LG Micro RGB Evo Review: Brilliant, Bright, Not Budget-Friendly

The TV supports 100 percent of the color gamut specs for BT.2020, DCI-P3, and Adobe RGB. Very few movies actually meet the BT.2020 spec, but I tested a few that do, such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Inside Out, both on Disney+. Each looked amazingly colorful.

Micro RGB, Macro Picture Quality

Photograph: John Brandon

As a first test of the new micro RGB tech, I ran through the usual Spears & Munsil Benchmark tests. Skin tones looked phenomenal, easily beating out the Hisense UR9, the Sony Bravia 7 II, and the TCL RM9L in terms of tonal variation. Lighter skin tones didn’t look washed out, and there was a nice differentiation in color.

A scene with a fence had bright green grass in the background, something that is often less obvious with an older LED or QLED television. A yellow flower looked more vibrant to me than just about any art television I’ve tested recently. Sunset scenes looked incredibly vibrant, proof positive that the micro RGB tech is working overtime. However, OLED still has the upper hand on contrast, more crisply displaying black trees in the foreground of a dark mountain.

With this TV, the picture modes impact what you see in terms of contrast and brightness. Filmmaker mode was more accurate, but Vivid and CinemaHome modes worked better to make browns, purples, and other darker colors pop. Only in those modes did a white mist on a snowy mountain look distinct and clear.

To test movies for contrast, I watched Awake on Netflix and The Creator on the Fandango at Home app, because each has dark scenes that turn normal LED displays into mush. Interestingly, in Vivid mode on this LG, a bicycle scene in Awake looked better than what I’ve seen on an OLED television in terms of contrast, with perhaps a bit too much saturation. LG has dozens of color temperature, tint, and white-balance settings, so I was able to scale back the saturation. In The Creator, a predawn scene looked nicely blue and visible by the ocean. Tron: Ares on Disney+ beat out the Hisense UR9 in terms of deep blacks and reds, but only in Vivid picture mode.