LG OLED B6 vs Sony BRAVIA 6 (A65)

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.

The Sony BRAVIA 6 is a moderately bright TV, and compared with today's OLEDs it can even be classed among the darker models. It peaks at around 700 nits, but you'll see those values mainly on small highlights surrounded by a dark background. In brighter, mixed scenes the result is closer to 500 nits — for example, a sunset shot from the film "Life of Pi", where we measured 483 nits. Combined with perfect blacks this gives a pleasant HDR effect, especially in the evening, although it's hard to call the brightness spectacular. Limitations become even more noticeable when bright elements occupy most of the screen. Then ABL kicks in, the mechanism that limits brightness when the OLED panel is heavily loaded. The BRAVIA 6 uses the panel's capabilities fairly conservatively, and in such shots brightness falls to around 250–280 nits. In the scene with the oil rig we got about 250 nits, so a bright sky no longer has the same punch as a single torch in darkness. It's in wide, sunny landscapes or large flares that it most noticeably lacks brightness headroom.

Colours

In terms of colours the BRAVIA 6 does quite well. It covers about 95–96% of the DCI-P3 gamut, so it can reproduce most of the colours used in HDR films and series with proper saturation. It still trails higher-end WOLED panels a bit, which approach full coverage of that gamut, but in everyday viewing it won't be a big difference. A larger gap separates it from QD-OLED screens when rendering the most intense colours from the wider BT.2020 gamut. Sony covers that at roughly 71–72%, so exceptionally saturated reds or greens won't look as impressive as on organic panels with quantum dots or on SQD Mini-LED displays. Moreover, gamut coverage alone doesn't mean the TV can show those colours at high brightness. On the BRAVIA 6 very bright, colourful highlights have less punch, which further tames the HDR impact. In typical films the colours still look good, with screen brightness remaining the bigger limitation.

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.

In Cinema mode the Sony BRAVIA 6 delivers a rather pleasant picture, although the factory settings give it a slightly too warm character. In SDR, that is when watching regular TV and older films, there’s a dominance of red and a shortage of blue. The image can therefore take on a creamy, slightly pinkish tint, and faces look more flushed than they should. It’s not a cast that completely alters the look of a film, but it’s noticeable with neutral colours. On top of that there’s a bit too much darkening in SDR. The gamma curve sits above the target value, which during viewing means darker areas of the scene. The scene may appear more contrasty, but subtle shadow detail becomes harder to distinguish.

In HDR the colours behave a little differently. The red dominance is reduced, but together with a slight excess of blue and a lack of green it gives a faint pink cast to bright, neutral surfaces. The luminance response remains close to the reference across much of the range, although you can see the previously mentioned lift of tones just above black. Because of this, in night scenes some parts of the background are more visible than the filmmakers intended. Some midtones are also slightly brightened. Overall cinema mode is a sensible starting point for viewing and is definitely the best mode among the options, but the white balance and the way brightness is rendered still need refining.

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.

BRAVIA 6 responds well to picture calibration, although many user options are unavailable from the TV’s menu. Apart from basic white balance and gamma adjustments in SDR, it’s hard to get the rest of the image under control. Fortunately, those adjustments alone allow a significant improvement. In SDR we were able to almost perfectly even out the white balance, which removed the excessive warm cast and stopped faces looking overly rosy. After correcting the gamma, darker areas are also better visible. For regular broadcast TV or YouTube content the result is noticeably better than the factory settings.

In HDR it was also possible to reduce the colour cast, but a bigger problem here is how the TV manages brightness. BRAVIA 6 unusually changes it depending on the scene: some tones are darkened, others brightened, and the available settings do not allow full correction. You can see this in measurements taken from films, where the brightness behaviour and the way the EOTF curve differs between shots are visible. That leads to the aforementioned emphasis of the darkest greys, which makes some night scenes too bright. Calibration therefore makes sense and especially in SDR allows a natural, well tuned image. In HDR the colour improvement is also noticeable, but it does not solve the issues with brightness and preserving the brightest details. It’s a shame, because with more control over what the TV does the panel’s capabilities could be put to better use.

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.

The "magic" of Sony's image processing has been talked about for years, and we've repeatedly confirmed its effectiveness in higher-end models. BRAVIA 6 shows, however, that the Japanese manufacturer's logo alone doesn't guarantee equally good results. Despite using a MediaTek Pentonic 800 processor, the TV handles smoothing of banding between shades in heavily compressed footage only rather averagely. The available "De Contour" function set to medium helps a little, but some uneven transitions remain visible. On the plus side, we didn't notice any obvious blurring of detail or extra artefacts. So it's worth using on weaker recordings, though its effectiveness is far from what we've become used to from the manufacturer's TVs. Upscaling of lower-resolution material performs better. The image is a little soft, but most fine detail stays clearly visible. In the scene with the model you can make out both the tree's texture and thin branches in the background, so this gentler sharpening doesn't automatically mean a loss of detail. There's also no issue with overscan: the TV shows the entire frame, without cropping the edges even with an SD signal.

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.

In dynamic scenes the BRAVIA 6 performs very well. The OLED panel responds almost instantly, so moving objects show virtually no smearing, even on dark backgrounds. Combined with a 120 Hz refresh rate, this delivers a sharp picture for watching sport and gaming. In that respect the TV offers exactly what we'd expect from an OLED.

The motion settings menu is much less typical for Sony. Instead of the familiar Motionflow system there's a feature called "MJC", which in both appearance and naming more closely resembles solutions found on budget TVs from other brands. You get two sliders: "Blur Reduction", which here is equivalent to the "Smoothness (Film)" setting, and "De-Judder", which corresponds to the "Smoothness (Camera)" control on other Sony models. The motion smoothing itself works well and lets you adjust motion to your preferences, though users switching from another BRAVIA will be surprised by the new menu on the TV.

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.

The Sony BRAVIA 6 is very good for gaming. Solid picture quality, fast OLED panel response and support for 4K at 120 Hz mean the TV handles fast-paced titles well. Players who expect more than just smooth gameplay will, however, quickly notice a few unusual omissions and shortcomings.

Start with the biggest change versus other Sony models: the BRAVIA 6 has four full-spec HDMI 2.1 inputs with 48 Gb/s bandwidth, thanks to the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 platform. That means you can connect several gaming devices and a soundbar without giving up a high refresh rate on any source. Each port supports ALLM, which automatically switches to low-latency mode, and VRR from 48 to 120 Hz, which synchronises the screen refresh with the game's frame rate. Dolby Vision at 120 Hz also works, with low input lag.

HDR setup is more problematic. There’s no correctly working HGiG, and the test checkerboard used for console calibration only disappears at around 1000 nits, even though the panel does not reach that brightness. Relying solely on that pattern can therefore lead to a loss of detail in the brightest parts of a game. In the settings that let you enter brightness in nits it’s better to choose roughly 700 nits, a value closer to the screen’s capabilities. We also couldn’t find a Game Bar, although retail materials suggest a basic version is included. The review unit only offered a sparse game settings menu. On top of that, there’s the familiar Sony limitation of no 1440p at 120 Hz. That won’t be a problem when playing on a console in 4K, but PC gamers may feel the restriction if they want 1440p to get more frames than 4K while retaining higher detail than Full HD.