LG's Big CES 2025 Win: What the Gaming Monitor and Smart TV Awards Mean

LG Electronics has picked up more than 20 CES 2025 Innovation Awards, including three major "Best of Innovation" honors. The awards span TVs, gaming monitors, and smart home technology. The company also announced something noteworthy: the world's first Full HD gaming monitor with a native 1000Hz refresh rate, called the UltraGear 25G590B.

This level of recognition across multiple product categories signals that LG is pushing hard in several directions at once. But what does it actually mean for consumers and the tech industry.

OLED TVs Keep Winning

LG's OLED TV lineup alone grabbed six Innovation Awards, with one of the three "Best of Innovation" honors going to their OLED displays. This is the third year running that LG OLED TVs have earned top recognition at CES—a streak that traces back to 2013, when the technology first started earning annual awards.

OLED (organic light-emitting diode) is a display technology where each pixel produces its own light, which gives you perfect blacks and stunning contrast. LG has been one of the main manufacturers pushing it into mainstream living rooms for over a decade.

The 1000Hz Gaming Monitor: What It Means

The new UltraGear 25G590B monitor runs at Full HD resolution—that's 1,920 x 1,080 pixels—but hits a 1000Hz refresh rate. To understand why this matters, think of refresh rate like how many times per second the screen redraws the image. Most standard monitors refresh 60 times per second. Gaming monitors jump that to 120Hz, 144Hz, or even 360Hz or 480Hz for competitive play.

Getting to 1000Hz is a major engineering feat. It requires reworking the circuitry behind the pixels, making them respond faster, and redesigning how data moves through the display. Historically, each time monitors hit a new speed milestone—144Hz, 240Hz, 360Hz—they typically debut at Full HD before spreading to higher resolutions like 1440p or 4K as manufacturing gets cheaper and faster. LG's 25G590B follows this same pattern.

The gaming monitor also earned three CES awards, including Best of Innovation in the Gaming & eSports category.

Smart Home and Security Get Recognition Too

LG's webOS smart TV platform won a CES Innovation Award in the Cybersecurity category. This reflects a broader industry shift: connected TVs are no longer just entertainment boxes—they're becoming home hubs that stay plugged into the internet and handle user data. Security has moved from an afterthought to something that matters for both protecting consumers and meeting regulations in countries with strict data privacy rules.

LG also announced ThinQ ON, an AI-powered home hub that can control other smart devices. It's LG's answer to Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's HomeKit—ecosystems that already dominate the smart home space.

Why All These Awards Matter

What's worth noting here is the spread. Most companies excel in one area—Sony makes great displays, Samsung covers multiple categories. LG is winning recognition simultaneously across OLED TVs, gaming monitors, smart home platforms, and security. That suggests serious engineering investment across different product lines and different teams.

For OLED specifically, LG Display makes the actual panels and sells them to other manufacturers, while LG Electronics builds the finished TVs and displays. That vertical integration—controlling both the component and the finished product—gives LG an advantage in getting new display technology to market faster than competitors.

On the gaming front, the CES awards program evaluates products on engineering quality, design, and market potential. The 1000Hz monitor creates a new ultra-premium tier that will appeal to professional esports players, where even tiny reductions in input lag—the delay between your controller and what you see—can matter. That said, there's real debate in the gaming community about whether humans can actually perceive or benefit from refresh rates beyond 360Hz. The practical answer depends on the individual player and the game.

The Bigger Picture

These awards are good timing for LG heading into CES 2025, where the company will likely show how its award-winning technologies work together and announce additional products in gaming and smart home. But awards and real market success are different things. Whether consumers actually buy these monitors and smart platforms depends on price, how they're distributed, and how easy they are to integrate into people's homes—factors that typically take 12 to 18 months to play out after the technology launches.

The cybersecurity award for webOS is a signal that connected device security has become competitive. As smart TVs become more central to home networks, how well they protect user data is becoming part of the buying decision. That's a shift from even five years ago, when most people didn't think much about TV security at all.

What all this suggests is that LG is betting on a future where your TV, your gaming monitor, and your smart home system are all integrated and talking to each other. Whether that vision resonates with consumers will depend on execution, pricing, and how seamlessly the pieces actually work together in real homes.