Samsung and Sony need to step up their game if they want to beat our new OLED TV recommendation
It’s a tumultuous time in the world of OLED TVs, at least when it comes to business deals between the big players.
This year we had TCL buying 51 percent of Sony’s home entertainment business, and Panasonic selling its European TV division to Chinese company Skyworth.
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Unlike its larger, 77-inch and larger siblings, it doesn’t have a next-generation Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel. It just has a basic WOLED.
But there’s a reason, after 50 years of reviewing AV hardware, that our team of experts remains in profitable employment. In particular, a specification sheet never tells the whole story.
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When we opened the LG C5 and C6 in our showrooms and ran our usual comparative testing program we saw improvements in the new model.
Despite the significant lack of significant hardware changes, the C6 was noticeably faster than the C5, especially while running Pan stress test. Here, the wealth of detail in the brightest part of the sunset, lost in the C5, was visible in the C6.
But it wasn’t just the extra nits that LG managed to squeeze out of the panel that impressed. The colors are rendered better, the skin tone of the characters in particular holding a great sense of vitality.
But the most surprising thing of all, is our running Blade Runner 2049 sound test, despite having a built-in speaker system, tuning and processing settings help the C6 deliver better performance than any other recent LG set we’ve tested.
Bass is undeniably light, and a booming synth track doesn’t have the impact it deserves, but the speakers manage to avoid distortion and are controlled enough not to completely drown out the scene – an achievement beyond most TVs we’ve tested, including expensive OLEDs.
The upgrade makes the LG C6 feel like a proper step forward for the ‘descending’ OLED line, rather than the redundant update we’ve come to expect based on its specifications.
So much so, that our TV and AV editor, Tom Parsons, boldly said in our review: “The improvement isn’t so great that the owner of the latest C-series model (or one of its closest competitors) should feel the need to upgrade immediately, but if you’re in the market for a low-end OLED, the LG C6 is the new benchmark to match, and it will let it pass.”
Notice the last part. While it’s too early to say if big rivals Sony and Samsung are up to the challenge, we can safely say they’ll have to come out all guns blazing to do so. A small update of the models we’ve already reviewed probably won’t do the job.
In any case, we already have a nice new OLED display to recommend in the form of the LG C6. Greetings from the LG TV department, have a great start to the year!
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