TCL X11L vs LG OLED B6

Such a large number of zones translated not only into deep, inky blacks but also into the panel’s brightness. The X11L is an extremely bright TV. Peak brightness can easily exceed 4000 nits, and with the special "Boost" mode enabled, under specific conditions that brightness can even hover around the marketing figures of 9000–10,000 nits. This is undoubtedly one of the brightest, if not the brightest, screens on the market. But how do those numbers translate to real-world movie measurements? The results are very good, though of course far from the marketing promises. Our measured brightness in actual movie scenes hovered around 2000–3000 nits. That’s an outstanding result, considering that the vast majority of content is produced to those brightness levels, including the rarer material mastered to 4000 nits. But it also shows that the numbers the manufacturer brags about don’t always translate directly to the video content available at home. The only "quirk" (if you can call it that) is that when very small, bright elements appear on the screen, their brightness drops below 2000 nits. The dimming algorithm does this deliberately to preserve deep blacks and minimize halo. This is entirely understandable and the effect remains very strong, but it also demonstrates that even with such powerful hardware, Mini-LED technology has its limits and does not always work without compromise. In HDR, brightness isn’t the only thing that matters; color saturation and color accuracy do as well. On the X11L these are very good thanks to the new Super QLED quantum dots (SQD). The addition of a newly applied filter delivered excellent coverage of the P3 color gamut and the ultra-wide BT.2020. Although it doesn’t reach the advertised 100% of BT.2020, values around 89–90% can be called excellent. Colors are not far off those of RGB Mini-LED panels. We can even say they’re more stable because they use a less demanding algorithm than the one RGB screens often have to deal with.

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.

When you switch on what should theoretically be the best Filmmaker Mode, you expect a one-to-one image of what the director saw. On the X11L it's quite good, but the mode has obvious flaws that our measurements immediately exposed. Let's start with SDR. Both the white balance and the gamma are simply miscalibrated. The white point has too much blue and red, so there's a faint pink cast on the screen. That also affects the gamma, which instead of holding the cinematic 2.4 runs closer to 2.2. What does that mean? The whole picture ends up pushed and artificially brighter. The worst, though, is saved for last: the HDR measurements. Besides the slight white balance shift, the X11L fails on the luminance management curve, the so‑called EOTF. What we saw in the measurements immediately explains what we saw earlier in films. The image is unnaturally bright because the curve massively overshoots the reference. The TV just unapologetically lifts the dark parts of the picture to create a "wow" effect, completely ignoring the director's intent.

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.

After professional calibration we chiefly managed to fully master the SDR signal. The X11L responded perfectly to our adjustments. We completely straightened the white balance, removed that pink tint and set gamma to a stable 2.4. After that treatment the picture finally became consistent with the director's vision, natural and free of artificial boosts. We were also able to make minimal tweaks for HDR, but the TV's biggest flaw remained unchanged. I'm talking, of course, about how the X11L handles its brightness and how much it overshoots the EOTF curve. Unfortunately, TCL provides practically no controls to adjust this parameter. Even during professional calibration the software does not allow you to rein in that curve, so the TV in HDR will always tend to brighten the image on its own.

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.

As with the C8L we tested earlier, TCL has delivered a substantial upgrade in its flagship X series in this area. It's all down to the MediaTek Pentonic 800 processor used in this model. Thanks to it, features like smoothing tonal transitions and even upscaling content to higher resolutions finally look the way they should. The biggest Achilles' heel of previous TCL models has finally been overcome. The processor handles digital processing superbly, and in this respect the TV no longer falls short of flagship models from Korea or even the most polished ones from Japan.

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.

Spec-wise the X11L can impress, supporting refresh rates up to 144 Hz at 4K, and in Full HD it can be pushed as high as 288 Hz. From a real-world perspective, though, we were most interested in how the screen handles 120 Hz — that's the limit of today's hardware, led by current-generation consoles. How does it perform in practice? Even though it's a VA panel, the screen doesn't exhibit heavy ghosting. With very fast-moving objects you can notice a slight trail, but it's subtle enough that you hardly notice it while gaming or watching sport. Also very helpful is the motion smoothing feature called "Wyrazistość ruchów", where you can adjust motion fluidity to your liking. You'll find the recommended settings in the photo.

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.

For gamers the X11L is simply a superb screen. TCL has already trained us to expect that it packs practically every feature available on the market into its products, and it’s exactly the same with the flagship X series. Thanks to the new processor, the X11L gets four HDMI 2.1 ports with full 48 Gbps bandwidth. Naturally, HDMI 2.1 brings a set of very useful options, such as automatic low-latency mode (ALLM) and variable refresh rate (VRR) synchronisation, working across the full refresh range up to 288 Hz. All of these features can be conveniently controlled from the dedicated Game Bar. Interestingly, you can customise its appearance to your taste, with three ready-made themes directly referencing the Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox consoles. And speaking of Xbox, Dolby Vision Gaming also runs without issue on the X11L.

When playing in the standard HDR10 format you should be aware of the screen’s specific brightness-curve tuning, which can cause problems during initial setup. Even though the TV supports HGiG, getting everything set correctly in the PlayStation or Xbox system menus can be tricky. The screen’s algorithms tend to artificially brighten the test checkerboard, so nailing the correct white-clip point by eye is genuinely difficult. For HDR10 to look correct, we suggest manually setting the console brightness in the console menu to around 2500–3000 nits.

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.