LG's OLED Flex TV takes you from gaming nirvana to Smart TV with the press of a button

It's a fact gamers have known for years: if you want a truly immersive experience, the TV you choose really matters.

That's why curved monitors have surged in popularity among the gaming community in recent years – they let you get up close to the action and become totally absorbed in whatever fantasy world, conflict zone or sports field is filling your screen.

The total immersion a curved screen provides, as well as its wider field of view and sharper, deeper, more contrasted picture, can give you a significant playing advantage that many gamers now will simply not go without.

But when the game console is finally switched off and it's time to watch regular TV, many of the advantages of an arced screen are nullified. The curvature can become an annoyance – especially if you're watching it at an angle, with the picture warping and light reflecting off the screen in unpredictable ways.

It's this toss-up between the benefits of a total immersion curved set-up and a flat-screen that appliance manufacturer LG has worked to address with its latest release, the OLED Flex TV.

The sleek new 42-inch OLED Flex does exactly what it says on the tin – it quite literally flexes with you, giving you all the functionality of both a gaming and a top-of-the-range flat TV.

"You can go from a regular TV to total immersion with one click of the remote," Dylan Cruickshank, LG Category Marketing Manager, tells me. "There are flat OLED TVs, and there are curved gaming monitors – we make both. But this offers customers one screen that can do it all."

The arc of the screen is controlled with the press of a single button on the remote, and the monitor starts soundlessly bending in. There are presets which can be set up to 100 percent curvature (900R), there are 20 incremental settings, and you can change these to suit your viewing and gaming needs.

"You can watch your favourite streaming services with a traditional flat screen, and then when you're gaming and you want the extra immersion, you can just change it on the spot. It gives you the flexibility," Cruickshank says.

There's another trick up the OLED Flex’s sleeve when it comes to gaming performance, too. It features the Game Optimiser feature, which allows you to set different presets for specific games.

"If you switch between playing a racing simulator and a role-playing game, you can have different visual settings for them," explains Cruickshank. "For example, you can independently set the black and white stabiliser to get retain more detail in extremely dark or bright images, which can give you quite an advantage."

Plus, if you're doing most of your gaming at night, you can select the Dark Room Mode, which tones down the brightness of the HDR effect to reduce the fatigue on your eyes.

It's not just about the different gaming features the OLED Flex provides, though. This TV is the epitome of luxury in its own right, with all the top-of-the-range specs you've come to expect from a premium LG product.

The model's 4K Ultra HD display boasts LG's OLED evo with self-lit pixels, meaning each pixel generates its own light, delivering brilliant contrast and colour at a rapid 0.1ms response time.

The OLED Flex also supports fast-moving content at a high resolution, delivering seamless synchronised graphics and audio without the lag, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in the chaos of the battlefield without distraction.

It also has a Super Anti Reflection feature helping reduce bothersome reflections and glare, for an enhanced and more comfortable viewing experience.

"It's one of those TVs where customers might see the demo in-store, and some of them will say, 'It always looks good when it's playing the demo'. But in fact, the picture always looks amazing – it's just that good," Cruickshank says.

With 40-watt front-facing speakers, the OLED Flex possesses double the audio power of the equivalent size in the popular C3 series, and Dolby Atmos adds another immersive element to your gaming experience – making it feel like the sounds of ancient warfare or stadium crowd noise are all around you.

You can also maximise the impact of the action on-screen by syncing the sound with the TV's Fusion Lighting capability, a series of RGB lights integrated into the height-adjustable stand that can be set to match the action on-screen or respond based on sound.

While a high-end product, the OLED Flex still does the basics well. It houses all the features you’d expect from a Smart TV – HDMI, USB and antenna ports are sleekly hidden within the stand, Wi-Fi connectivity allows you to access the internet, and you can watch all your favourite streaming apps as normal.

But it does so much more too. The ability to flex the screen whenever you want underlines LG's commitment to delivering the ultimate gaming performance while giving you the flexibility to choose the settings that work for you.

"Our OLED TVs were brought to market as one of the first with Nvidia G-SYNC certification. What that did was match the refresh rate of the TV to how many frames are being drawn, so there's less screen tearing when you're playing games," says Cruickshank.

"The OLED Flex continues on that legacy, because people are buying our OLED TVs for gaming, but we're continuing to innovate in that segment – showing our technology leadership."

Article created in partnership with LG.