If you’re in the market for a new TV, you might find yourself with a decision between these two big brands. We’ve put together some averages from previous tests along with reliability ratings to help inform your decision. You can see all the details here:
Of course, we also have our full TV review that compares many popular models on the market. This one is member content and you can find it here:
If you have any questions or experiences you’d like to share, leave a comment below!
I have an LG OLED that’s a couple of years old. The picture is excellent, and everything works, but some aspects of the way the “magic remote” works with the smart TV is annoying. E.g. The cursor defaults to the centre of the screen when it first comes on, including after it has just timed itself out. You can’t turn it off when it’s on either, you have to wait. If you’re watching TV, looking at the program “info” seems to randomly change the channel to the base channel in the list. The back button doesn’t always switch to the last channel you looked at.
I have a Fetch Mighty (4K) set top box, which is a little older than the TV. Some functions of the set-top box remote interface are better than the OLED. It’s certainly more predictable.
On the upside, there are some streaming apps on the LG that are not available on the Fetch STB,
No idea how the LG compares to a Samsung.
My daughter uses a TV only Kogan 4K with a Fetch mini Box (SD). It has a Samsung panel, and the picture is frankly about as good as my LG, for around 20% of the cost. She only uses the Kogan as a Fetch monitor. She has heard that more recent Kogans are not as good, so YMMV. Her picture quality is certainly good enough, and that’s upscaling from SD on the STB. The TV is ~5 or 6 years old.
The Magic remote for LG can have its quirks, but the scroll wheel is brilliant for doing things like looking at Web pages.
And my cat likes chasing the cursor on the screen. When he tires of Youtube CatTV.
That’s where I went wrong; I didn’t get a cat!
I have a recent (2022) LG. Slight irritation is that the free-to-air EPG is buried a click/scroll/click away, and that the menu it is on is context sensitive and not available when streaming services “home” is on screen. I can customise just about every other menu but this one.
[Edit] I was wr… wro… mistaken. After thinking about this further, and taking another look at the remote, I found a button that loads the EPG. 
I have had 2 LG “smart” TVs: 70LB6560 and 70UJ657T (both 70 inch)
The 70LB6560 had a number of problems over a 3-year period, related to display faults, and other problems related to insufficient processing power, insufficient flash memory, insufficient RAM, and ineffective RAM management.
The 70LB6560 ended up being replaced by LG, at LG’s suggestion, by 70UJ657T. I chose a model of the same resolution and size, but which didn’t have the 3D mode of the 70LB6560.
Sadly, this 70UJ657T TV also suffers from the same insufficient processing power, insufficient flash memory, insufficient RAM, and ineffective RAM management defects as the 70LB6560 TV, although thankfully, not quite as badly.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to upgrade the main processor, the flash memory, nor the RAM of these LG TVs.
How would you know that? Anyway, both LG and Samsung use Linux at the core as a base operating system that is responsible for virtual memory management.
The cache builds up, without being cleared, until there is no memory available for anything, and the TV freezes, and then restarts. Both of them have done that.
When I said “RAM management”, I was actually talking about the cache management aspect of RAM management.
That can never happen. If processor cache fills then address and data references go to the next level down. And entries in various levels of cache are continuously flushed of old entries and replaced by new ones.
Maybe going to actual RAM slows things down. But nowhere near as much as having to go to page files on disk, or virtual disk.
While the performance and usability of WebOS is germane, without ‘inside information’ the inner workings of WebOS are beyond a consumer issue.
@el_gallo_azul reports his experiences that LG ‘freeze and then restart’. The detail of why it happens is speculative although as a ‘computing device’ his general theory is plausible if not the specifics.
The Community is appreciative of posts about the user experience with the TV but those wishing to pursue the ‘hows and whys’ of the freezes and restarts in detail might best take it up on a technical forum or with LG themselves. OTOH opinions on how to mitigate the problem are welcome.
I have two LG TVs at home, one a big screen and another a midsize. Never had any ‘freezes due to cache or RAM management’.
Nonsense technical claims deserve to be called out, because the community are looking at this topic for guidance on what to buy.
And when I see such nonsense, I will comment.
As it appears to be relatively common to some LG TV models, LG provide a ‘fix’ for out of memory issues with its TV:
It might be worth trying this fix to see if it corrects the issue when it arises.
Oh boy. I will! Thanks. I’d love to get this TV working properly.
So it is impossible for others to have the problem?
Maybe not everybody may use technical terms accurately, does that mean they don’t have a real problem?
No not impossible. Just pointing out that cache management and RAM management are processor and firmware functions. If there were to be faults there then there would be many millions of TVs freezing up all over the world as most of them use the same or similar chips made by a small number of makers, mostly in Taiwan.
If I google the string “LG smart tv memory problem” I get 15 million hits, including many separate sites offering opinions or solutions to out of memory issues, plus the LG Canada site linked above, plus videos and a user support forum showing how to do a fix also purporting to be from LG.
I know that doesn’t say how many LG TVs around the world have the problem but it sure isn’t an isolated case or imagination.
So possibly this isn’t a nonsense technical claim at all.
Do yourself a favour. Do the same search with Samsung, or Sony, or Panasonic.
LG: 15 million hits
Samsung: 42 million hits
Sony: 76 hits
Panasonic: 96 hits.
What does this mean to you?
I asked you to do that change in your search string because I know how Google pagerank works.
The number of hits Google delivers is meaningless.
At face value it would seem that Samsung TVs are nearly three times worse than LG ones, and that Sony and Panasonic have almost no problems.
And that is not the case. So tighten up your searching to get meaningful results.
The last LG TV we had was a flat screen which could handle 720P, or 1080i. Not through broadcast TV because it was still analogue, and the flat screen was a CRT. It was great with the Nintendo and Sega Master System.
Subsequently our flat panel TV’s have been Toshiba, Sony and TCL products. I can relate to issues with Android and the Sony locking up. Usually no error code offered. The Toshiba (not so smart) rarely failed, and when it did it was on start up. The TCL which is Android based and takes longer than an aged Pentium to start Windows is more a glorified tablet. It’s been fool proof. An interesting comparison to make with the LG of the OP which has likely far superior picture quality. Assume similar for Samsung.
Leaves one asking if LG and Samsung can deliver in all other areas why their OS’s are not always premium trouble free performers?
