A Week With: LG 84" Ultra HD TV

If TVs were people I'd marry it

Price: £17,000
Ultra HD 4K resolution (3840 x 2160p)
Cinema style 3D
LED screen
2.2 speakers with two subwoofers

What is it?

This new offering from LG is an almost indescribably beautiful TV, with pictures so clear and huge they make you feel a bit wobbly. With its 7ft width making it a tight squeeze for many people's living rooms, not to mention their wallets (it costs a whopping £17,000), this object of desire isn't going to be a mass-market product. Think of it more like a piece of art, lovely high-definition art, that shows you how far this kind of technology has advanced.

Does it work?

Boy does it work... If TVs were people I'd marry this chiselled hunk. The design is elegant, with a discreet chrome stand and cinema screen design, where the picture comes really close to the edge of the skinny little chrome border. The picture quality is amazing. LG tells me it has a gizmo called an Upscaler, that makes every image look clearer and sharper, so even if you're just watching iPlayer, it will look like it's in HD. Likewise, if you pop in a Blu-ray DVD you get a better-than-Blu-ray image.

The pictures I saw were optimised for this TV – short films of things like Paris streets at night and the Grand Canyon – and they were so clear and detailed that even one small corner of the screen was packed with interest. You could see the leaves blowing on the trees, and the canyon felt so real you could fall in. I couldn't resist touching my face to the screen and even then I couldn't see the pixels.

The set has plenty of useful functions. You can opt in and out of watching it in 3D. Two people can even watch something together with one of them seeing it in 3D and the other in 2D with LG's 3D glasses. It also has a dual-screen function where you could play a game together but each of you would see a different image, from your own character's viewpoint. It has a voice control option and, of course, it's a smart TV too.

Is it worth the money?

At £17,000 it's out of reach for everyone but the super-rich, but it's a snip compared to Sony's 84-inch, £24,000 LED TV. For those of us with more modest budgets, LG is planning to release some smaller-screen versions later this year at a more pocket-friendly price.