Review: LG M4 OLED

People aren't often prepared to pay more to get less, but they will pay oodles of money to reduce clutter. Promise people that you can cut the amount of cables or other hard-to-hide items in their homes and you can basically name your price. The price LG is charging for its decluttering service, via a new wireless OLED TV screen called the M4, is around $4,299. That's a couple grand more than the equivalent 65-inch nonwireless version.

Bigger models (77, 83, and 97inches) of the M4 are available for more money. Considerably more money in the case of the 97-inch model—it costs around $34,999 and doesn’t have quite as many cutting-edge technologies as its smaller siblings, so it can safely be ignored.

Photograph: Simon Lucas

The M4s are a variation on LG’s G4 4K OLED TV, a technological tour de force that was widely acknowledged as one of the very best pound-for-pound TVs of 2024. The variation is the Zero Connect box, which takes all processing, and all physical and wireless connections, away from the screen and takes care of them itself. This means that as long as your Zero Connect box is able to establish a wireless connection to the TV (which is easy enough to achieve if you position it less than 10 meters away), your TV only needs a connection to power. If that’s not decluttering, I don’t know what is.

If you're after a sleek modern screen to pair with your well-designed space, and you really hate cables, you might actually be willing to pay for it. For the rest of us mere mortals, a much cheaper G4 will easily suffice.

Getting Connected

Photograph: Simon Lucas

The look of LG's M4 is similar to what you'd expect from any modern OLED. It's a thin, nearly bezel-less screen that can be easily mounted to any wall, which is what you're likely doing if you are paying all this money for the wireless connectivity.

The Zero Connect box can wirelessly deliver audio and video information to the screen at the same standard as you’d expect from devices physically connected. This means your 65-inch M4 can handle 4K Dolby Vision HDR images from a Blu-ray player or your favorite streaming service(s), and Dolby Atmos spatial audio from those same sources. Even 4K at 144 hertz with ALLM, VRR, HGiG, FreeSync, G-Sync and all the other cutting-edge gaming features for consoles and PCs can be handled wirelessly. All of this happens via the 60-GHz wireless band, which is nothing like as congested as the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands most other Wi-Fi devices use.

The box features three HDMI inputs, all at 2.1 standard, and one eARC-enabled. There are aerial binding posts for the TV tuners, a couple of USB-A slots, a CI card slot, an Ethernet input, and a digital optical socket. Wireless connectivity runs to Bluetooth 5.1 and Wi-Fi 6. On the top there’s a large dial with a sliding switch. It rotates in order to align the transmission with the screen’s receiver, and the switch slides to increase or decrease the angle of transmission. Make your connections to the box, wirelessly connect the box to the screen, and you’re in business.

Photograph: Simon Lucas

From there, it’s top-tier LG business as usual. The second-generation MLA (micro lens array) panel delivers remarkable brightness by OLED standards, and LG’s most potent processing engine yet (“Alpha 11 Super Upscaling 4K” is its full and unwieldy name) brings a number of exciting-sounding technologies to the party.

The A11 processing chip uses AI to improve depth and three-dimensionality of images, generate more dynamic highlights in images, and give an overall picture performance that’s as true to the content creator’s intentions as possible.

No Compromises

There seems to be absolutely no downside to sending content wirelessly. The LG M4 is fundamentally an LG G4, and its picture performance is every bit as impressive. Black tones are predictably deep and lustrous, and there’s a huge amount of detail available even in the darkest scenes during, say, The Batman—any number of alternative televisions can crush this movie’s numerous pitch-black scenes to uniformity, but the M4 is able to tease out variation where you might least expect it. At the opposite end of the scale, the white tones it creates are just as informative, just as varied, and thanks to the MLA panel and the processor that’s controlling it, can be far brighter than perceived OLED wisdom suggests they ought to be. If follows that glaring onscreen contrasts are handled confidently and in very convincing fashion.

Photograph: Simon Lucas

The color palette is wide-ranging and realistic, and the LG manages to look vivid and energetic even in low-light scenes. Edge definition is smoothly realized, and depth of field is quite prodigious at times. Even the most testing motion is handled without alarms, and in the moments of highest crisis the M4 keeps artifacts and picture noise to a bare minimum.

It’s similarly accomplished where games are concerned. The M4 offers a smooth and immersive experience in Game Optimizer mode: It is razor-sharp in its responses, keeps images stutter- and tear-free, and make the most of its extensive color palette and facility with contrasts to optimize lighting effects and the like. Enjoying all of this immersive and absorbing experience from a TV that seems connected only to an electrical outlet seems almost decadent.

Photograph: Simon Lucas

LG’s WebOS smart TV interface has undergone some minor changes to arrive in WebOS 24 guise, but despite featuring more overt advertising, it remains one of the more logical and more usable interfaces around. Getting what you want is straightforward whether you’re using the Wii-like Magic remote (which will be familiar to anyone who’s used an LG TV in the last decade or so), the ThinQ control app, or taking advantage of built-in Amazon Alexa voice control.

So far, so uncomplicatedly impressive. When you add in some predictably robust build quality, an impeccable standard of finish, and a nice slim profile, the LG M4 ticks almost every box. The only way in which it’s less than thoroughly enjoyable, in fact, concerns the sound it makes.

Worth the Upgrade?

Obviously the M4 is far from the only OLED TV with sound that’s much less exciting than the images it accompanies. But given that it features 60 watts of power driving a 4.2-channel speaker array, the tentative and boneless audio quality can’t help but disappoint. Definition is pretty good, and the Clear Voice Pro feature that uses AI voice remastering technology most certainly allows dialog to remain distinct and easy to follow, but there is very little low-frequency substance.

In all honesty, though, this is likely to be a moot point. It seems unlikely that anyone contemplating spending over $4K on a 65-inch TV isn’t budgeting for an audio system to do it justice. When you consider that the M4 is compatible with LG’s WOW Orchestra feature, which allows the screen’s speakers to join in with, rather than be overridden by, an LG soundbar, buying one to do the job properly is a no-brainer.

Yes, adding a soundbar or other speaker system (they can be put in walls too!) isn’t totally in keeping with the whole zero-clutter vibe, but that's hardly the screen’s fault. Basically no modern TVs come with good speakers. Just have your interior designer plan for some in-wall speakers, or mount a soundbar somewhere.

Let’s not forget that the alternative ordinary OLED TV you might be considering is highly likely to need some sonic assistance too, and will definitely need a bunch of cables to be connected to its rear in order to properly do its thing. That means the M4 remains a unique proposition as well as a superbly accomplished television. If you don't need wireless connectivity you can skip it, but if you do, this is the only game in town. We're sure lucky it looks amazing.