Hisense U7Q vs LG OLED B6

Since the algorithms responsible for blacks are performing quite well, we expected a similarly good outcome when it comes to brightness and overall HDR quality. Unfortunately, we have to disappoint you a bit here.

The U7Q is quite a bright television – under the best conditions, it can reach around 800 nits, which indeed impresses in some scenes, especially in scenes like those from the movie The Meg. Bright segments can shine, and the HDR effect is noticeable. The problem arises when very small, bright elements appear on a dark background – for example, in Sicario 2 or in the second scene from Life of Pi. At such moments, the dimming algorithms operate too aggressively. Yes, the blacks look great at that point, but the brightest spots can almost completely disappear, causing the HDR effect to vanish and details to be barely visible. That’s just the charm of this technology in this price segment.

As a consolation, it is worth mentioning that the U7Q is marketed as a QLED (in practice, a PFS layer is used, which operates very similarly), and it can indeed display a wide colour gamut – a DCI-P3 coverage of around 94% is a very good result for this class.

LG B6 is a moderately bright OLED. After calibration it reaches around 800 nits, roughly 200 nits more than last year's B5. That's down to LG Display's new budget OLED SE panel. In practice this simply provides a bit more headroom and makes HDR look fuller in many scenes than on last year's lower-end OLEDs. That doesn't mean the B6 has no limitations. In very bright shots, when a large part of the screen is brightly lit, brightness can fall below 400 nits. This behaviour is typical of OLED TVs (especially in this segment), and it's then you see the biggest difference compared with pricier models. All the same, we rate the B6's results as really solid. It's still not a TV built to break brightness records, but the HDR effect is strong enough that films really feel like a step up from ordinary SDR picture.

Colour gamut

Using the OLED SE panel has had some impact on wide colour-gamut coverage. Compared with last year's model the figures have dropped by a few percentage points. DCI-P3 reaches about 96%, and BT.2020 around 71%. That doesn't mean the colours on the LG B6 are weak. In most films and TV series they look vivid, well saturated and simply pleasing to the eye. You only notice the difference in very bright, highly colourful scenes. Then colours lose some intensity compared with QD-OLED panels. This is due to the WOLED panel structure. In addition to the red, green and blue subpixels it also uses a white subpixel that helps boost brightness. This comes at a cost: at very high luminance some of the colour is effectively 'diluted' by the white light, so saturation of some hues can be slightly lower. Day-to-day it's not a big problem, but you can see it in the most demanding scenes.

We tested the U7Q in the best possible picture mode, which is Filmmaker Mode. This mode is supposed to provide the most "cinematic" experience that aligns with the creators' intentions – straight out of the box. Unfortunately… even this professionally sounding name doesn’t guarantee a perfect image.

In our unit, the problem lay in the poorly set white balance. In both HD and 4K content, the image had too much blue and red, resulting in a slightly pinkish hue on the screen. It didn’t look terrible, but it was noticeable – especially in bright scenes and on white backgrounds. That alone could have been forgiven, but the biggest issue is managing brightness in HDR content. The EOTF curve from the measurements confirms what we saw earlier during scene tests: the television can overly dim the smallest bright elements, causing them to nearly disappear, or conversely – excessively brighten the brightest parts, which affects the naturalness of the image.

We tested the LG B6 in Filmmaker Mode, the best picture setting available straight out of the box. ISF modes give very similar results, but in our tests we always stick to Filmmaker Mode for better comparison with other TVs. Each of them is a far better starting point than Vivid or Eco, where the picture is heavily boosted and noticeably less natural. For SDR content the factory settings perform really well. Colour errors are small, gamma behaves correctly, and the picture looks natural during regular viewing and does not seem overly enhanced.

It's a bit worse with HDR. Once you start playing that kind of content it's quickly apparent the white balance isn't perfectly set. Too much blue and red makes the image take on a slightly pink tint. Colour gamut measurements and the ColorChecker confirm this, with samples clearly shifting in that direction. It's not a defect that completely ruins the picture, but you can notice it with HDR films. So anyone who wants the most faithful image should consider calibration, which we cover later in the review.

Thanks to specialist tools, we managed to correct the colour quality in SDR content to almost perfection. In materials with lower dynamics, delta E errors dropped below 0.5, which can be considered an almost reference result. The picture on television, YouTube, or classic Full HD looks really good after calibration. Well then – but where was it not so easy to improve the image? Primarily it concerns HDR quality content. Although we managed to somewhat "tame" the white balance and eliminate pink tints in most scenes, unfortunately, we did not have full control over brightness management. We set the local dimming settings according to the best observations – SDR: Medium, HDR: High – but the U7Q still did everything a bit its own way. There were still cases of overly strong dimming or brightening of details that calibration simply could not eliminate. And although the overall reception of content is much better, one must reckon that the U7Q will always have something to say at the end with "but".

During calibration we focused mainly on HDR material, because that’s where the factory settings needed the most correction. We didn’t neglect SDR, though. After tuning it was brought almost to perfection. Colours are very accurate and brightness is controlled as it should be. The biggest change in HDR came from improving the white balance. After removing excess red and blue the pinkish tint disappeared and the image became much more natural. Skin tones, whites and all colours that had previously leaned towards pink improved. After calibration most errors fell below Delta E 2-3, the threshold at which an average viewer stops noticing differences with the naked eye. So the LG B6 can produce a very accurate picture, especially for the manufacturer’s entry-level OLED model.

There are situations where we would like to smooth out tonal transitions a bit, especially in older materials – those with limited source quality. The U7Q has been equipped with a feature called “Smooth and Gradient Image,” but unfortunately… it works very poorly. In the “Low” option, the effects are practically unnoticeable, and other settings smooth out the details but don’t improve tonal transitions. The only positive thing is that the feature doesn’t interfere with the film grain, so it doesn’t ruin the natural structure of the image.

Fortunately, content scaling performs quite well. The image is not overly sharpened, there is no artificial clarity – and while it’s known that this isn’t the level of high-end TVs, the U7Q has no problem displaying really old content in a completely acceptable manner.

LG B6 copes very well with lower-quality material. Much of that is down to effective digital image processing, which can mask some source imperfections without excessively smoothing the whole scene. The "Smooth Gradation" feature proves particularly useful. It lets you noticeably reduce posterization mentioned earlier, especially in dark parts of the image. The safest choice is to set it to Low or Medium. The feature still effectively smooths out harsh tonal transitions, but doesn't yet interfere too much with fine details. Die-hard purists can of course leave it off. Upscaling to 4K also performs very well. Full HD and 720p content retain a fair amount of detail, and the image is neither overly sharpened nor heavily blurred. Some limitations are only noticeable with very poor sources below 720p, where the smallest text and fine elements aren't always perfectly sharp, but this is true for almost every other TV on the market.

U7Q is a truly fast TV, much like its more powerful version “PRO”. At 4K resolution, it supports up to 144 Hz refresh rate, and if someone wants even more – in Full HD, you can achieve up to 240 Hz! This will mainly benefit PC gamers, but it’s worth appreciating – it’s a rare feature in this price segment. Right from the start, it’s clear that the U7Q has been designed with dynamic content in mind, such as games or sports. In films, we’re not left “out in the cold” either – the U7Q offers an “Ultra Motion Smoothness” feature, where with two sliders, you can adjust whether you want a smoother, theatrical picture, or something closer to cinematic style with a visible frame. It’s good that, like most manufacturers, we have a choice here and can customise it to our own preferences.

One of the biggest advantages of OLED panels is their very fast pixel response time. That keeps the picture sharp and prevents visible smearing that often appears on LCD TVs. It does have a downside, though. During slow camera pans motion can look a bit choppier than on LCD screens, where the slower panel naturally masks some of that effect. Fortunately, on the LG B6 this is easy to tame with TruMotion. With the motion smoothing set correctly you can get smoother motion without giving the picture an exaggerated soap-opera effect.

The Hisense U7Q is a TV designed with gamers in mind – and you can see that straight away with its gaming capabilities. It has practically everything you could wish for: Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) – check, Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) – check, and high refresh rates of up to 240 Hz in Full HD, along with support for various resolutions, not just 4K. It’s truly an impressive set of features that makes the U7Q perform well with both fast-paced shooters on consoles and more demanding titles on PC. Of course – like most Hisense models – it lacks a proper implementation of the HGiG feature. It’s a shame because HGiG allows the console's brightness to be adjusted to the specific TV, which in practice makes it easier to display HDR games according to the creators' intentions. Without this, you just have to deal with some limitations in the final HDR image in games.

LG OLED B6 has plenty going for gamers; it's a complete base for the PS5, Xbox Series X/S or a solid PC. It comes with four full-size HDMI 2.1 ports with 48 Gb/s bandwidth, so you can forget about annoying cable swapping when you want to connect several newer devices at once. We get a full package of sync technologies, from classic VRR to G-Sync and FreeSync. The panel effortlessly syncs its refresh rate to the frame pacing produced by your console or graphics card. Of course ALLM is present: the B6 automatically recognises when a game is running and immediately cuts latency to a minimum. HDR support is also excellent. The TV supports Dolby Vision, and a correctly implemented HGiG means that after an initial calibration in the console settings the picture won't suffer from blown-out whites or lost detail in bright areas. The icing on the cake is the Game Bar. Instead of digging through the full menu mid-game, a single click lets you correct shadow visibility, tweak chosen parameters or simply check the display's current mode. All of this makes the LG B6 a great choice for gamers.