This may seem like a weird disclaimer to start with, but it has to be said: There’s no 100% perfect TV out there. Having tested TVs for years, I can tell you without reservation that you’ll always find something that could be improved. However, sometimes there’s a TV with so few and such minor flaws that it achieves a perfect 5 out of 5 score.
Today, that TV is the LG C2 OLED, the 2022 successor to the LG C1 OLED that has finally overtaken the Samsung QN90A QLED as the best TV of the year.
So what makes the LG C2 OLED so special? Well, its premium design, maximum versatility and great smart TV platform certainly help to make this one of the best TVs — as does its OLED evo panel that offers a better and brighter overall picture.
While the LG C2 OLED has its limitations — chief among them a lack of an ATSC 3.0 tuner and lower peak brightness than some of the newer QD-OLED TVs that hit the market this year — LG's stellar OLED offers the best balance between performance and price, and should therefore be at the top of your list of TVs to check out when shopping for a new screen.
The perfect TV? The proof is in the pudding
It's one thing to subjectively say this TV is the best, but it's another to prove that with hard data — a specialty of ours here at Tom's Guide. That said, let’s break down some of the key test data that makes the LG C2 OLED such a prize-winning pony.
For starters, LG C2 OLED’s color accuracy is unreal, with the set earning a 1.7 Delta-E score (the lower the number, the more accurate the colors are). Anything under 2.0 is indistinguishable to the native eye from the “true” color, so that’s a huge win there.
As far as color saturation is concerned, the LG C2 can produce 134.45% of the Rec 709 color space, surpassing the industry color standard by a significant margin. Admittedly there’s still room for improvement when it comes to the Rec2020 standard — an area in which the C2 OLED can only reproduce 74.17% of all the colors in the color space — however, that's not unexpected for this price.
Black levels are absolutely killer, as you’d expect with this being an OLED, and even the brightness impresses with a peak brightness of almost 800 nits with HDR content. That's not as high as some rival QLED sets, obviously, but it's getting to the point where you can watch an OLED TV in a well-lit room without losing details.
Some of these numbers resemble the data we got from the LG C1 OLED that didn't use the OLED evo panel — something I pointed out in a feature a few weeks back — but the improvement here is tangible and worthwhile.
Features both gamers and cinephiles are going to love
Specs and performance data are great, but those aren’t enough to achieve a perfect score around here — oh no. For that, TVs need to have a great feature set. And the C2 OLED certainly does.
For gamers, the LG C2 OLED TV scored a lag time of 12.9 milliseconds. That’s as good as you’ll see from a premium TV, making the C2 OLED one of the best gaming TVs. All of its ports support variable refresh rate and auto-low latency mode for 4K/120Hz gameplay via HDMI 2.1, as well as NVIDIA G-sync and AMD FreeSync, too.
Movie-lovers and avid TV watchers will love the fact that the LG C2 OLED's smart TV platform, webOS 22, includes all the best streaming services and almost all the best free streaming services, too. You can watch House of the Dragon on HBO Max, Andor on Disney Plus and The Bear on Hulu without having to plug in a separate streaming device. Searching clips on YouTube and launching workouts on Peloton are both possible, too, and the apps work wonderfully.
Finally, smart home owners will appreciate the Google Assistant and Alexa launchers that come built into the Magic Remote. Hold down one of those buttons and you can bring up the corresponding assistant who'll be more than willing to help control your smart home.
Last but not least, design-wise this is one of the thinnest TVs out there, measuring 0.1-inch thick across the top half of the TV. The LG C2 OLED comes with a central stand that keeps the set secure atop a table or console and reduced weight makes it easy to hang on the wall.
Any one of these features on their own wouldn't make this the best TV of 2022, but all of them together — alongside the pretty stellar testing data — should prove why the C2 OLED is the new top dog on our best TV guide page.
