We sampled our collection of UHD Blu-ray titles on the LG 55E6, swapping between a Samsung UBD-K8500 and a Panasonic DMP-UB900 – the two 4K
BD players available in the UK at this time of writing – as the video source. With both players, [HDMI Ultra HD Deep Colour] (buried in the TV’s [General] submenu) needs to be manually switched on for the specific HDMI port before proper 4K HDR playback can take place. Without the setting enabled, the Samsung K8500 would produce a picture riddled with posterization/ banding, crushed blacks and oversaturated reds; whereas the Panasonic UB900 wouldn’t even send the HDR metadata, opting to downconvert to SDR instead.
Once we got 4K HDR Ultra HD Blu-ray up and working, we compared the HDR presentation on the LG OLED55E6V side-by-side against a calibrated Panasonic DX900 LED LCD, the most accurate consumer-grade TV so far in terms of PQ EOTF and Rec2020 tracking. And straight away we could see that colours didn’t look right on the OLED: the sandy desert in Mad Max adopted an orangey tint, giving off a cartoony feel (even though some viewers may prefer this richly saturated look); while skin tones in The Martian appeared ruddier than usual even during scenes on Earth. Furthermore, the E6′s default [Brightness] setting of “50” crushed a not insignificant amount of shadow detail, requiring a few upward clicks to bring black floor in line with the Panasonic DX9.
Where the 55E6 had the definite upper hand was in low-APL sequences: stars shone brightly against night skies in both The Martian and Mad Max without incurring halos, and blacks clearly looked inkier on the LG OLED. At the other end of the contrast spectrum though, the sun and specular highlights went brighter and thus were more impactful on the Panasonic LED TV.
Disappointed with the 55E6V’s HDR10 colour fidelity, we moved on to check out its Dolby Vision HDR performance using several demo clips (including snippets from Pan and Jupiter Ascending) kindly supplied by Dolby. Immediately we could tell that colour tones looked correct: DV’s dynamic metadata seemed to have mapped the greyscale and colours accurately, so it’s like watching a pristine Blu-ray on steroids (more shadow and highlight detail visible simultaneously on screen without blowing one another out).