LG OLED48C5

Introduction

After spending the best part of a decade at 55-inches as their smallest OLED TV size option, LG’s TV division now finally serves both gamers and the spatially challenged with both 48- and 42-inch OLED models.

Both sizes have proved particularly popular in LG’s redoubtable mid-range C series, offering cutting edge gaming features that humble bigger and more ostensibly high-end TVs, and a smaller slice of that beloved LG OLED picture quality.

The latest 2025 iteration of LG’s winning small-screen C series formula, the OLED48C5, keeps much of the fine tradition going. At the same time, the quirks of its size are starting to feel just a little frustrating…

Price

Thankfully the time when LG’s smaller screened OLEDs used to cost as much as their bigger siblings is behind us. At the time of writing you can pick up an OLED48C5 for £1399 – £300 less than the 55-inch model.

The financial benefits do still contract if you step down to the £1299 42-inch model. The OLED48C5 costs $1599.99 in the US and €1199.

LG offers a 48-inch model in its premium G5 OLED series for UK buyers, which differs from the OLED48C5 by carrying the latest Alpha 11 AI 4K Gen2 processor rather than the OLED48C5’s less powerful Alpha 9 Gen8 processor.

Sony’s 48-inch 48A90K, meanwhile, costs £1399 and has been around since 2022! Panasonic’s 48Z90B OLED costs £1499, and Philips’ mid-range 48OLED809 costs £1,099 and sports an Ambilight design. Though this one has been around since 2024.

Design

• Premium metallic frame
• Ultra slim rear at its outer edges
• Unusual dark marble rear panel effect

The OLED48C5 is a good looking little TV. Its frame boasts a crisp metallic finish that sets an instantly premium tone, and the way the screen is less than a handful of millimetres deep at its outer edges makes it look spectacularly futuristic.

Inevitably given the OLED48C5’s panel drivers, connections, speakers, processing and so on have to go somewhere, the ultra slim outer edges do give way to a much chunkier mid-section.

This can make the set look a touch clumsy if hung on a wall, but it maintains its sleek, futuristic feel from all but the most extreme viewing angles when sat on its metallic bass plate-style desktop stand.

Connectivity

• Four HDMI inputs
• eARC support
• Lots of streaming options

While some major brands still struggle to deliver a clean sweep of fully specified HDMI 2.1 ports even on their flagship TVs, LG has been doing it even on its mid-range models for years.

It’s no surprise to find all four of the OLED48C5’s HDMI inputs handling everything from 4K/144Hz frame rates to variable refresh rates and auto low latency mode switching.

Other physical connections comprise three USB v2.0 ports, two RF inputs (one for cable, one for antenna), a CI Slot, an Ethernet port, and an optical digital audio output.

Plus there’s an impressive roster of wireless connections including Bluetooth 5.3 support, Wi-Fi, Apple Airplay and Google Casting.

User Experience

• WebOS Smarts
• AI Concierge
• ‘Magic’ Remote control

After many years of being the slickest and most user friendly TV operating system, webOS is getting a bit complicated. Its full-screen home display is packed with content icons, and it’s not always as clear as it used to be where you need to go or what you need to do to find your desired content or adjustment.

Single buttons on LG’s latest so-called Magic Remote confusingly do multiple things depending on how often or long your press them, too.

Crucially, though, LG seems to be aware that the sheer amount of content now out there is becoming unmanageable by conventional OSD means. So there’s a substantial enhancement this year of the relationship between LG’s AI-based content finding assistants and its already well-established voice recognition system.

The latter lets you get to almost anything you want, be it a TV show, movie, content service or even TV adjustment, just by verbally telling the TV what you’re after, thereby taking the onscreen menus out of the equation.

Not everyone is instantly comfortable with talking to their TV, so LG has also introduced an AI Concierge feature accessible via a new dedicated button on the remote control that calls up a selection of navigation aids and suggestions – including tips on the sort of things you might say to your TV.

This comes on top of further expansion of its excellent AI Chatbot feature, which essentially integrates a customer services system into the TV capable of helping you troubleshoot issues and figure out how to improve the TV’s performance.

The OLED48C5’s Magic Remote lets you pick onscreen options by literally pointing the remote at them (though this always feels a bit fiddly to me); or by using a vertically scrolling wheel knob to spin quickly up and down the TV’s set up menu options.

Features

• Native 4K resolution
• Alpha 9 Gen 8 processing
• Dolby Vision support, including for gaming

Despite its small screen size by today’s TV standards, the OLED48C5 retains a native 4K pixel count. It also delivers the classic OLED advantage of each pixel generating its own light, rather than external backlights that share pixels as happens with LCD TVs.

Measurements taken using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and a Klein K-10A colorimeter show the OLED48C5 capable of hitting light peaks of around 770 nits in Filmmaker Mode, which drops a few nits, unexpectedly, in the Standard preset.

These are nice enough figures for a screen also capable of delivering outstanding black levels, but it’s worth pointing out that LG’s bigger C5 models, which use more premium/modern panels, can deliver brightness figures of 1300 nits and more – a step up in brightness of around 40%.

It’s also possible to call up a dedicated gaming onscreen menu system when a game source is detected, where you can see key information on the incoming game signal and activate a few gaming aids. These include a target reticule over the centre of the screen, and the option to raise the brightness of dark image areas (without affecting anything else) to make it easier to spot lurking enemies.

The OLED48C5 joins every other LG TV in supporting the HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision HDR formats, but not HDR10+. There’s also support for the gaming-related HGiG system, where the TV can turn off its own tone mapping in favour of just taking in HDR images pre-calibrated at the PC or console end of the delivery chain.

The OLED48C5’s Alpha 9 Gen 8 processor isn’t only focused on picture quality. If you choose the TV’s AI Sound option, its 2.2-channel 40W speaker arrangement can deliver a virtual 11.1.2-channel upmix even from a simple stereo source.

Plus there’s a Clear Voice Pro facility for isolating and enhancing dialogue, and LG’s WOW Orchestra feature that lets the TV’s speakers join forces with those in an LG soundbar.

Gaming

• Frame rate support up to 144Hz
• VRR support including AMD Freesync and NVIDIA G-Sync
• Dedicated Game menu

Small OLED screens like the 48C5 appeal to gamers, so it’s great to find this one supporting refresh rates up to 144Hz as well as AMD FreeSync Premium/NVIDIA G-Sync formats.

The screen takes just 12.8ms to render images when set to its game mode, while its excellent contrast and light control helps pictures look crisp and detailed. Colours, meanwhile, are rich and vibrant but also subtle enough to do full justice to today’s best 4K HDR graphics engines.

Motion looks outstanding even at 60Hz, becoming blissfully good at 120Hz and beyond, while OLED’s wide viewing angles make social gaming more fun than it is on most TVs that use LCD rather than OLED technology.

The gaming aids provided in the OLED48C5’s special gaming menu are all genuinely helpful, and finally the 48-inch screen size feels pretty much perfect for gaming, delivering enough size to feel really immersive from a relatively close gaming distance while also being small enough to deliver exceptionally small pixel pitch and allow competitive gamers to take in the whole image at once.

Picture Quality

• Excellent black levels and contrast
• Rich in detail and sharpness
• Falls short of bigger C5 models

After years of well-deserved critical and commercial success for its OLED screens, you won’t be surprised to hear that LG’s OLED48C5 is another mostly excellent TV. At the same time, though, it doesn’t push as far forward as other LG OLEDs – even other models in the C5 series.

The good news – and there really is lots of it – kicks off with another lovely example of the pixel level light control only OLED can currently achieve. In 4K starscapes every last star twinkles clearly, precisely and even with beautifully handled slight variances in intensity.

While not always as obvious with other content, this extreme level of light control actually informs every single frame of every source, creating a lovely sense of detail and depth in 4K images that’s enhanced by the extreme pixel density associated with fitting a 3840 x 2160 pixel count into a 48-inch screen.

Black levels are typically delivered with beautifully inky depths, too – and as is usually the case, these lovely black tones provide a great foundation to a rich, vibrant colour palette. The OLED48C5 is also able to find plenty of subtlety and nuance within even the most vibrant areas, though, as well as managing to turn its hand to milder, more natural video tones with impressive authority.

While the OLED48C5’s 144Hz support is a big attraction, it can also drop all the way back to 24Hz with aplomb. Its Cinematic Movement motion processing option is one of the best around for taking the edge off OLED panel judder without making images look unnatural or plagued by unwanted processing side effects.

The OLED48C5 supports massive viewing angles without contrast taking a hit, too, and finally in the positive column, its pictures appear slightly brighter than those of its predecessor.

As I mentioned earlier, the OLED48C5 isn’t as bright as the step up 55-inch and bigger screens in the new C5 series. Nor does it increase its brightness as much over its predecessor as the bigger C5 models do. This inevitably impacts the potency of the OLED48C5’s pictures versus the larger C5 screens, as well as making the 48C5’s sense of a year-on-year step up less compelling.

The reduced brightness also means that the OLED48C5 doesn’t produce as much colour volume as larger C5s do – or most other brands of 2025 mid-range or higher OLED TVs, come to that.

It actually does well in pure colour gamut coverage terms according to my Calman Ultimate, Portrait Displays G1, Klein K10-A tests, covering 98.78% of the DCI-P3 spectrum and just over 77% of the much wider Rec 2020 spectrum currently used mostly as a container format for DCI-P3 masters.

But it can’t infuse that colour range with the intensity that brighter screens can. Including, to reiterate this point, its own £300 dearer 55-inch C5 sibling.

The OLED48C5’s relatively limited brightness appears to contribute to a couple of glitches not seen with the bigger C5s, too.

First, dark shots can sometimes take on a faintly green undertone – especially, tellingly, when using the supposedly most accurate but also least bright Filmmaker Mode preset. The green tone in dark picture areas can be accompanied in places by slightly exaggerated video noise.

The green tone dark scene issue can also crop up in the punchier Standard mode, but less often and more faintly. Though the Standard mode can also occasionally show instability in the usually excellent black level performance when other presets don’t.

The relative darkness of the Filmmaker Mode means it sometimes leaves dark colours looking less refined and nuanced than they tend to on other C5 sizes/brighter OLEDs. Happily this issue doesn’t crop up at all with the OLED48C5s brighter presets – but then the Filmmaker Mode is the one movie enthusiasts will use if they want to enjoy the most measurably accurate colour performance from the set.

The sort of issues I’ve just described don’t affect the picture constantly by any means, but they join the reduced brightness in making the 55C5 a significantly better bet unless you really can’t dope with its extra seven inches of screen.

Upscaling

• Excellent with HD and SD content

Despite not carrying LG’s most powerful OLED picture processor, the OLED48C5 still does an excellent job of upconverting HD and even SD sources to the screen’s native 4K resolution.

The upscaler is intelligent enough to spot the difference between real picture information and noise in a source, only enhancing the former while removing the latter. It adds the necessary millions of extra pixels to the picture intelligently enough, to maintain good colour accuracy and add palpable ‘real’ detail and sharpness.

Nor is there any sense of lag when showing motion in upscaled pictures, and common upscaling issues such as exaggerated grain, over-thick lines or light ‘ghosts’ around stand out edges are all expertly suppressed.

Sound Quality

• Mostly helpful AI Sound mode
• Can create a large sound stage
• Disappointing default Dolby Atmos playback

In keeping with most if not all other LG OLED TVs in recent years, the OLED48C5 sounds much better if you switch it into its AI Sound Pro mode rather than sticking with its default Dolby Atmos/standard sound quality modes.

Without LG’s AI processing to help out, even – actually, especially – Dolby Atmos soundtracks struggle to escape from the TV’s bodywork with either the power or room-filling sense of projection that I’d like to hear from what is, after all, still a fairly premium TV by the standards of the TV world at large.

The 48C5’s bass feels strained under even fairly light pressure in the default Dolby Atmos mode, too.

Calling in the AI Sound Pro mode makes a huge difference. The sound is cast much more aggressively away from the TV’s physical confines to create more cinematic staging.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I could make out all of the individual 11.1.2 channels of sound the AI Sound Pro system claims to deliver, but you can certainly appreciate how well the TV places specific sound effects and transitions within the larger AI Sound Pro sound stage. Including lifting dialogue vertically a little, so that it usually sounds quite accurately attached to onscreen mouth movements.

The AI Sound Mode also gets more potent bass out of the included .1-channel bass speaker, strangely, increasing the sense of dynamic range while simultaneously somehow sounding less like bass is likely to collapse into distortion than it does in the quieter Dolby Atmos mix.

The AI Sound Mode’s clever processing can’t fully disguise the fact that its workings are to some extent hiding power and dynamic range limitations in the TV’s physical audio hardware. But the disguise is typically quite convincing.

Should you buy it?

FAQs