When comparing LG E7P OLED 55" (OLED55E7P) vs VIZIO M-Series 50" (M50-E1), the Slant community recommends VIZIO M-Series 50" (M50-E1) for most people. In the question“What are the best TVs?” VIZIO M-Series 50" (M50-E1) is ranked 1st while LG E7P OLED 55" (OLED55E7P) is ranked 171st. The most important reason people chose VIZIO M-Series 50" (M50-E1) is:
The M-Series is the best pick for HDR content in this price bracket. Compared to its direct competitors, it offers the best HDR experience because it has all the essentials for true HDR playback that its competitors lack: local dimming, fairly high peak brightness level, and a wide color gamut. Its deep black levels are further improved with local dimming, which can make parts of the screen darker when the image calls for it. This results in a slight increase in overall picture quality - the black levels become deeper by a small margin, so highlights will stand out further. Colors look vibrant in both dark and bright scenes, and the panel can reproduce the wide range of colors required for true HDR playback. In addition, it can also get bright enough to light up these colors sufficiently for HDR details to stand out, thanks to the peak brightness level of ~400 nits.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Exceptional picture quality
The LG E7P has exceptional picture quality thanks to its OLED panel, which are unrivaled in picture quality — OLED panels are capable of reproducing absolute blacks and whites on a per-pixel basis, giving it infinite contrast ratio (which may sound hyperbolic but is absolutely true).
Pro Great color reproduction
The color gamut of a TV refers to the range of colors the display can reproduce — the wider the color gamut, the more colors it can display, and the better the overall picture quality will be. This is extremely important for HDR content because it requires a much wider color gamut than SDR content. The LG E7P has a wide color gamut and have no issues with accurately reproducing the colors necessary for true HDR.
Pro Comes with an integrated soundbar
The LG E7 has an built-in soundbar that performs surprisingly well. The frequency response is noticeably better than all other TVs out there, with good extension into the lower-ends of the frequency range, which means it can produce deep bass. The distortion levels are also low and not noticeable unless the volume is set to near-maximum. While an external audio set-up will definitely be better, this soundbar will suffice for most users that doesn't wish to spend additional money on an audio set-up.
Pro Great performance for sports & gaming
The LG E7P's versatility is top-notch. The motion blur (sub-1ms) makes it an excellent choice for sports & gaming, and the low input lag (~21ms) contributes to this especially for gaming where input lag matters.
Pro Interface is intuitive and user-friendly
The LG E7P runs on the webOS smart platform, renown for its intuitive and fully customizable UI built around a Launch Bar that provides quick and easy access to the TV's apps, settings, and inputs. This can be customized and re-organized to the user's liking.
Pro Wide viewing angle
The picture quality of the LG E7P does not suffer from much deterioration when viewed from other angles. While the colors might look off as brightness decreases with the viewing angle, the black levels and uniformity remain the same throughout, thus the panel retains most of its usual picture quality. This TV is a great choice if you require wider than usual viewing angles that LED panels can't provide.
Pro Remote is well-designed
The LG E7P's remote works similar to LG's Magic Remote (included in other LG TVs, e.g. the B7A). It is noticeably bigger than most remotes, but also comes with better controls and the on-screen cursor can follow the remote's movement similar to a Nintendo Wii remote, making it easy to navigate the UI and select menu items. It also has a built-in microphone for the voice command feature, which also supports content searching with voice input.
Pro Smart platform has great ecosystem of apps
The LG E7P runs on the webOS smart platform. It has a great ecosystem of apps, ranging from media streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, etc.) to third-party apps. Support for these apps are also first-class with up-to-date features and good performance; for instance, the YouTube app supports 360-degree video playback.
Pro Supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision
There are two different formats for HDR — HDR10 and Dolby Vision. Some TVs support only HDR10 and can't play Dolby Vision content. The LG E7P supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision, giving it the ability to play any HDR content in 2017.
Pro Dark scenes are perfectly reproduced
The LG E7P can handle dark scenes very well thanks to its OLED panel, which gives it infinite contrast ratios. This gives it the ability to reproduce dark scenes perfectly.
Pro Great at handling reflections
The LG E7P's panel has a glossy finish with anti-reflective coating, giving it the ability to fight light in bright environments very well. As a result of this, the picture quality remains the same even in bright rooms.
Pro Great at handling low-res content
The LG E7P is great at upscaling lower-res content such as DVDs — all details are preserved, but there are some visible haloing especially around edges.
Pro Excellent for dark rooms
The LG E7P performs exceptionally well in dark environments. Its ability to produce absolute and perfect blacks means the reproduction of dark highlights and scenes in movies will look great — this is further improved when there's no light around the TV as it allows the blacks to stand out more. This makes it great for watching all sorts of movies in a cinema-like setting, particularly movies with many black highlights/scenes where this is immediately noticeable even to undiscerning viewers (e.g. Interstellar).
Pro Extremely low motion blur
Because the LG E7P has an OLED panel, it has near-perfect pixel response time; the motion blur is virtually non-existent at sub-1ms, which means this TV will have no issues with displaying extremely fast-moving objects — they will look smooth without any blur or lag.
Pro Perfect TV for movies and HDR content
The LG E7P is a 4K OLED TV with perfectly uniform blacks and infinite contrast ratio, achieved by its ability to manipulate pixels individually. This, along with its color uniformity and wide color gamut, gives it exceptional picture quality and makes it the perfect choice for movies. It also has no issues with brightness levels as the panel can reach up to ~700 nits of brightness when playing HDR content, and it handles reflections very well.
Pro Great for HDR content
The M-Series is the best pick for HDR content in this price bracket. Compared to its direct competitors, it offers the best HDR experience because it has all the essentials for true HDR playback that its competitors lack: local dimming, fairly high peak brightness level, and a wide color gamut.
Its deep black levels are further improved with local dimming, which can make parts of the screen darker when the image calls for it. This results in a slight increase in overall picture quality - the black levels become deeper by a small margin, so highlights will stand out further.
Colors look vibrant in both dark and bright scenes, and the panel can reproduce the wide range of colors required for true HDR playback. In addition, it can also get bright enough to light up these colors sufficiently for HDR details to stand out, thanks to the peak brightness level of ~400 nits.
Pro Supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision
The M-Series can play all HDR content because it supports both HDR10 & Dolby Vision formats.
Pro Great picture quality
The M-Series looks great with vivid colors.
Dark scenes look amazing with great details, thanks to the panel’s contrast ratio of roughly 5500:1, which means it’s capable of producing blacks that are 5500 times darker than the brightest white pixel the screen can produce. This can be pushed slightly further to about 5800 with local dimming, which results in a slight increase in overall picture quality.
The colors are quite lifelike and accurate even without any calibration. They will look vibrant even in bright scenes because of the panel's high peak brightness levels of ~300 nits for SDR & ~400 nits for HDR.
Even in a decently-lit environment, the picture quality of the M-Series won't deteriorate by much. The panel is good at handling reflections and it can get adequately bright to fight off glare.
Pro Decent at handling glare
The M-Series is decent in bright environments.
The colors won't look dull thanks to the panel's high peak brightness levels and good handling of reflections. It's bright enough to fight off glare with peak brightness levels of ~300 nits for SDR & ~400 nits for HDR, and the intensity of reflections are reduced by panel's semi-gloss finish.
Pro Comes with Chromecast built-in
You can stream content to the M-Series from smart devices or apps that support streaming media to Chromecast.
Pro Has a remote app for iOS & Android
The M-Series runs on VIZIO's SmartCast OS which has a brilliant, well-integrated phone and tablet app for iOS & Android. It can turn your smart device into a fully-functional remote, which makes it easy and convenient for you to control the TV without the physical remote. It's also particularly handy for text input, especially when it comes to searching for content from streaming services.
Pro Interface is ads-free
The M-Series has no ads on its interface.
Cons
Con Suffers from image retention issues
The main drawback of OLED panels are image retention issues with static images — pixels on the panel gets burned in when the picture doesn't change for extended periods of time. Noteworthily, the static image doesn't have to be whole like a full wallpaper on the TV; it can happen with content that has a static image anywhere on the screen (e.g. the logo of some TV channels).
As the LG E7P has an OLED panel, it, unfortunately, suffers from this problem. There might be some retainment of artifacts for ~10 minutes when this happens, and it usually goes away after watching other content without static images. It's worth noting that the E7P handles this better than most OLED panels where artifacts can take longer to go away. There are some cases where normal content won't cut it, which usually happens when the static image has been there for more than some hours.
This can be remedied with the LG E7P's “Pixel Refresher” feature — it recalibrates the screen, which should get rid of any remaining artifacts. Note that this procedure takes around an hour, and the TV has to be turned off the entire time for it to work properly.
Con Interface has ads
The user interface of modern smart TVs can include some advertisements similar to those on the internet or in a mobile app. The LG E7P's interface includes ads that can’t be removed — there is no option to disable or opt-out from it. Compared to other smart TVs (e.g. Samsung's), ads on this TV can be really annoying because they're almost everywhere: video ads in LG's Content Store, apps menu, and even voice search results.
Con Local dimming could be better
Unless you're in a really dark room and the brightness is set to really high, the effects of local dimming on the M-Series isn't very noticeable. You'll be able to see some differences in dark scenes, but it's not enough to improve the picture quality by much. The contrast ratio with local dimming enabled increases from roughly 5500:1 to 5800:1, a difference that has little impact on the overall experience.
Con Interface can be sluggish and slow
The interface of VIZIO's SmartCast OS can sometimes be sluggish. Some users have reported experiencing choppy animations, frame drops when browsing through the menu, and slow response to input/selection.
Con Mediocre sound quality
The M-Series sounds too bassy and some details will be drowned out because of that. There is also noticeable distortion at high volumes.
Con Not suitable for group watching
The M-Series has a narrow viewing angle that makes it unsuitable for group watching.
Its picture quality gets worse when viewed from off-center angles. At just ≥20° off from the center, the colors start looking dull and blacks turns into grey.
Con Lacks TV tuner
The M-Series, along with several of VIZIO's latest TV lineups, does not have a TV tuner built-in. If you plan to watch local over-the-air broadcasts, you will need to purchase a TV tuner separately.
Con Not the best value choice for gaming
The M-Series is not the best choice for gaming in this price bracket due to its relatively high input lag of ~40ms. Gaming TVs requires low input lag so the player won't feel out of sync, which is why most of the TVs suitable for gaming have a low input lag of ≤20ms.
This may be negligible to some, but input lag can make a world of difference to demanding or competitive gamers.
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