LG OLED C6 (WOLED) vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

The HDR performance of the LG C6 is really very good. LG Display's new WOLED panel has primarily brought a considerable increase in brightness. In our unit we measured around 1,500 nits and, importantly, the TV can deliver similar values in many typical film scenes. That gives the HDR the necessary impact. Bright highlights, lamps and sunlight can be really intense, and most HDR films simply look very impressive. Of course it's still an OLED, so brightness falls in scenes with a lot of white. This is well illustrated by the fifth scene in the film The Meg, where the C6 reached around 600 to 700 nits. That's still a very good result, but it also shows that the new panel hasn't shed all the limitations typical of OLEDs.

Colours

When it comes to colours, there is also little to complain about. The C6 covers about 99% of the DCI-P3 gamut and roughly 75% of BT.2020. In practice the colours are very saturated and, importantly, stable across different scenes. This is worth emphasising, because not every TV behaves the same in this respect. In some RGB Mini LED models colour saturation can depend more strongly on image brightness. A wider colour palette is nowadays offered mainly by QD-OLED TVs and new SQD models with a new generation of quantum dots. However, the C6 still performs very strongly here and is able to produce suitably saturated colours in most film scenes.

Bravia 3 II is certainly not a TV that tries to impress with brightness. In our measurements it reached about 450 nits, so it falls well short of the brightest models on the market. That does not mean HDR is just a paper feature. Compared with ordinary SDR material, the brightest elements of the image can already come through noticeably, and reflections, highlights and stronger exposures have a bit more energy and stand out better from the rest of the scene. This is most obvious in simpler shots where the screen displays many bright elements. Then the Bravia 3 II can give a hint of a higher dynamic-range picture. The problem only begins with more demanding content, where much greater brightness headroom is required. There the TV quickly shows its limitations and instead of powerful, striking HDR we get only a competently rendered picture.

Colours

Bravia 3 II uses a QLED-type panel, although technically it does not use a classic quantum dot layer. Instead Sony has used a solution based on PFS phosphor, which performs a very similar role: it allows more saturated reds and greens and thus enables a much wider colour gamut. In measurements DCI-P3 coverage was around 94%, and the very wide BT.2020 around 74.4%. These are good results for this class of hardware, which mean the Bravia 3 II has no problem reproducing sufficiently saturated colours in HDR content. Colours do not look washed out, and more intense hues can look genuinely attractive.

Right out of the box the LG C6 is pretty well set up, especially if you choose Filmmaker mode. In SDR material the white balance is decent, although as brightness increases it starts to lack a bit of red. The picture becomes a little cooler as a result, but it’s not such a big difference that it stands out during normal viewing. More happens in the brightness response itself. Gamma is a bit low and instead of holding at 2.4 it sits closer to 2.1–2.2 over much of the range. In practice the C6 slightly brightens midtones. Shadows are therefore more readable, but the image loses some depth compared with how it should look in a dark room. In HDR the situation is a bit more interesting. The start of the grayscale looks very good, but from about 20–30% brightness the white balance starts to drift more and more. As brightness rises there’s more red and a noticeable lack of blue. In the brightest highlights the difference is already significant and also affects reproduction of some colors. The EOTF curve itself is handled fairly well over most of the range. The C6 only has a tendency to slightly brighten the image, which we also saw during our film comparisons. The largest deviation appears around the brightest highlights, where the TV begins to adapt the signal to the panel’s capabilities. So the out-of-the-box Filmmaker mode in HDR isn’t perfect, but overall it performs well. The biggest room for improvement is the white balance, especially at high brightness.

In Professional mode the Bravia 3 II already delivers a fairly good level of colour reproduction straight out of the box. In SDR the most noticeable issue is a slightly low gamma, which makes the midtones a little brighter. White balance isn't perfect either; as brightness increases the blue and red components become slightly lacking, so whites can at times take on a marginally warmer, faintly greenish tint. These are not faults that immediately catch the eye when watching a film. Average error values hover around 3, so the factory setting can be regarded as quite good. The situation is similar in HDR. Here too there is a slight lack of the blue component, so the image is marginally warmer than the reference, but the difference is not large enough to significantly interfere with normal viewing.

LG TVs have been very receptive to calibration for years and the C6 is no exception. After adjustment the white balance was set almost perfectly, and most colour errors dropped to values below 3, often even around 2. In practice this means very accurate colour reproduction, both in SDR and HDR. An interesting quirk only appeared with the luminance response in HDR. On a standard EOTF chart everything looks almost ideal and at first glance it would be hard to criticise. Only when we measured the TV's behaviour with filters based on actual film scenes did it become clear that the C6 has a slight tendency to artificially boost image brightness.

This is not a huge difference and many people may even view it positively, because HDR consequently looks a little more striking. From the perspective of fidelity to the source material this is not ideal, however, as some scenes are simply a touch brighter than the filmmaker intended. Interestingly, this is rather unusual for LG. In previous generations the brand's TVs typically stuck very closely to the reference picture characteristic after calibration. With the C6 we are still very close to the standard, but this subtle brightness boost is indeed noticeable in films and TV series.

After calibration, there is particularly a lot to be gained from SDR content. The white balance was set almost perfectly, the gamma practically matches the reference value, and the average colour errors fell from around 3 to about 1. That is already a level at which differences from the reference image are, in practice, very difficult to detect. The Bravia 3 II therefore shows that, despite its position in Sony’s lineup, it has quite a lot of potential for precise picture calibration. Improvements are also visible in HDR, although here it is no longer possible to avoid all the limitations of the TV itself. After evening out the colours, it is easier to notice that the EOTF curve in film content runs slightly below the reference value in places, so the Bravia 3 II gently darkens part of the image. This is not an ideal solution from a reference point of view, but in this particular TV it also has its benefits. With no local dimming and average black levels, this behaviour slightly reduces the visibility of the backlight in darker scenes and helps maintain a stronger impression of contrast. So you could say Sony partly masks the limitations of the panel this way, instead of trying at all costs to stick to the reference luminance.

Here the LG C6 has taken a real step forward. The TV uses the same processor found in the flagship G6, and in terms of image processing the two models are very similar. That's a considerable plus, because in this area LG's processor this year performs excellently. The "Smooth Gradation" function in particular works very well. With heavily compressed material it can effectively hide ugly banding and artefacts that often appear, for example, in lower-quality streaming. It's best to leave it set to "Low". That way the improvement is clear and the TV does not yet start blurring fine details. Higher settings smooth the image more aggressively but can already remove some of the natural texture of objects on the screen. Upscaling itself also performs very well. Lower-resolution content is sharpened correctly, edges look clean, and the processor quite effectively reconstructs fine details. In this respect the C6 is already very close to LG's best TVs and the differences compared with the G6 are small.

The Bravia 3 II is Sony's first TV to use the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, and there are a few changes in image processing. Starting with the basics. The upscaling itself is adequate. The TV can sensibly pull up lower-resolution material and does not have a strong tendency to over-emphasise jagged edges or other source imperfections. With regular broadcast TV or weaker streaming material the picture therefore remains quite pleasing. We have more reservations about the digital image processing. In this model Sony has replaced the well-known "Smooth Gradation" function with a new setting called "Digital Noise Reduction". Its role is essentially very similar: it is supposed to smooth unpleasant tonal transitions and artefacts resulting from heavy signal compression. Unfortunately, this function performs noticeably worse than before. At the "High" setting (the only one that had any visible effect) the TV can smooth away too many elements of the image at once, causing film grain to disappear and the texture of objects or even skin to start looking unnatural. Worse still, the effect is not particularly stable. When a scene contains more motion, the function's effect clearly weakens and at times it looks as if the TV stops intervening in the picture altogether. For everyday viewing we therefore would not recommend using it at a high level. It can help on a static shot, but the price is often an excessive loss of detail.

LG C6 received a panel with a maximum refresh rate of 165 Hz, which is great news above all for gamers using a powerful PC. In films, sport or on consoles we will of course make use of up to 120 Hz, but even then it is hard to fault the motion clarity. As befits an OLED, the panel's response time is almost instantaneous. Moving objects therefore do not leave the characteristic smearing or trails that we can still see on LCD televisions. This is especially noticeable in sport and fast-paced games, where the picture remains very clean even during dynamic movement.

For films and television LG has also prepared the TruMotion motion smoothing system. In the user settings you will find two separate sliders. De-Judder primarily addresses low frame-rate content, that is mainly films and TV series at 24 fps. You can use it to slightly reduce the characteristic judder or set a higher value if you want a very smooth image. De-Blur is useful for higher frame-rate material, chiefly sports broadcasts and 50/60 fps television.

Motion handling is definitely one of the Bravia 3 II's strongest points. The TV uses a 120Hz VA panel, a solution that, by nature, despite the high refresh rate, does not always cope well with motion blur. Here, however, Sony has managed to keep that problem very well under control. Fast-moving objects remain crisp, and the characteristic trails and blurring are reduced to a very low level, if not to zero. It is one of the least motion-blur-prone LCD TVs we have tested. Interestingly, in this respect the Bravia 3 II can even outperform the much more expensive True RGB flagship series, the Bravia 9 II.

LG has long focused heavily on gamers, and the C6 really lacks nothing important. The TV supports 4K at 120 Hz from consoles, and when connected to a PC it can run at up to 165 Hz. There is also VRR from 40 to 165 Hz, ALLM and a properly working HGiG. A big plus is support for Dolby Vision in games, so the Xbox Series X can use that format without giving up Game Mode. It's rounded off by a Game Bar, from which you can quickly check key signal parameters and change settings without leaving the game. In terms of features, the C6 is therefore one of those TVs that is really hard to fault. Whether you're gaming on a PlayStation, an Xbox or a PC, practically everything you could expect from a modern gaming TV is available here.

Sony Bravia 3 II is a very good TV for gamers, although not everything has been implemented exactly as we would like. The biggest change concerns the connectors. For the first time in a Sony TV we get as many as four full HDMI 2.1 ports with 48 Gb/s bandwidth, thanks to the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset. That removes one of the issues that has plagued this manufacturer’s TVs for years. We can connect several devices at once and on each input use the device’s full capabilities, for example VRR or ALLM. There is also a simple Game Bar that lets you view key signal parameters and change a few useful settings, such as black level, when you want to improve visibility in darker parts of a game. However, there are two limitations worth knowing. The first is the lack of support for 1440p at 120 Hz. That will not be a problem for everyone, but people using that resolution on a console or PC, for example to get higher frame rates in certain games, will have to choose 1080p. We have more reservations about HGiG support. Sony does not allow you to disable the TV’s tone mapping on the Bravia 3 II, so the screen is always processing HDR content even when you would prefer to leave that task to the console. This is most obvious during HDR setup — the checkerboard pattern does not disappear at the point that corresponds to the TV’s actual capabilities. That does not mean HDR in games will look bad. You just need to approach the setup a little differently and, instead of relying on the pattern, manually set the peak brightness to around 450 nits. The issue can be worked around, but you should know about it before you start setting up the console.