LG OLED C6H (TANDEM OLED) vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

And it is with HDR that the Tandem OLED panel shows its greatest advantage. The C6H’s brightness is simply very high and in our measurements it hovered around 1900–2300 nits in most film scenes. That’s already a level at which bright highlights, the sun or small light sources can look truly spectacular. The biggest impression, however, was made by the fifth scene from the film The Meg. It is exceptionally demanding for OLEDs because almost the entire screen is very bright. Even so, the C6H reached about 1650 nits in that scene. By comparison, the regular C6 with a classic WOLED panel recorded around 600–700 nits at the same point. So we’re talking about more than double the brightness, and in places the difference even approaches three times. And that is probably the best example of what Tandem OLED delivers here. It’s not just a higher result on a small test patch. The C6H can maintain very high brightness even when much more of the screen is lit. As a result HDR has significantly greater dynamism, and in this respect the C6H is much closer to flagship OLEDs than to typical mid-range models.

Colours

Tandem OLED also brings an improvement in colours. DCI-P3 coverage remains practically complete at about 99%, while in the much wider BT.2020 colour space we measured around 82–83%. That’s roughly seven percentage points more than the regular C6. In everyday use this won’t be a difference visible in every scene, because most films do not use such a wide gamut. However, when very highly saturated colours appear, the C6H already has noticeably greater capability, especially in reds. Reds benefit the most, becoming deeper and more saturated. This still isn’t at the level of the best QD-OLED panels or SQD TVs, but for a WOLED panel the performance is really very good.

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.

Straight out of the box the LG C6 is fairly well set up, especially if you select the Filmmaker mode. In SDR content the white balance is decent, although as brightness increases it shows a slight deficiency in red. The image therefore becomes a little cooler, but not enough for the difference to be very noticeable during normal viewing. More is happening in the brightness response. Gamma is a bit low and, instead of holding at 2.4, it sits closer to 2.1–2.2 across much of the range. In practice the C6 slightly brightens midtones. Shadow detail is therefore more readable, but the picture loses some depth compared with how it should look in a darkened room.

In HDR the situation is a bit more interesting. The lower end of the greyscale performs very well, but from roughly 20–30% brightness the white balance starts to drift increasingly. As brightness rises there is more red, while blue becomes noticeably deficient. In the brightest scenes the difference is already substantial and also affects the reproduction of some colours. The EOTF itself is, however, fairly well tracked across most of the range. The C6 merely tends to slightly brighten the image, which we already saw in our film comparisons. The largest deviation appears in the very brightest areas, where the TV begins to adapt the signal to the panel’s capabilities.

The factory Filmmaker setting in HDR is therefore not perfect, but overall it performs well. The biggest room for improvement is the white balance, particularly 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 long been very receptive to calibration and the C6 is no exception. After adjustment the white balance could be set almost perfectly, and most colour errors fell below 3, often even down to around 2. In practice this means very accurate colour reproduction in both SDR and HDR. An interesting detail only emerged when we looked at the HDR luminance response. On a classic EOTF plot everything looks almost ideal and at first glance it would be hard to find fault. Only when we measured the TV's behaviour on filters based on real film scenes did it become apparent that the C6 has a slight tendency to artificially boost image brightness.

It is not a huge difference and many people may even welcome it because HDR looks a bit more striking as a result. From the point of view of fidelity to the source material this is not ideal behaviour though – 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 closely to the reference picture characteristic after calibration. With the C6 we are still very close to the standard, but this subtle brightness 'boost' can indeed be noticed in films and 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 really big 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 this year's LG processor excels in that area. The "Smooth Gradation" function works particularly well. With heavily compressed footage it can effectively hide ugly banding and artefacts that often occur, for instance in lower-quality streaming. It's best to leave it on the "Low" setting. Then the improvement is noticeable, while the TV does not yet start to blur fine detail. Higher levels smooth the picture more, but can already remove some of the natural texture of objects on screen. Upscaling itself also performs very well. Lower-resolution material is sharpened correctly, edges look clean, and the processor quite effectively reconstructs fine detail. 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.

The C6H with a Tandem OLED panel can also operate at refresh rates of up to 165 Hz. PC gamers will naturally get the most out of this, because for consoles, films or sport we're still looking at a maximum of 120 Hz. The panel itself is excellent when it comes to motion. OLED pixels respond virtually instantly, so even with fast-moving objects you don't see the typical motion blur. The picture remains clean whether you're watching sport or playing fast-paced games.

If you prioritise smoothness over motion clarity, TruMotion is available. LG lets you adjust two parameters separately. De-Judder mainly works with films and series shot at 24 fps and helps reduce the judder that's characteristic of them. De-Blur, meanwhile, is intended for 50/60 fps content, so it's particularly useful when watching sport or 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.

The C6H offers practically the full suite of gaming features. On consoles you can easily use 4K at 120 Hz, while PC users can push the refresh rate up to 165 Hz. The TV also supports VRR from 40 to 165 Hz, ALLM and a proper implementation of HGiG. Dolby Vision is also available in game mode, which remains a major advantage for Xbox owners. All key information can be viewed in the Game Bar, which provides quick access to VRR settings and the current signal’s parameters. The OLED implementation therefore does not alter the feature set available to gamers, but with such high panel brightness HDR games can make an even stronger impression. Functionally, the C6H is simply a very complete TV for console and PC gaming.

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.