LG's 4K TV's great: just wait for UHD content It's early in the game but Chris Griffith says ultra high-definition TV will take off and reviews LG's latest offering. LG's 65LA9700 - 65-inch ultra-high definition (UHD) TV. TRYING out a new LG 65-inch ultra-high definition TV for the past week has proven a bitter-sweet experience. It's sweet because a TV with four times the pixel density of 1080p high definition offers spectacular vision quality when viewing UHD content. That's 3840 x 2160 screen resolution, 8.3 million pixels. We were gobsmacked. The crispness and detail was superb and the colours of some of the demo clips featuring scenes across Europe were bright and vivid - maybe too vivid, but we'll accept that the demo clips are a little overdone. Blacks looked jet black. The clarity meant I became particularly conscious of depth of field: I noticed more the fuzziness of objects out of focus compared to the exquisite detail of those in focus. The UHD TV was a bitter experience too because my family and I were craving for a lot more native UHD or 4K content than is available now. We simply couldn't get enough. As with other UHD TVs, LG's 65LA9700, as it is known, has an upscaler, which grabs each frame of a lower resolution video and creates extra pixels to simulate 4K crispness. It works, but the quality is below real 4K video quality. Lack of content is a plight that befalls early adopters. At the moment, the only 4K material available is the samples LG gives you, and you can download what are generally two or three-minute clips from YouTube. If your internet is slow, you can install the 4K Video Downloader. I found some of this content played, and some didn't. LG currently doesn't offer 4K content to purchasers nor is there ongoing access to a library of 4K movies. But help is on the way. German optical disc manufacturer Singulus Technologies has conducted its first successful production tests of a triple-layer 100-Gigabyte Blu-ray disc, which should accommodate playback of movies in 4K resolution. That means early adopters who buy UHD TVs now might not wait too long to enjoy what will start as a trickle of ultra-high resolution movies on disc but will inevitably enlarge into a stream and torrent of available content. Ironically, as content provision generally moves online, UHD TV users may initially get their 4K content the old-fashioned way by visiting a video library that carries 100GB 4K disks rather than by downloading them, due to the sheer size of 4K files. However, other technology will see available 4K content grow online. Before the election, NBN Co had been trying out multicasting UHD TV content. The required bandwidth was 25-50 megabits a second. Then there's codecs. LG's UHD TVs come with the HEVC (high-efficiency video coding) feature built in. It enables online 4K video to be crunched to about half its original file size. In the immediate future the most important thing to check out in a 4K TV is the upscaler, as almost everything you watch, from free-to-air TV to cable, DVDs, USB and streamed content will go through it. LG's Tru-Ultra HD Engine upscaler does a decent job with 1080p HD content as it only needs quadruple the pixels. It performs upscaling no matter the content source. But for anything less than full HD, don't expect miracles. Converting low-resolution fuzzy content to pixel-etched 4K splendour is a dream. The set has a hidden sound bar, a 4.1 channel, seven-speaker, 50-watt system that slides down from the back of the panel when switched on. It offers clear, immersive sound. The 65LA9700 includes LG's Smart TV system with 3D and dual play, which means two gamers can see different perspectives on the same screen. Each eye effectively sees 2K resolution and it's a great visual experience. There are three HDMI and three USB3.0/2.0 ports, a built-in camera, near field communication and WiFi Direct. LG says it is selling about 100 84-inch UHD TVs a month. They came on to the market last year. Its research indicated that more consumers were willing to pay $4000 or more for a new set and 17 per cent of consumers regarded UHD as an important feature despite the low availability of specific content. If you're in the market for a medium-sized UHD TV, LG's 65-inch model is a great choice as it offers not only UHD but also all the bells and whistles of a smart TV with enhanced 3D and dual-play functions.