Perfor mance
Which TV best combines UHD image quality with the latest HDR tech?
The San Fernando Valley pre quake in San Andreas warrants sunglasses
It goes without saying that all three screens are a cut above the norm when it comes to picture quality. The images offered by the LG OLED are lush. With deep perfect blacks (an OLED strong point) and vibrant colour, the E6 looks great with pretty much anything. With regular HD, be it from Sky or Blu-ray, you can see its dynamism immediately on graphics and white text. Feed it native 4K with HDR though and the panel really shines. OLED doesn’t offer the same high peak highlight brightness of its LED rivals, but in many ways it’s a better watch.
LG is also the only UK screen brand to offer support for Dolby Vision. This is currently limited to Netflix ( Marco Polo and Adam Sandler’s Ridiculous 6), but in truth we think it doesn’t look overly different to regular HDR.
The Panasonic DX802 rather betrays its low-price roots in this shoot-out. It can’t match the brightness of the Sony ZD9 and can’t go as black as the OLED E6. But image quality remains high – the San Fernando Valley pre quake in the disaster movie San Andreas (4K Blu-ray) warrants sunglasses.
Colour fidelity is excellent, with copious fine detail. What lets the screen down is light bloom caused by the screen’s edge lighting. This becomes particularly distracting when watching a letter-boxed movie – the bottom bar flicks between grey and black.
Sony’s ZD9 doesn’t have any such problems because it uses a full array backlight as part of its Backlight Master Drive. A number of precision calibrated LED lights, controlled by a unique lighting algorithm, enable the ZD9’s backlight to discreetly dim and glow with astonishing precision. This gives the set enormous contrast, free from the haloing around bright objects seen on lesser LED sets. So much so, its HDR performance is leaps and bounds ahead of both Panasonic and LG rivals.
The set also looks phenomenal with regular HD, a benefit of its upscaling X1Extreme HDR image processor. If Sony has produced a better looking 4K TV, then we’ve not seen it!