I recently bought a LG OLED42C2 TV. The display is fantastic. You get 4K, 120Hz and perfect contrast as pixels can be illuminated individually. Some people even use it as an external monitor. With 42” screen size it doesn’t stand out in the living room which is good. It’s probably the best display I’ve ever owned. The user experience, however, is really bad.

The TV is shipped with the so called Magic Remote. It can be used as a pointer to interact with LG’s webOS. There are direct access buttons for four streaming services and two voice assistants. I don’t use any of them and they are ‘hard coded’ on the remote wasting space. You cannot reprogram them. I often use YouTube, but there is no direct access button for that popular service, probably because Alphabet didn’t pay LG for it.

Another usability hell is the missing play/pause button. When you want to pause a video you press the wheel button to open the video control menu and then you need to press it again to pause the video. The wheel button is also used to scroll through the menu. Therefore you have to be careful that you don’t accidentally select another video control option when you want to pause a video.

I’m currently using a Chromecast and try to avoid the LG Magic Remote and webOS 22 as much as possible. It’s also very interesting that the TV never fully turns off, instead is keeping connected to my WiFi and makes regular requests to LG servers.

LG Magic Remote