Last year, WIRED gave the LG B5 an 8 out of 10. This year its successor, the LG B6, gets a 7. Same job, same slot at the bottom of LG's OLED lineup, lower grade. Nothing in WIRED's LG B6 OLED TV review suggests the TV got worse. The shelf around it just got crowded.
If you're shopping, that's the useful part. A TV never gets graded in a vacuum. It gets graded against whatever else your money could buy this month.
A cheaper OLED in a pricier crowd
The B6 is the least expensive OLED LG sells, priced under both the C6 and the G6. Listings show it at $1,300 from Amazon, Best Buy and LG directly, against a $2,000 sticker price. For a technology that used to mean a real splurge, that's a real discount.
But a discount isn't the only game in town anymore. Amazon's Ember Artline, an art-style set with a matte screen, costs under $1,000 and renders famous paintings with convincing realism. RGB-backlit televisions, including LG's own Micro RGB Evo and models from Samsung and Hisense, have arrived with a pitch of their own: more punch than an OLED, without the OLED premium on the very top models.
So the B6 gets squeezed from three sides. Cheaper art sets pull one kind of buyer away, brighter RGB sets pull another, and the LG C6 sits a short step up the same product line, tempting anyone who's already stretching.
Thin, simple, and a remote that fights you
The hardware is easy to like. The B6 measures only 1.8 inches at its thickest point, near the base, and shrinks to about a quarter-inch across the top and most of the bezel. OLED pixels make their own light, so there's no backlight layer to hide. The chunkier bottom strip houses the ports: four HDMI inputs (every one of them capable of 120 Hz), an optical audio output, two USB 2.0 slots and an ethernet jack. Wi-Fi tops out at the older Wi-Fi 5 standard, a small penny-pinch you'd only notice on a spec sheet.
The reviewer, John Brandon, tested a 65-inch model. It attaches to two legs, two screws apiece, and sat comfortably across a pair of 38-inch IKEA benches pushed together. He'd rather have a single central pedestal, but he calls that a matter of taste.
Setup runs through LG's WebOS software and the ThinQ phone app rather than Google TV or Fire TV. On an iPhone it took minutes, and Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV+ were loaded shortly after. The feature list is generous. There's a low-latency gaming mode and AI picture tweaks that, per the review, make a visible difference instead of just sounding good on the box. A desktop mode mirrors a laptop screen (Gmail app included), a dialogue-sync setting is borrowed from powered speakers, and an LG music app is there for people who don't want Spotify. The artwork mode, LG Gallery+, costs $5 a month. Paying a subscription to make your TV look like a wall decoration is a hard sell next to a $1,300 purchase.
Then there's the remote. A pointer that can't be switched off jumps around the screen, and pressing the center dial shuts it off only briefly, which feels like a design team quietly admitting the pointer isn't great. The Home button sits off to one side where thumbs don't find it, and the app shortcuts along the bottom aren't backlit. In a dark room, exactly where you'd want an OLED, you end up feeling around for buttons like a person hunting for a light switch in a hotel.
Where the budget shows
Start with what LG won't say. The official specs promise "wide color gamut" without giving a percentage for the BT.2020 standard, and they list no brightness number at all. When a manufacturer leaves out the figures that make a TV look good, the figures usually aren't flattering. Brandon ran benchmarks rather than rely on the marketing.
The good news is black levels. Dark grays and near-blacks showed texture and detail, which matters because plenty of midrange sets turn night scenes into gray mud. Two very dark films, Awake and The Creator, played clearly once he made a few picture adjustments, chiefly switching to Vivid mode. A slightly funny fix for a screen whose main talent is darkness, but it worked.
The trouble starts when brightness and contrast both have to do heavy lifting. For a stress test, Brandon turned to the notoriously murky Battle of Winterfell episode from Game of Thrones' final season. In one scene a character walks out onto a frozen lake. On a stronger TV, or a home theater projector, you can make out the trees behind her. On the B6 they vanish into solid black. That's contrast trouble in practice: the detail isn't dim, it's gone.
Color tells a similar story. Saturation and luminance lagged behind the RGB sets he'd tested recently. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, a film packed with glowing, blooming effects, looked fine but less crisp than it did on LG's Micro RGB Evo. A calmer title, The End of Oak Street, held up better. On a demo reel, winter grass by a fence came out browner than it should have. Skin tones, though, were better than average, which is arguably the one color test most families will notice every day.
Add it up and the B6 is excellent at being dark and merely competent at being vivid. If your viewing is dim-room movies, that trade might suit you. If your living room has big windows, a brighter RGB set is going to look better at noon.
It also makes the RGB pitch stronger than it first sounds. The B6's weakness lines up almost exactly with what RGB sets do best, and the review's verdict is that brighter alternatives, LG's own C6 included, beat it where it counts.
A better gaming screen than the badge suggests
LG isn't the brand most people name when you ask about gaming TVs. Brandon says that spot belongs to Sony. Still, the B6 earns some credit.
The 120 Hz panel kept things crisp and responsive while he played Crimson Desert on a PC. Resident Evil: Requiem, a game that leans on shadow and grime, looked close to photographic on the screen. Pair that with four full-speed HDMI ports and it's an easy recommendation if you have a console, a PC and a streaming box all fighting for inputs. You won't be swapping cables to get the fast refresh rate.
The dark-scene strength helps here too. Horror games live in dim corridors, and the B6's handling of blacks does more for them than any brightness spec would.
Who should buy it
The B6 is a good TV, and the review says so plainly. It's an inexpensive way into OLED, with rich blacks, easy setup, a fast panel for games and better-than-average skin tones. What it isn't anymore is the obvious default.
If $1,300 is your ceiling and you watch mostly in the evening, it's still a smart pick. If you can stretch to the C6, the review points that way. And if a bright room is your reality, an RGB set deserves a look first.
Keep an eye on the price. Sticker-to-street gaps like this one ($2,000 down to $1,300 already) tend to widen, and as RGB sets get cheaper, the B6's discount may need to deepen to keep it competitive. Whether LG lets that happen, or leaves its own C6 as the quiet favorite, nobody has said.