LG UA77  TV Review

The peak brightness in HDR on this TV is bad. While it's bright enough for most moderately lit scenes, bright specular highlights don't stand out at all, and bright scenes are flat and dull overall.

Switching to Game Optimizer results in a very slight decrease in peak brightness in most content, but it's not at all noticeable.

This TV's brightness in SDR is poor. It's only bright enough for a light-controlled environment, and it can't overcome glare from windows or lights.

The LG UA77 has terrible contrast, much worse than similarly priced models like the TCL Q77K. Blacks are noticeably raised and look gray in any content. It doesn't have a local dimming feature to improve this, either.

There's no local dimming feature, so there are no lighting zones. This means there's no haloing around bright elements against a dark background or subtitles, but the entire image looks gray and washed out.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual zones to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. This means that there are no distracting flickers or brightness changes as bright highlights move between dimming zones.

Switching to Game Optimizer doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance. Blacks are still terrible and look gray in any content.

The LG UA77 has disappointing black uniformity. Since there's no local dimming it can't dim the dark parts of the scene, and there's considerable backlight bleed through the screen. This results in an overall cloudy image. It's patchy throughout, with uneven amounts of light bleed.

The SDR color volume on this TV is sub-par. It struggles with both bright shades and darker shadow details, as the low contrast results in muted low-light colors. It also has limited coverage of even the DCI-P3 color space, so it's not a good choice if you're a fan of saturated colors.

This TV has bad color volume in HDR. It can't display a wide range of colors in HDR, bright colors don't stand out at all, and shadow details are lost due to its low contrast.

Unfortunately, the LG UA77 has mediocre accuracy in SDR before calibration. Gamma is too high, closer to 2.4 than 2.2, so most scenes are crushed a bit. The RGB balance is way off, with way too much blue overall, giving the TV a noticeably cool color temperature. Color dE is decent, with some noticeable issues in blues and reds that also affect cyan and magenta.

The accuracy after calibration is much better, but it's not as good as most TVs, and it's likely limited by the capabilities of the panel itself. The RGB balance is much better, and the color temperature is nearly perfect. There are no noticeable issues with gamma. Color accuracy is better, but there are still some issues with saturated reds and blues.

See our full calibration settings.

The HDR accuracy before calibration is poor. The most glaring issue is the absolutely terrible color temperature, which is way too cold even with the most accurate pre-cal settings. Color accuracy is sub-par, with significant issues across the board, but the white balance is a bit better, with just a few noticeable issues in midtones and darker shades.

Calibrating this TV in HDR helps improve the color accuracy in HDR, but its severely limited by the capabilities of the panel and it still doesn't look good. The color temperature is a bit better, but still too cold, and both white balance and color accuracy are slightly improved. It simply can't display the necessary range of colors for HDR to be displayed accurately.

The LG UA7700 has mediocre PQ EOTF tracking. The most noticeable issue is shadow details, which are noticeably raised due to the TV's terrible contrast. Mid-tones fare a bit better and actually track well, but there's a sharp cutoff at the TV's peak brightness. This means that the brightest highlights in HDR are always displayed as bright as they can be in HDR, but since it's clipping, you lose brightness gradients, and everything blends together.

The TV's low-quality content smoothing is good. It significantly reduces macro blocking and pixelization from low bitrate streams, but there is some slight loss of fine details and the image has a slightly waxy look to it.

Unfortunately, this TV has mediocre sharpness processing. The image is soft overall, and text is difficult to read.

The gradient handling on this TV is decent. There's noticeable banding in darker shades of green and blue, and it looks worse than it should due to the TV's low contrast, as the backlight bleed interferes with gradients in shadow details.

This TV has very low input lag when set to Game Optimizer, which ensures a responsive gaming experience.

The TV supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 60Hz. It displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with any signal, which is important for reading clear text from a PC.

Unlike previous models in this lineup, the LG UA7700 supports VRR to help reduce screen tearing. Unfortunately, it's not very useful, as the refresh rate range isn't wide enough to work with Low Framerate Compensation (LFC), so you'll see tearing if your framerate drops below 48Hz.

Unfortunately, this TV has a very slow response time at the maximum refresh rate of 60Hz. It's especially bad in shadow details, which are incredibly blurry. Mid-tones are a bit snappier, but still too slow, resulting in blurry motion in most scenes.

This TV doesn't support a 120Hz refresh rate.

Unfortunately, this TV has a very slow response time at the maximum refresh rate of 60Hz. It's especially bad in shadow details, which are incredibly blurry. Mid-tones are a bit snappier but still too slow, resulting in blurry motion in most scenes.

This TV is a 60Hz TV, so it only supports 4k @ 60Hz on the P55. It has Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), so it'll automatically switch to Game Mode when it detects a game being played, which gives you the lowest possible input lag for games.

This TV only supports 4k @ 60Hz Xbox Series consoles. It has Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), so it'll automatically switch to Game Mode when it detects a game being played, which gives you the lowest possible input lag for games. It doesn't support Dolby Vision.

The relatively slow response time on this TV has one benefit: there's very little stutter when watching cinematic content at 24 or 30 fps. It's still a bit noticeable in very slow, panning shots, but it's better than most TVs.

Unfortunately, the LG UA77 doesn't remove 24p judder from 60Hz sources like most cable TV boxes and older streaming devices that lack a Match Frame Rate feature. Watching movies from a Blu-ray player or with the native apps is fine, though.

The cinematic response time on this TV is sub-par. There's very noticeable blur behind fast-moving objects.

The TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, which introduces flicker that can bother people who are sensitive to it. Unfortunately, it flickers at a slow 120Hz in all picture modes and at all brightness levels, so it can cause headaches and eye strain if you're sensitive to flicker.

The TV doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI), to help reduce persistence blur.

There's an optional motion interpolation feature on this TV, but it's very bad. There are noticeable artifacts even in slow panning shots that should be easy to handle, and it's much worse in faster scenes.

The glossy coating on the LG UA77 does a poor job reducing the intensity of direct, mirror-like reflections. They're reflected back almost perfectly, so lights and windows opposite the TV are very distracting.

There's barely any noticeable increase in black levels when watching this TV in a bright room, which is good, but the black levels are always raised anyway.

The total amount of reflected light on this TV is decent. The screen coating does very little to reduce the intensity of reflections, so glare is very distracting in a bright room.

The perceived color saturation in a bright room is poor. Most of this has nothing to do with the ambient lighting, though, as this TV has low color volume even in a dark room.

The LG UA77 has a very good viewing angle. Colors barely shift even at a wide viewing angle, although there is some loss of brightness at moderate viewing angles.

The gray uniformity on this TV is mediocre. There's a fair amount of dirty screen effect in the center, which is distracting when watching sports especially, but it's bad enough that you'll notice it with most content. The sides of the screen are also considerably darker than the center.

The TV uses an ADS panel with an RGB sub-pixel layout, so it renders text well as a PC monitor.

It uses basic, inefficient color filters to produce red and green light, but there's very little separation between those colors, which contributes to the TV's inability to display a wide range of colors.

The TV is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth on all three ports. It doesn't have an ATSC 3.0 tuner, so 4k over-the-air isn't possible.

This TV supports eARC, which allows it to pass uncompressed high-quality audio from a connected source to your home theater system or soundbar. Unfortunately, it doesn't support any DTS formats commonly used on Blu-rays.

Unlike most LG models, the LG UA77 doesn't support Dolby Vision.

This TV has a very basic design, with relatively thin bezels on all sides and basic feet. It doesn't look as good as more premium models, but it doesn't look cheap, either.

The stand consists of two plastic feet set near the sides of the TV, with no alternate or narrow position. This means you'll need a wide table if you're buying one of the larger sizes and can't wall mount it.

Footprint of the 75-inch model: 60.8" x 13.3" x 3.6".

The inputs are housed in a central electronics box that's a bit hard to reach of you wall mount it. One of the HDMI inputs faces straight out the back of the TV, so if you're planning on wall-mounting it you'll need a 90° adapter for the HDMI cables. Unfortunately, there's nothing to help with cable management.

The LG UA77 has decent build quality. It's not very premium, with a mostly plastic build, but there are no obvious issues with its construction.

This TV ships with webOS25, LG's proprietary smart interface. It runs the full version with no compromises, but the interface is a bit sluggish compared to higher-end LGs. As this TV is part of LG's Re:New program, it'll eventually receive software updates to newer versions of webOS for the next few years.

Unfortunately, like almost all TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can't disable them.

Instead of the Magic Remote pointer found on higher-end models, this TV comes with LG's older basic remote. Some people may actually prefer this as it has more physical buttons. It's compatible with the Magic Remote, though, so if you prefer that you can buy the fancier remote separately.

• Remote control
• Power cable
• User guides

The LG UA77 has an okay frequency response. The sound profile isn't very well-balanced, so dialogue isn't perfectly clear, with some dips across the spectrum. Like all TVs there's very little deep bass. It gets pretty loud, but there are noticeable pumping artifacts at max volume.