LG OLED G5 Review: A $5,299 Reminder That Excess Is Rarely Required

There’s something about men and televisions. We convince ourselves we need the best or the biggest. We need the one with the highest acronym count and talk about refresh rates like horsepower, believing a better panel means a better life.

And for a while, it feels good. You spend big money on a monster screen or flagship OLED, mount it proudly on the wall, switch it on, and wait for your life to look like a cinematic trailer.

But if you’re a family man, it’s wishful thinking. Because the majority of the time, your screen is filled with Frozen or Paw Patrol if the kids are awake – maybe a bit of weekend footy or the F1 highlights on YouTube if you’re lucky enough to watch your own TV. Then at night you’re streaming a series, contending with bitrates and buffering, desperate to get an hour of entertainment in before passing out.

Enter the LG OLED G5. A television infinitely more capable than the compressed, convenience-first content we feed it.

Design & Setup

The G5 sits on a console in our lounge, and the first thing you notice is how beautifully it’s made. The bezels are razor-thin, almost invisible. The rear panel is clean and refined, with none of the vented plastic bulk you see on cheaper sets. LG calls it the One Wall Design, and it genuinely looks like something out of a Local Project magazine.

The included pedestal stand is engineered for a seamless install and well-weighted once in place. You could wall-mount it flush if you wanted, but most people won’t bother. The stand does the job and does it well. Setup itself is straightforward, though LG’s process feels a bit corporate.

I wouldn’t call our lounge room the optimal environment for enjoying the G5. It’s bright during the day, with a sheer-curtained window right beside the screen, but our console height is pretty bang on. At 65 inches we probably sit a touch too close to the screen. I would have preferred a 55-inch for our space.

Where it gets interesting – and probably relevant for most – is that we stream everything, the majority through an Amazon Firestick, relying entirely on Wi-Fi performance. And that’s when the difference between wanting the best and needing it becomes painfully clear.

Performance: Beautiful, But Mostly Wasted

There’s no question this is a stunning display. The G5’s panel delivers picture quality that stops you in your tracks: inky blacks, rich contrast, and colour accuracy that makes documentaries look alive.

But that magic is conditional. OLED brilliance reveals itself in dark rooms, with high-bitrate HDR content, or gaming at 120Hz (something we do not do in our house). When your viewing is mostly compressed HD kids’ content, intermittent 4K streaming, and the occasional film, the step-up from a mid-range panel is largely unnoticeable.

The window beside our TV introduces gentle glare throughout the day. The G5’s brightness, boosted by LG’s Brightness Booster Ultimate tech, cuts through it, but not enough to feel transformative. It’s impressive, but not life-changing.

At night, with lights dimmed, the panel comes alive – but only if the content does too. A blockbuster film looks impressive, but a Netflix or Apple TV series? You’ll wonder where your five grand went.

What the Experts Say (And Why It Matters Less Than You Think)

Professional reviewers love the G5. In testing environments, it’s the brightest, most colour-accurate OLED LG has ever built. Its motion handling is flawless, its contrast infinite, and its gaming performance class-leading.

But those conditions aren’t reality for most people. You won’t be sitting in a perfectly dark room, streaming uncompressed Dolby Vision footage, or pushing a PS5 to its limits. You’ll be watching Bluey with daylight sneaking in, and Netflix compressing your favourite show into a 10Mbps stream.

The G5 might be world-class tech, but the real world doesn’t give it room to breathe.

User Experience

This is where LG loses me. The hardware might be exceptional, but the software feels dated. The interface is dense and cluttered, with menus buried under submenus. LG’s Magic Remote – the one with the on-screen pointer – remains one of my least favourite input systems in consumer tech. It’s twitchy, oversensitive, and adds zero joy to the experience.

Samsung’s interface, by contrast, is faster, cleaner, and simply more logical. For a company that nails design so completely in its panels, LG still struggles to deliver a UX worthy of the hardware. I will also add that the integration with Fire Stick is far more clunky on the LG than Samsung. A Samsung remote seamlessly controls your Fire Stick, while the LG does not, which means you need to have both on hand.

I was provided a soundbar to accompany the unit, but with kids who don’t sleep at the best of times, I rarely watch TV with any volume, so I didn’t set it up. I also don’t have room on my console for it. On the rare occasion it has been turned up the G5’s AI-driven virtual surround is satisfactory, but it’s thin and hollow compared to even a modest soundbar. For a product at this level, it could be better.

Living With It

Living with the G5 for the last few months has been enlightening. It’s a perfect example of the gap between technical excellence and real-world relevance. Yes, it’s a joy to look at. Yes, it makes the occasional movie night feel special. But the rest of the time? It’s just a TV – an expensive one that doesn’t fundamentally improve the way we watch or feel about what’s on screen.

It’s not that it disappoints. It’s that it doesn’t transform the experience at a level I feel it should for the price. And that’s realisation we all need to come to about high-end TVs in family homes. They can only be as good as the content (and context) allows.

Value & Verdict

If you have a dark, dedicated viewing room, love cinematic quality, game for hours on end and want the best OLED picture available, the G5 will reward you every night.

But if you’re like us, and place it in a multi-use family room and feed it poor quality streaming content, you’ll be paying for capability you simply don’t need. At $5,299, it’s a triumph of engineering that never quite connects with reality. If it’s value you seek, you’re far better suited to buying a technically inferior product and being pleasantly surprised by its performance than being unfairly underwhelmed by the G5.

As men, we convince ourselves that more tech equals more satisfaction. But sometimes, the cleverest choice isn’t the most advanced one – it’s the one that adequately fulfils your requirements.

And the LG OLED G5 is well beyond adequate for mine.

The author was loaned an LG OLED G5 for the purposes of this review.

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