LG C3 OLED review (2023) an excellent TV for watching shows

We chose the C2 because of how well it worked, how many features it had, and how much it cost. It was an easy choice for anyone who wanted a high-performance TV that wasn’t too expensive. Considering how well the C2 did, we had high hopes for this review of the 65-inch LG C3 OLED TV. You’ll have to keep reading to find out how the new model did, but we don’t think it’s giving away much to say that it’s even better than the last one. Prices for the C3 series are about the same as for the C2 series.

LG C3 OLED: Description

Even though we thought (or hoped) they would be lower, the C3 series, which has screens from 42 inches to 83 inches, is still a good choice and a good value when you consider everything it has to offer. The LG OLED C3 is the newest model in LG’s popular C series of upper-middle-range 4K TVs. Previous TVs in the C series, like the LG C1 OLED and LG C2 OLED, were praised by both reviewers and regular customers for their great picture quality and ease of use at a price that was still affordable.

The C3 fits right in with this tradition. Like its predecessors, the C1 and C2, the C3 looks like a winner and has everything you’d want from a TV that serves as the centre of your home entertainment: perfect blacks, thrilling contrast, and rich, accurate colours at every point across the visual spectrum. LG’s C Series is one of the best 4K TVs you can buy and has been the company’s best-selling TV line for a few years. By balancing price and performance, it’s easy to say that it’s the best LG smart TVs to buy. In doing so, it takes the spotlight away from the flagship G Series, which is a bit of an odd thing to do.

LG C3 OLED: Pros and Cons

Specification Table

LG C3 OLED: Design

The C3 is slim like most modern OLED TVs, but it also feels very sleek and stylish. The only thing you can see from the front is a thin metal frame around the screen on all four sides. You can turn the TV on or off, switch inputs, change channels, or change the volume with a button under the IR receiver in the middle of the bottom. The back of the C3’s screen, which is just a hair less than a quarter of an inch thick, has thin horizontal lines that look great next to the large central control box. The only things that make the central control box stand out are the “LG OLED” logo and the 300x200mm VESA mounting holes for hanging your TV on the wall.

The power cord comes out of the middle of the bottom of the box, and all the other ports are on the left side, making them easier to reach. It also has a good selection of ports, including an IR blaster, coaxial cable, RS-232C for service, S/PDIF digital audio out, Ethernet, three USB, and four HDMI. These devices are notable because they all follow the HDMI 2.1 standard. This gives you the most bandwidth so you can watch 4K video at 120Hz or use popular gaming features (see the section below for more information). Some top-of-the-line TVs only have two HDMI 2.1 ports, so this is a big plus for connecting things now and in the future.

Only the C3’s stand looks a little bit old-fashioned, if you don’t want to mount the TV on the wall. It’s a heavy, annoying-to-install V-shaped foot made of thin metal in front and thick plastic in the back. It raises the TV enough to fit a soundbar below the screen, but it takes away from the otherwise beautiful design.

LG C3 OLED: Features

LG’s OLED Evo panel with Brightness Booster technology is used for both the LG C3 and the LG C2. This technology is possible because of changes to the software that are run by the new Alpha 9 Gen 6 processor. There is no heavy-duty hardware involved. The LG G3 has a built-in heat sink and a micro lens array, but this phone doesn’t have either. The new Alpha 9 Gen 6 processor does make some improvements to how pictures are processed, though. These include LG’s AI Super Upscaling Pro, which reduces noise in lower-quality content, Object Enhancer, which makes objects in the foreground of an image sharper, and Dynamic Tone Mapping Pro, which divides an image into 20,000 zones instead of 5,000 for a better, more accurate HDR result.

There are a lot of features for gamers, including support for 4K/120Hz on all four HDMI ports, VRR and ALLM (including support for AMD Freesync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync), and Dolby Vision Gaming up to 4K/120Hz. With Game mode on, the input lag is less than 10ms, so there shouldn’t be any complaints if this monitor is also used for gaming.

This year, LG changed its WebOS smart TV platform to make it easier to use. It has now been cut down to just two pages. The first page has a new Quick Card system for grouping apps and features into different categories, such as Game, Music, Sport, and Home Hub, where you can connect and control your smart home devices.

LG C3 OLED: Picture Quality

In Filmmaker HDR mode on the LG C3, the most light it could put out was 830 nits, while in Standard mode it was only 670 nits. That’s a slight improvement over last year’s C2, but it’s definitely overshadowed by LG’s claim that its new flagship G3 series is 70% brighter than its more basic B3 series. (The G3 series gets its high light output from an optical part called Micro Lens Array and a new algorithm called META that boosts brightness. This is one reason why G3 sets cost a lot more than C3 models.)

The LG’s colour balance in its default Filmmaker mode was very accurate, with Delta-E values of 3 or less for most of its brightness range. Delta-E values measure the difference between what the test pattern source shows and what is shown on the screen. Coverage of the colour space DCI-P3, which is used to master 4K Blu-rays and digital cinema releases, was 98.9%, and coverage of the colour space BT.2020 was 74.7%. This is what the best OLED TVs usually do, so the results are great.

There was some glare on the screen from the lights above, but it wasn’t too bad for the C3. Excellent screen uniformity was also seen with white full-field test patterns, and colours stayed fully saturated even when viewed from far away from the centre. I thought the TV was bright enough to watch even during the day, and when the lights were turned down, the picture had a lot of contrast.

When the TV was set to Dolby Vision Cinema Home picture mode and the Netflix show 1899 was being watched, the dark scenes in the ship’s boiler room had endlessly deep blacks and lots of detail in the shadows. When the passengers went above deck to look for the boy, the picture was clear and free of noise, and it was easy to see the different skin tones of the worried crowd.

I then watched a scene from Elvis in which The King does his freewheeling Christmas special. This had more Dolby Vision HDR power. The background stage lights flashed in a dramatic way, and I could see every detail of Elvis’s black outfit. The yellows and reds on the fans’ clothes were bright without being too loud, and The King’s face had the right orange colour that TV studio makeup gives to people’s faces.

LG C3 OLED: Gaming

The C3, like many newer TVs, doesn’t just let you play games. It also has a feature called “Game Optimizer,” which gives you a number of ways to make your games better. These include features like Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), which you can find on many newer TVs with HDMI 2.1, as well as tweaks like black and white stabilization, blue light reduction, Dark Room mode, and more. The C3 is said to be compatible with Nvidia G-Sync, and it also works with AMD FreeSync Premium. You can even tell the C3 what kind of game you’re playing, and it will change its settings to give you the best picture for that kind of game.

Luckily, none of this is annoying, and most of it shows up in a dedicated, no-nonsense game bar that you can bring up when you’re playing a game, but that you can also expand into a menu that takes up the whole screen when you need to. The Viking-themed Assassin’s Creed Valhalla game ran very well on the C3, and none of the TV’s many game functions ever got in the way.

According to the Leo Bodnar 4K Lag Tester, which measures the time between when an image is sent from the source and when it appears on the screen, the C3 did pretty well with a lag time of 12.9ms, which is just above our 10ms threshold for a great gaming experience. But when we turned on the Boost feature of the Game Optimizer, the time dropped even more, to an amazing 9.1ms. This puts it right up there with the best gaming TV you can buy.

LG C3 OLED: Sound Quality

LG’s C Series has had a less-than-great built-in sound system for a long time. This is probably because LG expects you to upgrade your sound system with at least a soundbar. This seems to be a trend that continues with the LG C3, which is sad because the sound isn’t anything to write home about. The 2.2-channel 40W system can “virtually” decode Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, with an upgrade from the C2’s 7.1.2-channel virtual performance to 9.1.2 channels.

But we wouldn’t count on this setup to give us a real Atmos effect. Some of the sound modes can add body and depth to the sound that comes out of the box, but the C3’s performance as a whole is pretty small, and none of the modes sound comfortable or perfectly balanced. Cinema mode, as you might expect, tries to give you the biggest sound, but when you turn up the volume, the low end it tries to emphasize distorts quite a bit. If you try AI Sound Pro, you’ll be surprised at how hard and thin it sounds. The dialogue is clear and the soundstage is big, but this fragility gets old after a while.

Standard takes away some of the sound’s width and sharpness, but sometimes distortion will start to creep back in. Still, it might be the best option overall, but you should definitely include the cost of a soundbar in your calculations when deciding whether to get the C3 or not. LG has made one that is perfect for the C3: the USC9S. It comes with a stand that fits perfectly under the TV when it is mounted on the wall.

Final Words

The LG OLED C3 easily lives up to the hype surrounding its predecessors and makes a strong case for itself as a TV from the latest generation. No matter what you want to watch, this set will make it look great, and if you’re a gamer, you’ll get just as much use out of its speed and wide range of dedicated features.

Still, it’s important to remember that the C3 is not the best TVs on the market. It just does a better job than most other sets at making the most of what it can do for the price. If you already have a C2, there aren’t enough differences here to make it necessary to upgrade. If you have a little more money to spend, the slightly more expensive LG G3 OLED has all the same features and reportedly even better brightness, which is never a bad thing. And the best TVs from Samsung and Sony may have a brighter, more colourful picture and better sound.

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