LG OLED B6 vs Sony BRAVIA 2 II (S25M2)

The LG B6 is a moderately bright OLED. After calibration it reaches about 800 nits, roughly 200 nits more than last year’s B5. That’s thanks to the new budget OLED SE panel from LG Display. In practice it simply gives a bit more headroom and makes HDR in many scenes look fuller than on last year’s lower-tier OLEDs. That doesn’t mean the B6 has no limits. In very bright shots, when a large part of the screen is strongly lit, brightness can drop below 400 nits. This behavior is typical for OLED TVs (especially those from this segment) and that’s when you see the biggest difference versus more expensive models. All things considered, we rate the B6’s results as really solid. It’s still not a TV for breaking brightness records, but the HDR effect is strong enough that you can really feel the step up from ordinary SDR in films.

Color gamut

Using the OLED SE panel has slightly affected wide color gamut coverage. Compared with last year’s model, results fell by a few percentage points. DCI-P3 reaches about 96%, and BT.2020 around 71%. That doesn’t mean the colors on the LG B6 are weak. In most movies and series they look lively, well saturated and simply pleasing to the eye. You only notice a difference in very bright, highly colorful scenes. Then colors lose some intensity compared with QD-OLED panels. This comes from the WOLED panel construction. Besides red, green and blue subpixels it also uses a white subpixel that helps boost brightness. It comes at a cost: at very high luminance some color is effectively “diluted” by the white light, so saturation of some colors can be slightly lower. In everyday use this isn’t a big issue, but you can notice it in the most demanding scenes.

Sony Bravia 2 II is not a very bright TV and unfortunately that is immediately apparent in HDR. In our measurements brightness stayed around 300 to 330 nits, which is definitely too low for the brightest parts of the picture to look truly impressive. In practice HDR here does not differ that much from ordinary SDR. Bright highlights, the sun, or lamps are of course visible, but they lack the intensity you would expect from HDR material. The Bravia 2 II therefore performs much better with regular SDR content, and it is in that use case that its limited brightness will be least noticeable.

Color gamut coverage

Sony Bravia 2 II also doesn't impress when it comes to colors. The TV doesn't use any additional gamut-expanding filter, such as the quantum dots found in QLED TVs or a PFS phosphor layer. In our measurements DCI-P3 coverage was about 78%, and the very wide BT.2020 around 57%. That's definitely too little to talk about truly saturated colors in HDR content. More intense reds, greens, or turquoise hues will simply be less striking than on TVs with an expanded color gamut. The Bravia 2 II therefore fares much better with standard Rec.709, the gamut used for movies, series, and TV in SDR.

We tested the LG B6 in Filmmaker Mode, which is the best picture setting available right out of the box. ISF modes deliver very similar results, but in our tests we always stick to Filmmaker Mode for better comparison with other TVs. Each of those modes is, after all, a much better starting point than Vivid or Eco mode, where the picture is heavily boosted and noticeably less natural. With SDR content, the factory settings perform really well. Color errors are small, gamma behaves properly, and the image looks natural during ordinary viewing and does not seem overly "pumped up." It's a bit worse with HDR. When you play that kind of content you can quickly see that the white balance hasn't been set perfectly. Too much blue and red causes the image to shift toward a slightly pink tint. This is also confirmed by measurements of the color gamut and the ColorChecker, where samples clearly drift in that direction. It's not a flaw that completely ruins the picture, but you can notice it in HDR films. So people who care about the most faithful image should consider the calibration we describe later in the review.

Out-of-the-box color reproduction in Cinema mode was really good, at least for ordinary SDR material. The Bravia 2 II had a slight tendency to boost reds, so some colors skewed a bit warmer, at times with a faint pinkish tint. However, it wasn't a major fault, and during normal viewing the picture still looked quite natural. There was a bit more going on with image brightness. Looking at the gamma trace, you can see Sony doesn't stick exactly to the reference value. The darkest parts are slightly lifted, while as brightness increases the gamma gradually rises and a larger portion of the image becomes darker than it should. That said, the difference isn't large enough to seriously interfere with everyday viewing. Overall, SDR straight out of the box performs pretty well.

The situation is much worse in HDR. We already mentioned the limited color gamut, but the Bravia 2 II also manipulates image brightness quite aggressively here. The EOTF curve sits below the reference for a large part of the range, which means the TV renders most midtones and brighter parts of the scene darker than the source material intends. Only toward the very end of the range does the curve flatten out, as the panel reaches the limits of its capabilities. Combined with a peak brightness of around 300 nits, this results in HDR that not only lacks punch but can simply look too dim.

During calibration we focused primarily on HDR content, because that's where the factory settings required the biggest corrections. We didn't neglect SDR mode, though, which after adjustment was brought almost to perfection. Colors are very accurate and brightness is handled as it should be. The biggest improvement in HDR came from correcting the white balance. After removing the excess red and blue, the pinkish tint disappeared and the image became much more natural. Skin tones, whites and all colors that had been shifting toward magenta improved. After calibration most errors fell below a Delta E of 2–3, the threshold at which the average viewer stops noticing differences with the naked eye. The LG B6 can therefore deliver a very accurate image, especially for the manufacturer's entry-level OLED model.

Calibration did a lot for the Bravia 2 II, especially with SDR content. Above all, we were able to even out the white balance and tidy up the gamma, which now sticks much closer to reference values. As a result, the picture no longer has the previous pink tint, and the brightness of individual areas is much better balanced. You can also see this in the color errors, which dropped to a very low level after calibration (with minor issues in the most saturated reds).

We also partially tamed the Bravia 2 II in HDR, particularly in how the TV manages image brightness. However, there is one thing no calibration can fix: the panel's inherent limitations. The narrow color gamut means the TV physically cannot reproduce the most saturated colors present in HDR content. On top of that, the IPS panel's low contrast leaves darker scenes veiled by a grayish glow, causing colors to lose some of their depth. So we can improve how the Bravia 2 II uses its capabilities, but unfortunately we can't overcome the panel's fundamental limits.

The LG B6 handles lower-quality sources very well. Much of the credit goes to effective digital image processing, which can mask some source imperfections without overly smoothing the whole scene. The feature "Smooth Gradation" proves particularly useful. It can significantly reduce posterization, which we mentioned earlier, especially in darker areas of the image. The safest choice remains Low or Medium. The function still effectively smooths harsh tonal transitions, but does not yet interfere too much with fine details. The most dedicated purists can, of course, leave it off. Upscaling to 4K also performs very well. Full HD and 720p content retain a good amount of detail, and the image is neither overly sharpened nor excessively blurred. Some limitations become noticeable only with very poor sources below 720p, where the smallest subtitles and fine elements are not always perfectly sharp, but this is true for almost every other TV on the market.

Upscaling in the Bravia 2 II performs quite well, and in that respect the TV maintains the standard Sony has accustomed us to. Lower-resolution content is sensibly scaled to 4K, with the image slightly smoothed and without over-sharpening edges. It’s a different story when it comes to improving content with visible compression. That’s handled by the "Digital Noise Reduction" feature, which on the "High" setting can indeed smooth out some ugly tonal banding. The problem is it does so fairly aggressively, removing a lot of fine detail along with the imperfections, including natural film grain. Moreover, when there’s more motion on screen its effectiveness drops significantly and the improvement becomes minimal. So we generally avoided using this feature in everyday viewing.

One of the biggest advantages of OLED panels is their very fast pixel response time. This keeps the image sharp and prevents the visible smearing that often appears on LCD TVs. However, there is a downside. During slow camera pans, motion can look more choppy than on LCD screens, where the slower panel naturally masks some of that effect. Fortunately, on the LG B6 you can easily soften this with TruMotion. With the motion smoothing properly adjusted, you can achieve smoother motion without giving the picture an excessive soap-opera effect.

The Bravia 2 II uses a 60 Hz panel and, given its capabilities, handles motion quite well. However, keep in mind this is a basic panel, and its limitations are already noticeable, especially with sports. The TV cannot interpolate 50/60 fps content to a higher refresh rate, so it can't further improve the sharpness of fast-moving objects. For movies and series, you get a standard motion smoother that can reduce the characteristic judder of material shot at 24 fps.

LG OLED B6 offers a powerful set of advantages for gamers; it's simply a complete platform for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, or a solid PC. It has four full-size HDMI 2.1 ports with 48 Gbps bandwidth, so you can skip the annoying cable swapping when you want to connect several newer devices at once. We get the full suite of sync technologies – from classic VRR to G-Sync and FreeSync. The screen seamlessly matches the refresh rate to the frame output produced by the console or graphics card. Of course ALLM is included: the B6 automatically detects a running game and immediately cuts input lag to a minimum. HDR handling is also excellent. The TV supports Dolby Vision, and a properly implemented HGiG standard means that after an initial calibration in the console settings the picture won’t suffer from blown-out highlights or lost detail in bright areas. The cherry on top is the Game Bar. Instead of digging through the full menu during gameplay, one click lets you adjust shadow visibility, tweak selected settings, or simply check the display’s current operating mode. All of this makes the LG B6 a great choice for gamers.

The Bravia 2 II is not a TV particularly well suited for gaming, and the feature list makes that clear pretty quickly. You basically only get automatic low-latency mode (ALLM) and a simple Game Bar where you can view basic signal information and change a few settings. But that's where the list of advantages ends. The TV doesn't support VRR or 120 Hz (not even at lower resolutions), and on top of that it has problems with a proper implementation of the HDR HGIG format. It can, of course, be used for occasional console gaming, and thanks to low input lag controls stay responsive, but if you're mainly looking for a TV for gaming, the Bravia 2 II will simply be a very limited choice.