CES 2025: LG OLED TV lines go all in on brightness, AI

If there’s a company that – like a meta joke of sorts – seems to embrace being predictable at CES, it’s LG. When it comes to TVs the Koreans have followed the same announcement pattern for half a decade now… and 2025 is no exception: they moved towards what we all expected them to. These days that’s higher OLED brightness and AI functionality (where LG seems focused on to an almost concerning degree as of late). There’s a number of notable changes in the company’s entire TV lineup for 2025, though, so let’s go through everything in detail.

Long live MLA, welcome… unnamed new 4-stack OLED panel

So, first things first: it’s clear that LG intends to stay in the race for the brightest OLED TV of the year by introducing a new panel produced by LG Display. This is where things get less clear because we do not yet have any official technical information about this panel, just a handful of details and ballpark numbers. LG remains vague by calling this combination of new OLED panel and algorithm tuned for that “Brightness Booster Ultimate” and claiming that it can achieve “three times higher brightness than conventional OLEDs”.

If past is any indication of how LG describes brightness levels, then this combination of new panel and algorithm can exceed 3500 nits in theory, probably settling at around 2300-2400 nits in a color-accurate picture mode. These numbers would mark a significant jump in brightness compared to LG’s MLA-based OLED panels of 2024 and 2023, even lead to the brightest OLED panel of 2025 (unless Samsung has something to say about that).

In all probability this is the new LG Display OLED panel mentioned by a couple of Korean media outlets and DSCC’s Ross Young a while ago: it does not use MLA tech anymore, instead comprising of a red, green and two stacks of blue for a total of four (up from the previous three). This allows LG Display to get rid of the more expensive MLA materials and boost brightness by 25%, which is almost in line with what one would expect a TV succeeding last year’s LG G4 to provide (around 2200-2300 nits).

It’s worth noting that this new panel does this while being able to achieve higher full-field brightness too (not just peak highlight brightness) and being more efficient when it comes to power consumption. Here’s hope that LG Display will share more technical information about it soon.

LG’s 2025 OLED TV series are direct successors to their 2024 counterparts

Few people were expecting to see major changes in the LG OLED TV lineup for this year and they were right: it’s basically the same as last year’s. The company does away with the A series, focusing on the B5 series as the only entry-level, budget OLED option (it honestly makes a lot of sense). The C5 series will once more be the most balanced, mainstream option, but it won’t be noticeably brighter than last year’s C4: it is built around an upgraded Alpha 9 processor and the webOS 25 operating system, but that’s basically it. It will be offered at 42-, 48-, 55-, 65-, 77- and 83-inch screen sizes.

The new OLED panel described earlier will be implemented in the G5 and M5 series of LG TVs, the only important difference between those once more being the latter’s Zero Connect Box which allows the M5 to operate wirelessly (both are also built around the new Alpha 11 AI Gen2 processor). Both series come at 65-, 77-, 83- and 97-inch screen sizes, while the G5 will also be offered at 55 inches and – for the first time – at 48 inches. The new OLED panel will not be used in any 48- or 97-inch model. The G5 now offers VRR refresh rates of up to 165 Hz (144 Hz for the M5), both will come with webOS 25 and… again, that’s basically it.

The fact that the redesigned, simplified remote control accompanying all LG OLED TV models for 2025 is a highlight in these products’ announcement speaks for itself. As far as the company’s new OLED TVs themselves are concerned, just two things are worth looking forward to: (a) finding out how bright the G5 can get in color-accurate picture modes and (b) finding out how affordable the C5 can get on Black Friday. Then again, these are the very same things demanding early adopters and mainstream consumers are most interested in anyway, so…

AI for every new feature and Microsoft CoPilot on Smart TVs raise concerns

The other thing everyone expected LG to focus on was artificial intelligence, but few expected the company to lean into it that hard. The company shoved “AI this” and “AI that” in every aspect of these TVs, from picture processing and sound upsampling to voice recognition, information search, content recommendations and even generative background art creation. Microsoft’s CoPilot – one of the most controversial Windows 11 features in the world of PCs – is somehow a part of this and present in all LG 2025 OLED TVs as part of webOS 25.

It’s not clear whether CoPilot will be active by default after the initial setup of these TVs – based on the way these AI functions are described it seems to be – and it’s also not clear whether it can be disabled or not, which is highly problematic for a consumer product of this type.

There are multiple other issues with LG’s approach regarding the implementation of AI in its most recent OLED TVs too. For one, the sense of “AI overload” is now very much a thing, as many consumers seem to be either sick of artificial intelligence cropping up everywhere or essentially indifferent to it. For another, because LG used the term “AI” liberally or even nonsensically for years – mostly to describe functionality just leveraging static data-based machine learning – it’s now pretty hard to convince anyone, let alone early adopters, that what it’s announcing as AI anything in 2025 is actually groundbreaking or even interesting.

Last but not least, few are talking about the data gathering almost certainly taking place in the context of AI functionality, as well as the privacy concerns this raises. Most TV manufacturers are already in hot water due to the extensive user data the operating systems of their recent models are hoarding for statistical and marketing purposes. It’s practically a given, then, that a lot of consumers would object to the idea that even more behavioral and content-related data can be collected through AI functionality like CoPilot’s, possibly connected to unique digital fingerprints and stored by TV manufacturers for various purposes. Anyone else missing the innocent times when all we cared about regarding new TVs was their picture quality and design?