LG 75SM9970PUA

LG 75SM9970PUA

Editor Rating: Excellent (4.0)


LG 75SM9970PUA - LG 75SM9970PUA
  • Pros

    • Strong contrast and color.
    • 8K resolution with excellent AI Picture mode upconversion.
  • Cons

    • Expensive.
    • Fairly dull design with stock remote.
    • No consumer 8K content is available yet.
  • Bottom Line

    LG's SM9970 LCD TV is one of the few 8K models available and offers excellent picture quality, but you're paying a lot of money for a resolution no movies or TV shows can actually be watched in yet.

8K TV is still in its very first stages of consumer availability, so if you buy in now, you'll be spending a hefty sum for a TV that won't have much, if any, native resolution consumer content for the next year or two. You can pay as much as $30,000 if you want the 88-inch LG Signature Series OLED88Z9 OLED TV, the most advanced 8K we've tested. If five digits is too much for you, especially during this early adopter period, the 75-inch LG 75SM9970 LCD TV can be yours for "just" $4,999. It doesn't reach the performance or style heights of the Z9, but it's still an impressive TV in its own right.


The SM9970 keeps with LG's near-bezel-less design philosophy for TVs. It doesn't have quite the edge-to-edge glass of the Z9, but its gunmetal frame is just a quarter of an inch wide, curving around the back. The bottom bezel is a slightly thicker half-inch, with an LG NanoCell logo in the lower right corner. The screen sits on a U-shaped metal stand, and unlike the massive 88-inch Z9, it can be mounted on a wall.

For watching 8K content over HDMI, along with upconverted 1080p and 4K content, you can use the connections on the back of the SM9970 itself. Four HDMI 2.1 ports and two USB 3.0 ports face left on the back side of the TV, and a third USB port, Ethernet port, antenna/cable connector, composite video input, optical audio output, and RS-232C connector face back.

LG SM9970

For other 8K video from USB sources, you need to use the 8K Upgrader, which will be provided to SM9970 owners for free in December. It's a small black box about the size and shape of an Apple TV, which supports playback of 8K video files in HEVC, AV1, and VP9. Playback of those files over network storage will be possible with the box after a planned update in the future. Of course, no consumer 8K content is available in any form yet, but the adapter will be necessary to decode many types of it.

While the SM9970 is a top-of-the-line LG NanoCell LCD TV, it isn't part of LG's Signature series like the Z9 OLED. Because of that, it doesn't come with the sleek aluminum remote of the Z9. The SM9970 comes with a standard LG Magic Remote, a curved black plastic wand with a circular control pad featuring a clickable scroll wheel. It functions like an air mouse to control an on-screen pointer, and has a pinhole microphone for using Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and LG's own voice search.

LG SM9970


WebOS, with LG's ThinQ AI smart platform, handles the SM9970's interface and connected features. It's a powerful, attractive menu system that provides access to most major streaming services. It also lets you use your choice of voice assistant, Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, by pressing the microphone button on the remote and speaking into it (it doesn't support hands-free Google Assistant like the Sony Master Series Z9F does). WebOS also supports Apple AirPlay 2, letting you stream video from your iOS device to your TV, and control it with Siri thanks to HomeKit compatibility.


The SM9970 is an 8K (7,680 by 4,320) LCD that supports high dynamic range (HDR) content. It can play HDR10, Dolby Vision, and Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) HDR video through its HDMI 2.1 ports or from storage connected over USB, with support for 8K60 in multiple formats with the included 8K adapter box.

The SM9970 might have four times the pixels as a 4K TV, but those pixels can be judged the same way as those on any other TV, based on the quality of their color and light. We took our test equipment (a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo Six-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays' CalMAN software) to California to test just that at LG's Santa Clara lab.

The SM9970 can get quite bright under certain conditions, particularly with a high dynamic range signal. The TV showed a peak brightness of 338.98cd/m2 with a full screen white field and a 685.46cd/m2 peak brightness on an 18-percent field with a standard dynamic range signal. HDR bumps that up considerably, to 487.90cd/m2 with a full field and 995.40cd/m2 with an 18-percent field. Black level is strong at 0.026cd/m2 for an excellent contrast ratio of 38,285:1, though light bloom can occasionally get slightly aggressive with active contrast features turned on. It's much brighter than the OLED Z9 (441.50cd/m2 with an 18-percent field), but of course OLED offers perfect black levels LCDs can't match. Few TVs can break the 1,000cd/m2 threshold, including the Sony Master Series Z9F (1,677.49cd/m2) and the Hisense H9F (1,275.03cd/m2).

LG SM9970

The above charts show measured color levels as dots and ideal color levels as boxes, comparing the SM9970's performance with an SDR signal against Rec.709 broadcast standard color levels on the left, and an HDR signal against the DCI-P3 color space on the right. Out of the box, in Cinema mode, the SM9970's SDR colors look very good, showing strong accuracy that can be tweaked into excellence with a professional calibration (which we recommend for any extremely expensive, centerpiece, early adopter, bragging-rights TV).

HDR performance is also admirable, with accurate whites, reds, and blues. It doesn't quite cover the full DCI-P3 color space, not reaching far enough into greens. Cyans and magentas also run a bit cool, but again professional calibration can improve these issues. Both the SM9970 and Z9 are 8K TVs, but the nearly perfect Rec.709 and impressively wide DCI-P3 color performance of the Z9 show why only the OLED model is part of LG's Signature series.

Viewing Experience

While the SM9970 is an 8K TV, you won't be able to watch any real 8K content on it for a while. There are currently no consumer sources of 8K video, so unless you create your own or have access to a movie studio that is willing to provide you working files, your options for native 8K are limited.

Fortunately, LG provided us with some native 8K test footage, video recorded for the Spears & Munsil Ultra HD Blu-ray test disc. It's a montage of demonstration video like wildlife, cityscapes, and machinery, recorded in 8K. It looks incredible on the SM9970, with the contours of buildings and water looking remarkably sharp and crisp. The TV's strong contrast comes through in night shots, where neon signs stand out against dark buildings. Colors are vivid and accurate, looking natural without appearing oversaturated. It's really eye-catching, and it shows how good 8K content will look when you'll eventually be able to access it through streaming or download services.

The vast majority of video you can watch on the SM9970 is and will continue to be 1080p and 4K content upconverted by the TV itself. Fortunately, LG's Alpha 9 Gen 2 8K image processor is very good at that upconversion thanks to an AI Picture mode that uses content-based algorithms to determine what it's showing and how to best convert it to 8K. It can't be as accurate as native 8K video, but it's remarkably crisp compared with conventional upconversion.

The demo video on the Spears & Munsil Ultra HD Blu-ray test disc is identical to the 8K test footage I viewed, just encoded at 4K resolution. Even with a quarter as many pixels to work with, the video looks remarkably sharp, and viewing it from just four feet away betrays no pixels or noticeable upconversion fuzz. Individual blades of grass can be clearly seen, and colors look just as vibrant. You can see a bit of pixel-level blurriness if you get very close to the TV and study a small patch of the screen, but it looks excellent when viewed from a comfortable position.

LG SM9970

BBC's Planet Earth II also looks excellent upconverted from 4K. The individual wrinkles in elephant hide and hairs in tiger fur can be clearly seen on the SM9970, and the greens of grass look saturated and natural. Shadow details like the dark hide of black buffalo can be made out, showing off the TV's excellent contrast. Fine details occasionally look a little soft from four feet away, but considering the 65-inch TV takes up the entirety of your vision at that distance, it isn't particularly negative. At six to eight feet away, the upconverted video looks fantastic.

Input Lag

Pushing four times the number of pixels as 4K can wreak havoc on input lag, the amount of time between when a TV receives a signal and the screen updates. For the SM9970 in Cinema mode, that input lag is an incredibly high 180 milliseconds, which will make playing video games uncomfortable. The Game mode cuts that down to a more manageable 43.6ms by disabling most image processing features, but that's still over twice that of the 20ms or lower input lag we want to see for a TV to be considered one of the best for gaming. The Z9, in contrast, has an input lag of just 17.7ms in Game mode.

8K TV in a 4K World

The LG 75SM9970 is an impressive LCD TV and one of the first 8K models you can buy. It has very strong contrast performance for an LCD, wide colors, and a strong upconversion system that will make your 4K video look nice and crisp until 8K content becomes available. It doesn't have the panache of the LG Signature Series OLED88Z9, which boasts some of the most impressive color range and accuracy we've seen, OLED contrast, and a stunning design, but it also costs a sixth as much at $5,000. We can't really recommend anyone buy an 8K TV yet, however, because of its early stages and almost complete lack of content.

This doesn't mean the 75SM9970 is bad; it's an excellent TV with a bright, colorful picture and the highest resolution you can get on a big screen. It's just very expensive compared with excellent 4K TVs like the LG OLEDC9P and Sony Master Series A9G (both OLEDs), and the Samsung Q90R. If you don't mind spending the extra couple thousand dollars on 8K, the SM9970 is a fine choice. If you simply want a great, eye-catching TV and don't want to move up to 8K until there's more content to watch, consider the aforementioned models and wait a bit longer before making the resolution jump.

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