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LGE’s CX AI System Needs More Intelligence
June 07, 2020
LGE’s OLED 4K CX Series is getting rave reviews for the form factor and HDR support. The screen is impossibly thin, a mere 4mm thick The picture is impossibly good, with the right content (but there are some exceptions). Watching from the front of the screen a TV couldn't possibly get any better But alas, one of the biggest new features in the 2020 lineup of LG TVs, an artificial intelligence system that is supposed to automatically adjust the picture settings is impossible to get working, according to Digital Life Labs, and they needed help from LG technical support. Hopefully, LGE will figure out how to get that new AI feature to work as advertised, because the feature sets out to solve the one thing that stands between LG's OLED screens and perfection. The problem is that OLED TV, and in particular LGE's implementation is patchy. With the right content –4K high-dynamic-range (HDR) from sources such as Netflix, Stanand Blu-ray discs – LG's 2020 OLED TVs are utterly inspiring. Switched the TV out of "Standard" mode – a high-frame rate mode that drives many viewers to despair by making them feel as if they're watching a documentary, rather than watching a film – and into FilmMaker mode, which has a slower frame rate and warmer, deeper color tones. But FilmMaker mode isn’t perfect, so Digital Life Labs fine-tuned the picture for around an hour, until FilmMaker mode modified with Dynamic Contrast and Peak Brightness changed from "off" to "low".
Figure 1: The Very Thin OLED 4K CX
June 07, 2020
LGE’s OLED 4K CX Series is getting rave reviews for the form factor and HDR support. The screen is impossibly thin, a mere 4mm thick The picture is impossibly good, with the right content (but there are some exceptions). Watching from the front of the screen a TV couldn't possibly get any better But alas, one of the biggest new features in the 2020 lineup of LG TVs, an artificial intelligence system that is supposed to automatically adjust the picture settings is impossible to get working, according to Digital Life Labs, and they needed help from LG technical support. Hopefully, LGE will figure out how to get that new AI feature to work as advertised, because the feature sets out to solve the one thing that stands between LG's OLED screens and perfection. The problem is that OLED TV, and in particular LGE's implementation is patchy. With the right content –4K high-dynamic-range (HDR) from sources such as Netflix, Stanand Blu-ray discs – LG's 2020 OLED TVs are utterly inspiring. Switched the TV out of "Standard" mode – a high-frame rate mode that drives many viewers to despair by making them feel as if they're watching a documentary, rather than watching a film – and into FilmMaker mode, which has a slower frame rate and warmer, deeper color tones. But FilmMaker mode isn’t perfect, so Digital Life Labs fine-tuned the picture for around an hour, until FilmMaker mode modified with Dynamic Contrast and Peak Brightness changed from "off" to "low".
Figure 1: The Very Thin OLED 4K CX
Source: Company
The trouble is, though, that those settings aren't ideal for non-HDR content. FilmMaker mode displays beautifully detailed shadow tones if the source has HDR, but if you're watching plain-old high-definition TV, which doesn't contain metadata telling the TV how to display shadows, FilmMaker mode absolutely crushes shadows, robbing you of a lot of detail you might still see on a regular LCD TV. The OLED test TV was positioned next to last year's LG LCD TVs, and when it came to watching regular HD TV, the LCD was often preferable, not because it had better colors – the colors are thin and washed out compared to OLED – but because they could actually see what was going on in the shadows on the LCD, and couldn't on the OLED.
To get the most out of the OLED, they had to tweak the settings again when switching to HD content, in an effort to pull back some of the lost shadow tones, the very problem LG's new AI picture adjustment system sets out to fix. It's meant to automatically switch from, Standard mode to FilmMaker mode when its machine-learning algorithms detect a movie, it's meant to automatically adjust the brightness, presumably to avoid crushing blacks in non-HDR content. LG's 2020 line-up of OLED TVs has other new features, too, such as dramatic improvements for gaming (it now adjusts its framerate to that of the gaming console, even as the console changes its own framerate) and an enhanced menu system that allows you to jump right to a show in an app without first opening that app (it's a really great new feature). But the AI-based picture control was by far the most exciting new feature for us, since it directly addresses the one, big problem we have had with OLED for several years and it addresses a broader problem in the TV industry, too, which is that TVs have a lot of settings in them that can dramatically improve the viewing experience but that most people either don't know how to use, or don't bother using, leaving them with an experience that's much less than they paid for. One theory was that the new AI system won't work with any content that has Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection on it, since DRM prevents the TV from analyzing the image in order to optimize it.