LG’s 2025 OLED TVs are its best yet — but they risk going overboard with AI

At least when it comes to making TVs, LG can seemingly do no wrong. Year after year, the company’s OLED sets are at the top of most reviewers’ recommendation lists. They’ve overcome the Achilles heel of older models — brightness — thanks to clever innovations like Micro Lens Array, which made the G3 and last year’s G4 bright enough to make HDR shine in any viewing environment.

So it should come as no surprise that LG’s 2025 lineup of OLED TVs raises the bar yet again. At the top of the lineup is the M5, which is the latest series to use the company’s Zero Connect Box for a wireless link between the TV screen and your gaming consoles, streaming boxes, and other external devices. It’s an impressive trick that, by all accounts, works quite well, but no one really needs that. So I tend to view the G-series as LG’s more practical flagship for consumers.

Lucky for us TV nerds, the G5 is (somehow) getting even brighter. LG says its latest Brightness Booster Ultimate technology “enhances light control architecture and light-boosting algorithms to achieve brightness three times higher than conventional OLED models.” (For context, that comparison is being made with OLEDs that don’t include the Micro Lens Array tech found in the M5 and G5.) LG is also pushing the refresh rate on its premium OLEDs all the way up to 165Hz, which it claims is an industry first, offering a new level of smooth gameplay for the PC crowd.

Image: LG

The two highest-end models feature LG’s latest Alpha 11 Gen 2 processor, which improves image processing and upscaling to make lower-bitrate content look as good as possible on these 4K screens. LG says a lot of those processing tricks are also trickling down to the more mainstream C5. With so many people watching internet TV services and other streaming content these days, that magic sauce can make a noticeable difference. Sony’s known for being the best in the game at this, but LG has made big strides in recent years.

Goodbye inputs button, hello endless AI features

This year’s Magic Remote no longer has a dedicated inputs button. In what might prove to be a controversial decision, LG is making the Home Hub button pull double duty: you can press it to reach the Home Hub dashboard of webOS or hold down the button to pull up your list of inputs. That’s not the end of the world, but it’s still another thing to remember for a fundamental TV interaction.

And then comes the avalanche of AI features. The usual AI Picture Pro and AI Sound Pro optimization modes are present. The C5 series is getting the same virtualized 11.1.2-channel surround sound that debuted in the G4 last year. LG is also expanding on the picture wizard it introduced two years ago, where viewers pick from a series of images to land on their ideal image settings, with a similar process for audio.

But this year, the AI focus is much, much bigger than that. LG has new “LG AI” branding — that’s what the mic button now activates. Oh, I’m sorry. Did I call it the Magic Remote before? The remote has been rebranded as the AI Remote. And there’s a whole damn LLM chatbot built into these TVs. Hell, even Microsoft’s Copilot is being thrown in.

The risk LG faces here is getting in the way and pushing this stuff on customers too aggressively. The company’s OLEDs are some of the very best TVs on the market. They offer brilliant visuals with every feature home theater enthusiasts want. In 2025, that includes an enhanced Filmmaker Mode that takes your room’s ambient lighting into account and adjusts picture settings accordingly — all the while making sure to “maintain the filmmaker’s original intent.”

For its part, LG claims the latest webOS home screen is faster and easier to use. And the company has vowed to keep software updates coming over the next five years, much like our smartphones gain new features over time.

Still, at this stage, I find myself putting up with webOS and spending the bulk of my usage time in a different interface — whether that’s Apple TV, Google TV, or something else. I’m hopeful that LG’s mega push into AI won’t be too heavy-handed, but we’ll have to see how it all comes together once the 2025 TV lineup starts shipping this spring. If customers find their usual flows getting interrupted by AI gimmicks, there might be some complaints.

We’ll have a much better idea of how LG AI fits into these superb TVs — and whether it ultimately detracts from them — when the M5, G5, C5, and B5 OLEDs hit stores in a few months. By then, we’ll know how much they’ll cost, too.