cd/m²
• Sustained 50% Window: 395 cd/m²
• Sustained 100% Window: 395 cd/m²

The LG QNED80 2023 has a great color gamut in HDR. Unfortunately, the tone mapping is bad when sent a 75% stimulus, which corresponds to content mastered at 1,000 nits, so most HDR content is inaccurate. In dimmer scenes, the TV performs much better:

• DCI-P3 - 50% Stimulus
• Rec. 2020 - 50% Stimulus

The color volume is just okay. It's mainly limited by its low contrast, as it can't display dark saturated colors well.

With a few quick setting changes out of the box, the LG QNED80 2023 has great accuracy. Bright shades of gray are a bit off, but not noticeably so, and gamma is close to the 2.2 target. Color accuracy is excellent, with no noticeable issues, and the color temperature is nearly perfect.

This TV is very easy to calibrate, and the results after calibration are nearly perfect, with no noticeable issues at all.

You can see the full calibration settings we used here.

The LG QNED80 2023 has great gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are slightly darker than the center, but it's not noticeable. There's very little dirty screen effect in the center. Near-black scenes look excellent, with no noticeable issues.

The black uniformity of this TV is just okay. There's noticeable clouding throughout the screen and a few bright spots along the bottom edge. Enabling the local dimming feature makes the black uniformity significantly worse, as the very limited number of zones can't effectively dim the screen around bright highlights.

This TV has a great viewing angle, ensuring you'll enjoy a consistent image even when viewed at a wide angle. It's a great choice for a wide seating arrangement or if you like to move around with the TV on.

The reflection handling is decent. There's no sign of rainbow smearing when bright lights are opposite the TV, which is great, but the coating does little to reduce glare.

The TV has mediocre HDR gradient handling. There's a lot of banding in bright greens and some minor banding in darker shades.

The TV has good low-quality content smoothing. There's very little noticeable macro-blocking in dark scenes, which is very good, but unfortunately, it struggles with preserving details.

This TV's upscaling and sharpness processing is okay overall. Fine details are upscaled well for the most part, but hardcoded text is a bit hard to make out. These results are with the following settings:

• Sharpness: 25
• Super Resolution: High

This TV uses an IPS panel with an RGB subpixel layout, which is great for PC users as Windows ClearType handles RGB quite well. You can read more about text clarity here.

This TV's response time is great, and there's very little motion blur in fast-moving content. There's some overshoot in shadow details, which you'll notice as a slight halo effect around darker details, but it's minor.

The LG QNED80 2023 uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight at all brightness levels. The flicker depends on your picture mode, and you can see the differences below. The 120Hz flicker is noticeable and causes a double image with 60 fps signals, like when you're gaming, as it flickers at 120Hz in Game Mode.

Picture modes with 480Hz flicker:

• Expert (Dark space, night)
• Expert (Bright space, daytime)
• Cinema
• FILMMAKER MODE

Picture modes with 120Hz flicker:

• Vivid
• Standard
• APS
• Sports
• Game Optimizer
• All HDR modes

There's an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion, which you can enable to improve the appearance of motion. It can only flicker at both 60 or 120Hz, ensuring smooth motion and no double image.

This TV can interpolate lower frame-rate content up to 120 fps. It's decent overall with slow-moving content, but significant motion artifacts are present when interpolating fast-paced action.

Due to the quick response time, there's some noticeable stutter when watching low frame-rate content like movies. It's especially noticeable in slow panning shots or wide landscape shots.

This TV removes judder from any source, including 60Hz sources like cable boxes. For a smooth movie-watching experience, enable the Real Cinema setting.

The LG QNED80 2023 supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. It supports all three VRR formats across the TV's entire refresh rate range.

The input lag is incredibly low, ensuring a responsive gaming or desktop experience. It's a bit slower than the LG QNED80 2022 and the latest high-end LG TVs like the LG G3 OLED, but still low enough for most users.

The LG QNED80 2023 supports all signals up to 4k @ 120Hz, but only on HDMI ports 3 and 4. It also displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with any signal, which is essential for clear text from a PC. HDMI ports 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, so you can't use it for 4k @ 120Hz signals with chroma 4:4:4 and 10-bit color depth.

This TV works without issue with the PS5 as long as you use HDMI ports 3 and 4, as they support the full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth.

Like with the PS5, there aren't any issues with the Xbox Series X, but you need to use the HDMI 2.1 bandwidth ports 3 and 4 to take full advantage of it.

The TV doesn't support Dolby Vision, so you're limited to watching HDR content in the basic HDR10 format. One of the HDMI 2.1 bandwidth ports also serves as the eARC port, meaning you can only have one HDMI 2.1 device connected if you have a soundbar or receiver.

This TV supports a plethora of audio formats, which is great. It supports DTS audio formats, which is great if you like to watch DVDs or Blu-rays, as they tend to use DTS for their main audio tracks.

Unfortunately, the LG QNED80 2023 has a mediocre frequency response. Music sounds muddled, there's audible distortion, and everything sounds mixed together, making it hard to understand dialogue or specific sounds in the mix. Like most TVs, there's very little bass, but it's even worse than usual on this TV. There's an automatic room correction feature, but it actually made the sound worse, so it was disabled for our testing.

Even at moderate volume levels, this TV's distortion performance is poor, and at max volume, it's terrible. While it's less noticeable in real content versus isolated tone patterns, music sounds thin and muddled.

The LG QNED80 2023 runs the 2023 version of LG's webOS proprietary smart interface. It's fast and easy to use.

As is now, unfortunately, typical, there are ads throughout the smart interface, and you can't fully disable them. You can limit ad tracking and remove ads from the home screen using the 'Home Promotion' and 'Content Recommendation' settings in the 'Home Settings' menu, but there's no way to remove ads from the apps page.

The built-in webOS smart interface has a huge selection of streaming apps.

The LG QNED80 2023 comes with LG's Magic Remote. You can use it as a pointer, making it easier to navigate the menus if you prefer that approach instead of using the remote's buttons. The remote also has an integrated microphone, which works well. You can use voice commands to ask the TV to open specific apps, search within apps, ask for the time, or ask for the weather.

There's a single button centrally located at the bottom of the TV, and that's also where the infrared sensor is. You can turn the TV on or off with the button, change inputs or channels, and control the volume.

• Power cable
• Remote (with 2x AA batteries)
• Cable management clips and cable wrap
• Stand covers
• User manuals