LG M3 Wireless OLED TV Review | The Results Are In
This is no ordinary OLED TV this is the LG Gallery Series OLED M the world’s first wireless OLED TV I love the premise but does it actually work has anything been sacrificed well we got the very first review unit so let’s find out oh yeah that’s that’s big uh wireless box here it is let’s go ahead and pull this out now um and have a look this is the first time I’ve been able to kind of pick it up and handle it a little bit of a plastic to remove but this is it this is
the wireless transmission box this is an aimable antenna that you see swirling around on the top here three not four HDMI inputs most LG TVs come with four HDMI inputs you only get three here I’m not sure why there is an optical output here and I’m kind of struggling to think how that might work I suppose if you were to put it in a media cabinet you could run a sound bar off of that um well sound bars however offer HDMI ARC or e-ARC so so I noticed on the side of this box it says
SVC stand V2 version two honestly I’ve set up so many TVs and dealt with so many stands it’s hard to remember exactly what the previous stand was
is cute and everything that they’re it’s showing like the TV with some speakers on the side and uh I guess this would be the cabinet that it what maybe there was some stuff under here yeah I stand by the fact that I’m not wild about these instructions but um that was definitely partially me so this is kind of a Vesa mount compliant bar that will attach to the TV and then this tag will attach to the bottom of this bar but we’re only doing this because we can’t wall mount this TV here from there the
instructions were um fine I guess it was a little bit confusing because this mound is meant to be able to fit the 55 to 65 or the 77 I think it would probably also fit the 83. and that means that there are removable pieces to scale this down for the smaller TVs I’m not sure I understand entirely why we have to have these buffer plastic pieces there maybe this is a me problem and not so much an LG problem I’ll say this the components the hardware are are rock solid and then once you do get
things screwed in just right it feels good feels good to get the screwing we’ll just leave my commentary at that I think that’s enough of that business let’s get this thing up on the uh on the table let’s peel some plastic I love this part um it doesn’t matter how many times I do it I just like oh also shout out LG thanks for the pull tab on the plastic that’s not a small deal that should be a standard almost no bezels we do have a little like quarter inch Matrix around the actual display area
which we’ll notice when we turn this on I’m digging the 77 inch size 85 is fun but 77 just seems to like fit really well here but before we can turn it on we have to finish the installation which involves the wireless box that I mentioned earlier and here is where I feel like our setup kind of fails the concept of the wireless OLED TV we have a cabinet into which we can put all our devices uh granted we would be running multiple HDMI cables up to it but when you have a cabinet you can
kind of hide those cables with some clever cable management the idea of the wireless OLED I think is that you can house your components somewhere else and I feel like we should give it a little bit of a challenge so LG recommends about 30 feet I think it is of line of sight in order to have a stable signal well it looks like after you get past the zero connect box related setup stuff the rest is standard LG webos setup I did connect the Xbox and the Blu-ray player they were both automatically recognized everything is
set up and good to go I’ve gone ahead and put on a YouTube video for this section of the video and I I think if I stand here we might start seeing some drop frames or signal drop out that’s all going to be part of the process here stress testing this TV finding out how far the wireless signal box can go from the TV before you start having problems according to LG there should be no loss of signal quality at all for a lot of unfamiliar things to test out with this thing but I’m kind
of looking forward to it for me it’s going to be about two or three days for you it’s going to be about two seconds until I’m back with the full review and just like that I’m back and guys I gotta tell you reviewing the M3 was a lot more fun than I expected I’ve got some useful information on how the wireless system works as well as the final word on picture quality with this setup but before I get into that I have a few updates for you first off this stand has actually grown on me
I know I expressed frustration when I assembled it but frankly I was just having a tough day that day obviously I’ve left that section in this video because the experience was what it was but this stand this pigeon-toed stand I kind of like it now my brain is telling me I should hate it but I’ve been living with this TV for a solid week and I don’t know guys I I really dig it it’s turned out to be stable enough as I’ve moved the BDI console back and forth probably 30 times at this point and
it doesn’t rake the TV back like the other stand did either now I’ve not been able to find this stand on sale so that’s kind of weird maybe LG just hasn’t put it up yet but when I get that sorted out I’ll post an update down in the description moving along I mentioned earlier that I was looking forward to experiencing the G3 OLED TV again in the form of the wireless M3 here just to see if there was anything I missed in the original review or if I felt differently about it in any other way
and as a matter of fact I have I actually had to go back to my review to watch it because I did not recall being a big fan of the TV’s onboard audio and sure enough this is what I had to say about the G3 sound there’s bass it doesn’t sound anemic but it lacks presence richness and most of all Clarity a TV with picture clarity this good deserves sound clarity too so I’m going to highly recommend at least a sound bar with this TV so I still stand by some of that this TV doesn’t
sound quite as good as the LG G2 or the Sony A95k that’s still true but frankly after using this TV for a week I mean I never connected the nines to it I never felt the need it sounds pretty good honestly the bass is quite a bit better than I remember and the clarity has been fine actually I even used it to listen to music and no it was not super high five but it was good enough for what I needed at the time I think maybe I was a little too hard on it I’m
sorry about that anyway with those updates out of the way let’s talk about how this wireless feature works that is after all what we’re really here for well in short it works really well we launched straight into a torture test to figure out what the range and line of sight claims LG makes looks like in real life now as a reminder LG claims up to 30 feet with line of sight and whenever you claim a range like that you do expect some variables so in order to test both the distance and also the line of
sight Reliance I took the zero connect box upstairs to The Loft and that got me about 25 feet of distance from the TV now using this on-screen signal checker I was able to track the signal strength and get tips on how to improve it if needed but there’s also an LED indicator on the top of the zero connect box that tells me the same thing blue is awesome green is good yellow is getting into dicey territory and red is a hard no go so long as the zero connect box had line of sight and by
that I mean the Box could actually see this little receiver section on the bottom of the display that light stayed blue that is unless I went out of my way to try to interrupt it if I put my hand over this receiver on the display I could get the signal to drop a bit which looked like dropped frames on the TV but just walking around the rooms both upstairs and down doing a little Dance I mean the signal stayed solid and I saw no alteration to the picture whatsoever if however I dropped the zero connect
down behind this little knee wall that’s up in the Loft then we could see some initial interruptions at least you can see the LED on the Zero connect box going yellow at first then eventually green and at times it was full on blue as well that’s what happened initially however as zero connect box remained in that location behind the knee wall for a while what I noticed was that the connection became more stable now this is just a theory but it seemed that like a lot of wireless devices the zero connect box had done some
Wireless channel surfing and settled on the channel that worked best and then locked it in again that’s just the story I’m telling myself based on the behavior I witnessed but the fact is the signal locked in stronger over time which I like a great deal continuing with the zero connect box placement test I brought the unit downstairs and placed it in the back of the room with a clear line of sight to the TV and the LED remained blue the entire time I was not able to interrupt the signal by walking or dancing around again
I had to cover up the zero connect box or the wireless receiver module on the display to get it to trip up this kind of deliberate move doesn’t seem like a real world scenario to me but if you work for it you can affect the wireless signal next I move the zero connect box into the BDI elements console and when I did so I intentionally placed it under one of the shelves so there were two layers of thick wood in between the box and the TV according to the signal strength meter this was the most
challenging placement location we’ve taken away line of sight and the objects in the signals paths are pretty significant before I discuss the results of this test I want to talk about why I actually do think this is a realistic scenario for some folks even though I said the opposite at the beginning of this video whether you wall mount this TV or put it on a stand you might want to put your gear in a console like this below the tv and have the luxury of not having to run any wires to the TV at all
just provide Power and you’re good personally speaking I like the idea of being able to put the equipment somewhere else entirely in the room especially if the location I choose is more suitable for using an OTA broadcast antenna where those signals come in best but I think this is a more realistic scenario for most folks now if you have an open cabinet no doors or whatever all the better but even if your cabinet has doors like ours though it is important to note that the doors do have holes and perforations in the screen you might
do okay maybe while the light on the Zero connect box remains yellow even to this very moment which by the way is code for not ideal or perhaps tenuous I’ve had no problems with the TV’s picture performance over the past week or so no dropped frames no image interruptions at all there was one thing though that I have to mention on one specific day in the last six I believe it was day three I kept getting this weak signal message on the TV the picture never dropped out there were no audio issues at all no
sign of struggle actually whatsoever but this message popped up maybe 15 times while I was trying to watch a show interestingly this seems to have coincided with my moving the BDI console back toward the wall a bit and then just as quickly as it started the warning message stopped and I’ve not seen it since now again this is just a theory but I suspect that it may have taken a while for the zero connect box to lock onto a wireless channel of sorts that it found to be the most stable whatever actually happened technically though
it’s been three days of frequent use without seeing that message again and of course the TV has performed flawlessly as far as the picture and audio goes all this just goes to show that The Invisible Wireless signals that we use and live around every day can be hard to understand we know that they are not always omnipresent they can be very directional and we also know that they aren’t always linear despite the notion of line of sight it is possible for a wireless signal to bounce off of a hard surface and land exactly where it
needs to be it’s still directional we just change the trajectory a little bit all of this to say that even though I’ve thoroughly tested this Wireless technology your mileage will vary you may get away with tucking the zero connect box in a place that isn’t recommended but then again you may not you may be able to place the box outside of its 30-foot range with the right conditions or your conditions may require less than 30 feet I can’t predict what might happen with your use case but I can say that I am pretty optimistic because
in this space with all the torture tests I gave it the M3 has performed really admirably from a wireless signal perspective as for the picture quality and latency I can’t tell any difference whatsoever between the M3’s wireless system and an HDMI cable connection none there’s no added compression or pixelization poor video Source problems aren’t further exacerbated by the wireless connection I don’t experience any perceivable lag with video games though admittedly I’m not a hardcore FPS player there was no alteration to motion resolution again I might as well have had HDMI cables connected but I didn’t
and I loved the sense of freedom that that gave me now there are some restrictions involved with this kind of setup if you want to use a sound bar other than one of LG’s own wireless sound bars or an AV receiver keep in mind that the arc or e-arc connection is on the Zero connect box there are exactly zero ports on this TV or the display part of it anyway so if you do want to use your own audio system that means that the zero connect box will need to be within an HDMI Cable’s distance
from those audio devices which means you would need to house your equipment near the TV now I can see you in the comments right now saying LG should just add an HDMI input to the display itself except it really is not that simple if LG did that they’d have to add a whole board that had not only that HDMI input but processing to go with it as well unless they were to double up on the transmission so that it went from the display to the zero connect box for processing then back to the display that
would add cost complexity and probably some liabilities in terms of performance as well and frankly that just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense I think the better fix would be for the weissa audio standard to take off it’s not going to but it should anyway then your audio system could just be Wireless as well so if it’s not going to be y sub maybe it’s something else otherwise I think the M3 works great what a cool TV I’ve had so much fun with it I love the M3 in practice but even more I love
what it could mean for the future I actually made a video All About That if you’d like to learn more and I’m including that along with my full review of the LG G3 OLED on which this M3 is based anyway thanks as always for watching don’t forget to like And subscribe for more content like this I’ll see you on the next one and until then well these are the two videos I think you might like thank you
