The S405 is excellent for gaming - the overall experience will be very responsive thanks to the barely noticeable input lag and motion blur.
The TV only takes ~15ms to respond to the user's input, and it can also fully change its pixels color in that same time, resulting in fast-moving objects not leaving any trails on the screen, eliminating virtually all motion blur.
It's also great for HDR gaming because there is no increased input lag for HDR, and it has full 4K @ 60 FPS support, which makes it suitable for all new 4K games.
The S405 has a narrow viewing angle that makes it unsuitable for watching with groups.
Audience sitting away from the center of the screen will not experience the same picture as those sitting in the center, because the picture quality starts to deteriorate significantly when viewing from just ≥30° away from the screen's center.
The S405 strikes a nice balance between picture quality, screen size, and input lag, all for an affordable price of below $500. It's a great choice for casual watching and gaming without breaking the bank.
Compared to its direct competitors, it offers decent picture quality that is a tad below them, bigger screen size, and lower input lag.
Content looks decent enough for most casual viewers - the black levels are sufficiently deep, colors are vivid, and it gets bright enough for most types of content in a dark room.
The size difference is pretty huge - options with similar size of 49", or even smaller, cost fairly more than the S405.
Its low input lag of ~15ms contributes to a more responsive gaming experience. It's barely noticeable, and it’s also one of the lowest in the 4K TVs market, which is an impressive feat in this price bracket.
The S405 can't reproduce HDR pictures very well because it lacks various important features.
HDR won't look much different from SDR due to the lack of wide color gamut and low peak brightness. It can't reproduce the full range of colors necessary for HDR, and the brightness level of only ~200 nits is barely enough for HDR content to stand out.
The black levels are also insufficient for highlights to stand out, and it won't be as dynamic as one would expect for HDR due to the lack of local dimming.
The S405 runs on the Roku TV smart platform, touted for its simple, straightforward, and lag-free UI.
It’s easy for anyone to grasp how navigation works, thanks to its two-column design with the menu on the left and options on the right.
There’s also no noticeable lag during navigation or menu selection.
The 43" model of the TCL S405 can be placed on top of your work desk and used as a computer monitor, thanks to its reasonably small panel size and low minimum viewing distance of 2.2 ft.
The full 4K support at 60 FPS (frames per second) makes it perfectly compatible with all current generation gaming consoles, like the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro.
The S405 can deal with small amounts of light, such as sunlight through curtains, but it won't be able to stand up to huge amounts of light.
Its handling of reflections is only average, and it can't get bright enough. The panel has a semi-gloss finish which helps in reducing reflections a little, but its peak brightness level of ~200 nits is not enough for fighting glare.
The S405 is a good pick for watching sports thanks to its low motion blur and reasonably consistent color uniformity.
Fast-moving objects, like footballs, won't leave any visible trails on the screen thanks to the low motion blur of ~15ms. While there are slight uniformity inconsistencies in the edges of the panel when displaying large, same-color objects on screen, like football fields, the issues generally go unnoticed by most.
The S405 works well as a computer monitor thanks to its low input lag, barely noticeable motion blur, and full 4:4:4 color support. The 43" model can even be used up close due to its small minimal viewing distance.
The low input lag and low motion blur of ~15ms makes it highly responsive to input and gives it the ability to handle dynamic content well.
It also has full 4:4:4 color support that, so text or shapes with hard edges on the screen won't be blurry.
The S405 looks decent with adequately deep black levels, above-average color accuracy, and sufficient peak brightness levels for most content.
It’s especially great at reproducing dark scenes thanks to the panel’s contrast ratio of about 4000:1, which means blacks can get really dark at about 4000 times darker than the brightest white it can produce.
Colors are spot-on even without calibration, and the panel can get bright enough with a peak brightness level of ~200 nits to make them pop in dark environments.
The best viewing experience will be in a dark environment where the panel won’t have to compete with light - the S405’s screen can’t really get bright enough to perform as well in bright environments.
The S405 is excellent at reproducing colors accurately out of the box.
Even without calibration, the colors are spot-on - they're very close to what the source signal demands, and any inaccuracies are generally considered imperceptible to most end users.
The overall average difference between the source signal and the panel's reproduction of the color is measured in Delta-E, where lower means better accuracy. The S405 has a Delta-E of below 2.0, and anything below 3.0 is generally considered accurate for most end users.
The S405 has no ads on its main interface, although there can be ads in third-party applications. Third-party ads can't be blocked, but the tracking and personalisation can be limited through the TV's settings.
The S405 has a basic remote that is only capable of navigation, playback control, and volume control. It doesn't have fancy stuff like voice command found in remotes of other TVs.
The speakers on the S405 is too bassy and distortion becomes a huge problem at high volumes. A relatively cheap speaker system or a soundbar will make a huge difference in sound quality.
The S405 is versatile enough to be used as a general-purpose display.
The picture quality is decent for movies and TV shows, and it checks all the boxes that makes a TV suitable for gaming, sports, and as a computer monitor: low input lag, low motion blur, good screen uniformity, and full 4:4:4 color support.
The S405 is a decent, affordable pick if you're a casual viewer. You'll get decent picture quality and a good 4K experience, but the HDR performance might be lacklustre due to the lack of local dimming, wide color gamut, and low HDR peak brightness.
The UJ6300 is a decent choice for gaming thanks to its extremely low input lag, excellent response time, and full 4K 60 FPS support.
In terms of input lag, this TV outperforms almost every currently available high-end TV. The low input lag makes the TV great for fast games. The motion blur is really low at ~17ms, so fast-moving objects won't leave any trails at all.
It’s also compatible with 60 Hz 4K input which makes it suitable for high-end console gaming.
The UJ6300 fails to reproduce deep and uniform blacks. Its dark images look smoky and grey-ish, which makes many dark scenes look awful. Furthermore, the panel’s low contrast ratio of only 1314:1 makes the blacks look distorted and flat.
The UJ6300 is great at handling motion, making it a good choice for displaying fast and dynamic content. Fast-moving objects don't leave any discernible trails behind them, thanks to its low motion blur of only ~17ms.
The UJ6300 can’t fight glare well in really bright environments because of the panel’s low peak brightness level. The brightness peaks at only ~170 nits for SDR, which is really low. Even cheaper and lower-tier TVs are usually brighter.
The UJ6300 will run content from the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X smoothly, and its input lag stays low at ~13ms even with HDR-enhanced 4K content. You will not notice any increased delay when switching from SDR gaming mode to HDR.
The UJ6300 suffers from minor image retention issues. If a static image is on the screen for more than 10 minutes, it gets burned in and you'll be able to see it retained on the screen faintly, which is really unpleasant. Fortunately, this does not cause permanent pixel damage and disappears in around 5 minutes.
The UJ6300 can upscale 480p, 720p, and 1080p content quite well. The majority of details will be preserved, although there might be some artifacts on the sides of an image.
The UJ6300 does a decent job at lowering the intensity of glare. Reflections are kept to a minimum thanks to the panel's semi-gloss finish. In fact, only around 1.9% of total light is reflected - a feat surpassed only by a handful of higher-end TVs.
The UJ6300 runs on the webOS smart platform. It has a great ecosystem of apps, ranging from media streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, etc.) to third-party apps. Support for these apps are also first-class with up-to-date features and good performance; for instance, the YouTube app supports 360-degree video playback.
Apart from some tiny details, it seems like LG adapted their old remote from 2016 to the UJ6300. The remote is as basic as it can get. It does not have any smart functions that can be found on higher-tier LG TVs. In fact, it is very disappointing that this TV does not have LG’s new Magic Remote.
Because of the TV’s specific RGBW pixel structure, some unwanted artifacts might occur while the TV is displaying 4K content. The problem with the RGBW pixel structure is that only 75% of the total panel's pixels can produce colors, which results in lower quality and less detailed picture.