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Deornoth

So I spent a week with the LG 65QNED90 and am sending it back. It’s close to perfect but has a few fatal flaws.

The good

• Very good picture quality, local dimming is effective and little blooming with the latest firmware. It gets very very close to oled quality when tweaked well.
• Lots of settings and adjustments so you can fine tune it a great deal
• No PWM flicker at all at any setting. I measured for pwm all the time as i tweaked and never detected any. This is a first for a local dimming tv as far as I know. And it does make a difference - the familiar “pinch” I get between my eyes on pwm sets doesnt happen on this tv.
• I didnt get any dizzyness once ALL image enhancements (like motion clarity, etc) were turned off.

The bad:

1. The tv doesnt handle dim rooms well at all. Highlights (ie light sources on screen like car lights, flashlights, etc) are blinding. You can’t get the brightness low enough to be able to handle the highlights without crushing dark scenes. And I spent a lot of time playing with the various settings including white balance luminance settings. The backlight is far brighter than it needs to be at lowest settings.
2. Reflection handling is terrible. Any light source is reflected so much that you can’t see whats on the screen, unless brightness is cranked up. Which again doesn't work in a dim (or even medium bright) room.
3. Bright scenes actually bleed into surrounding colours. Example: A person standing in front of the bright window will have light bleed into them. Its probably a dimming software bug.
4. Panel uniformity is quite bad. I had 6 wide vertical bars run through the set. Causes dirty screen effect, Noticeable in all but the darkest scenes. Very distracting. I may have just lost the panel lottery…not sure but based on reviews it sounds like many of these are bad.

Honestly, the picture quality was so good (particularly in hdr mode) that if I was in a bright room I would keep it. Unfortunately, I’m in a fairly dim room and it makes my eyes bleed from brightness. The combination of factors means this isnt good enough to keep.

Folks, just a quick tip for iphone users - the RAW+ camera app lets you manually set shutter speed and ISO like a DSLR camera, and you can see flicker on TVs, monitors, laptops etc easily up to about 40000hz. Works great on my Iphone 11… just be sure to crank the brightness up on your screen when you’re using a high shutter speed so you can still see the image.

right there with you. Definitely try the eye patching trick, it really seems to help. There are other threads here that go into detail about it but basically it seems like if one eye is weaker than the other it makes a person super sensitive to flicker. Covering the better eye and just using one seems to be a big relief to many. And it can get better over time as the weaker eye is forced to get stronger. Worth a shot.

Other than that, keep searching out devices without flicker - the LG eye care monitors seem to be good, I bought one recently and its easy on the eyes. ie.. No pwm, no dithering. I still haven't found a recent tv thats good but am trying another this week.

Agreed - local dimming can be tough on the eyes with PWM. This is different since apparently no PWM, so Im curious to see how it is for my eyes. I’ll also use game / pc mode to turn off any processing and dithering crap. Dithering for me is actually worse than PWM. I can handle high frequency pwm (1000hz+) if dithering is off. Also this is apparently a native 10 bit panel so there shouldn’t be any FRC dithering to increase colour capabilities.

Anyway I have 30 days to return it if I don't like it so fingers crossed!

MvDoorn

This is a huge disappointment about the S95B. RTINGS saying that the S95B is flicker free above certain brightness thresholds got me very excited. I love the look of OLEDS but the eyestrain and dizzyness/nausea have always been a dealbreaker for me. I assume you tried filmmaker mode as well as the brightness settings RTINGS suggested?

I just pulled the trigger on an LG QNED90 and its on the way. Everything Ive read suggests its the very best TV for us sensitive folks - much better than the QNED 85/86, which apparently still have some PWM use. Fingers crossed.