For $30K, you can get yourself a pretty nice vehicle. So, if you’re going to shell out that same amount for an HDTV, you should expect nothing short of perfection—meaning unrivaled picture quality, accurate colors, wide-angle viewing, the deepest blacks, and inimitable uniformity and contrast ratios.

With the 88-inch LG Signature Z9 8K OLED TV, you can be rest assured that you will achieve all that and more. But at that extravagant price point, that’s a hefty financial commitment that most regular folks just can’t swing.

As you would expect, this LG OLED beauty comes fully loaded with all of the cutting-edge features found on other highly praised OLED offerings from the Korean tech giant—including state-of-the-art processing power, the webOS smart platform, a handful of AI assistants, HDMI 2.1 connections, and Dolby Atmos. Also know that this latest version of HDMI supports higher frame rates up to 120Hz, dynamic metadata for HDR, and eARC.  

In addition to its gorgeous, bezel-less design, this OLED panel comes with plenty of meat on its bones. The Z9 utilizes a ten-bit display that boasts more than thirty-three million self-emissive pixels—that’s a whopping four times more than on your run-of-the-mill 4K HDTV. In order to accommodate this higher resolution, the Z9 taps into the power of an updated version of LG’s second-generation Alpha9 intelligent processor that can take advantage of deep learning algorithms.

When it comes to 4K HDR content, it’s easy to see that the LG Z9 excels in every way. And since this is an 8K set, you might be wondering if you can start enjoying awesome 8K content right away. The short answer is: Not so fast.

Unfortunately, as of today, there just isn’t that much 8K content to work with. Interestingly, there have been several movies filmed in 8K, such as “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” but this is far from becoming the standard in the film industry. Until there is more similar content, this $30K set will continue to operate more like a 4K HDTV—although you could take some comfort in knowing that you’re future-proofing your TV tech.

The one huge risk that you take on by purchasing the Z9 is that pesky issue of burn-in, which occurs whenever a persistent part of the image of a screen, such as a channel logo or a scoreboard from a sports game, remains as a ghostly background no matter what else is being shown on the screen. These static image elements have “worn out” certain areas of an OLED screen’s organic materials faster than the rest of the screen.

Since your bank account is already $30K lighter because of this massive purchase, being unhappy would surely be an understatement if you ever got stung by one of these permanent blemishes.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.