When comparing LG B7A OLED 55" (OLED55B7A) vs Sony X900E 55" (XBR55X900E), the Slant community recommends LG B7A OLED 55" (OLED55B7A) for most people. In the question“What are the best TVs?” LG B7A OLED 55" (OLED55B7A) is ranked 4th while Sony X900E 55" (XBR55X900E) is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose LG B7A OLED 55" (OLED55B7A) is:
The B7A is the perfect choice for HDR content. On top of its exceptional picture quality with perfectly deep blacks, it has everything essential to an excellent HDR experience: an OLED panel, wide color gamut, and high peak HDR brightness levels. Shadow details are perfect and highlights are really stunning, making for an immersive experience. The OLED panel can manipulate pixels individually, which means it has control over every tiny bit of the picture. The panel can also reproduce the colors necessary for true HDR, and these colors will really pop thanks to its high peak brightness level of ~700 nits.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Perfect for HDR content
The B7A is the perfect choice for HDR content. On top of its exceptional picture quality with perfectly deep blacks, it has everything essential to an excellent HDR experience: an OLED panel, wide color gamut, and high peak HDR brightness levels.
Shadow details are perfect and highlights are really stunning, making for an immersive experience. The OLED panel can manipulate pixels individually, which means it has control over every tiny bit of the picture.
The panel can also reproduce the colors necessary for true HDR, and these colors will really pop thanks to its high peak brightness level of ~700 nits.
Pro Great at handling reflections
The B7A is great at handling reflections. It can fight glare pretty well in bright environments, thanks to its anti-reflective coating on the panel.
Pro Interface is intuitive and user-friendly
The B7A runs on the webOS smart platform, known for its intuitive and fully customizable UI. It’s built around a Launch Bar that provides quick and easy access to the TV's apps, settings, and inputs. This can be customized and re-organized to the user's liking.
Pro Wide viewing angle
The B7A looks good from almost any angle thanks to its OLED panel, making it a great choice if you usually watch the TV with large groups of people.
Its viewing angle is wide enough for a group of audience to experience more or less similar picture quality when watching from multiple angles off the center of the screen. The black levels and brightness only starts degrading at ≥75°, which means the picture quality will stay roughly the same no matter which angle the screen is viewed from.
Pro Great color reproduction
The B7A can reproduce a really broad range of colors that are crucial for HDR, which also means it has zero issues with SDR colors.
It’s capable of reproducing ~70% of the standard colors for 4K HDR, the Rec. 2020 colorspace. This is one of the highest in the 4K TVs market.
It can also display these colors at different brightness levels accurately that conveys much more HDR details than its direct competitors can.
Pro Extremely versatile
Apart from games, the B7A is great for movies and sports. Its top-notch picture quality, combined with the features it offers, makes it perform really well across different kinds of use cases.
Movies look excellent thanks to the exceptional picture quality, and it’s also a great pick for watching sports because the motion blur is non-existent and the panel is really uniform.
It has near-perfect pixel response time of ~1.0ms, resulting in virtually no motion blur, so fast-moving objects like football don’t leave any trails on the screen. The panel is also uniform enough that it has no issues with displaying large, same-color objects on screen, like football fields.
Pro Good value for money
While the B7A can seem rather expensive, the picture quality and features it offers is top-of-the-line and can’t be beaten. The performance easily outclasses all other TVs in this price bracket.
Pro Suitable as a computer monitor
The B7A can display clear and crisp images from a computer thanks to its full 4:4:4 color support. Because of this, text or shapes with clear, hard edges won’t be blurry.
Pro Excellent at handling dynamic content
The B7A can display extremely fast-moving objects smoothly without any blur or lag, thanks to its OLED panel that has near-perfect pixel response time of ~1.0ms.
Pro Excellent for gaming
The B7A is excellent for gaming thanks to its really low input lag and near-perfect pixel response time that gives it virtually no motion blur.
It’s perfect for all types of games, even fast-paced action games. The experience will be really responsive and fluid. Players will have no issues keeping their actions in sync with what’s on the display thanks to the really low input lag of ~20ms, and fast-moving objects won’t leave any trails on the screen because the panel has a response time of ~1.0ms - it can fully change its pixels color in that tiny amount of time.
Pro Remote is well-designed
The B7A comes with LG's Magic Remote, touted for its easy-to-use design.
It works similarly to a Nintendo Wii remote where the on-screen cursor follows the remote's movement, making it easy to navigate the UI and select menu items.
The remote also has a built-in microphone for the voice command feature, which also supports content searching with voice input.
Pro Excellent for HDR gaming
The B7A’s input lag remains low at ~20ms even when gaming in 4K @ 60Hz + HDR, making for an really immersive and responsive HDR gaming experience.
Pro Smart platform has great ecosystem of apps
The B7A 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.
Pro Exceptional picture quality
The B7A's picture quality is top-of-the-line. It has an OLED panel that gives it infinite contrast ratio, excellent screen uniformity, high peak brightness, wide viewing angle, and great handling of reflections.
Thanks to that, it can reproduce blacks perfectly and the uniformity is top-notch - they’re truly dark and even, because the OLED panel has the ability to manipulate pixels individually.
Colors really shine and look true-to-life, thanks to the peak brightness levels peak of ~400 nits for SDR & ~700 nits for HDR.
The picture quality also doesn't suffer from much deterioration when viewed from any angle because the panel has a really wide viewing angle. It’s also capable of maintaining the same picture quality in bright environments, thanks to its high peak brightness levels and great handling of reflections.
Pro Excellent for watching sports
The Sony X900E is an excellent companion for watching sports because of its admirable image quality, decent motion representation, and good color uniformity.
Aided by a highly sensitive panel, the Sony X900E handles its motion blur well as the TV needs only around a 100th of a second for its pixels to switch their color entirely. As a result, moving objects leave just a tiny trail on the screen. The X900E’s pixel response time outperforms every competitor in its price range.
The TV can also display beautiful and uniform colors, which allows it to reproduce sports pitches correctly. In fact, the Sony X900E is among the best in its range concerning color uniformity.
Pro Handles reflections well
The Sony X900E is an excellent option for those who need a TV for a bright room since its panel does an outstanding job of handling reflections thanks to the semi-gloss screen finish, which can diffuse around 98.8% of the incoming light.
Pro Excellent for HDR media
The Sony X900E has everything needed for displaying high-quality HDR content. First, the X900E supports wide color gamut which is essential for a decent HDR experience as it allows the TV to reproduce deep and vibrant colors. Second, in HDR mode, the Sony X900E can sustain up to 525 nits of brightness, which enables it to fight glare and display vivid colors even in bright environments. In its range, the Sony X900E is the most luminous TV.
Pro Excellent for 60p and 24p signals
The Sony X900E is an excellent TV for those who use cable/satellite boxes, DVD/Blu-ray players, and Apple TV because it can detect and eliminate the ‘2:3’ judder effect. This effect is usually caused by 24p content being transmitted using the 60 Hz signal.
Pro Ads-free UI
The main interface of the Sony X900E does not have advertising.
Pro Large app selection
The Sony X900E runs the Android smart TV platform, which has the widest app selection among all current smart TV platforms. All of the applications are available via the Google Play Store.
Pro Compatible with all current-generation consoles
This 4K120 TV is entirely compatible with all of the current generation gaming consoles, including the Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, and Wii U. Additionally, it’s highly unlikely that within the next couple of years any gaming console will break the 120 Hz barrier; so it is expected that this TV will remain compatible even with the next generation consoles.
Pro Suitable for gaming
The Sony X900E is also suitable for gaming because of the TV’s low input lag. While in ‘Game Mode’, the TV’s input lag remains at 34.2 ms allowing for relatively fast-paced gameplay.
Pro Excellent picture quality
The Sony X900E has the best picture quality in its range as the TV manages to balance high contrast ratio, marvelous SDR and HDR brightness, decent color uniformity, acceptable black uniformity, and good color accuracy.
The TV does an outstanding job with dark scenes as its contrast ratio of 5411:1 is perfectly balanced with its decent black uniformity, allowing the X900E to display deep and immersive dark scenes.
As for bright scenes, the TV’s peak luminosity is 509 nits, which is more than enough for making colorful scenes look really luminous, even if the TV is in a bright room.
Cons
Con May require some color calibration out of the box
Out of the box, the B7A’s white balance might look slightly off to some viewer, so a brief calibration might be required if you notice it. Fortunately, all the optimal color settings are available on the internet and isn’t hard to find.
Con Interface has ads
The B7A's interface includes ads that can’t be removed - there’s no option to disable it. Ads on this TV can be really annoying when compared to other smart TVs because they're almost everywhere. There are video ads in LG's Content Store, apps menu, and even voice search results.
Con Below average sound quality
The sound quality of the B7A's built-in speakers is below average. It can't get very loud with the max volume peaking at ~85db, and sound quality it offers does not match the picture quality.
Con Suffers from image retention issues
The main drawback of OLED panels are image retention issues with static images - pixels on the panel gets burned in when the picture doesn't change for extended periods of time. This usually happens with content that has a static image anywhere on the screen, like the logo of TV channels.
As the B7A has an OLED panel, it unfortunately suffers from this problem. There might be some retainment of artifacts for ~15 minutes when this happens, and it usually goes away after watching other content without static images.
There are some cases where normal content won't cut it, which usually happens when the static image has been there for more than some hours. Fortunately, the B7A has a “Pixel Refresher” feature that can recalibrate the screen, which should get rid of any remaining artifacts.
Con Horrible sound quality
The sound quality of the Sony X900E is a total mismatch to the TV’s excellent picture quality. Additionally, the TV is unable to get really loud as it caps off at 90 dB.
Con Minor image retention problems
If you leave an image on the screen for an extended period, you might notice some minor ghosting effect which will disappear within a couple of minutes. This is a very unusual thing for a VA LED TV.
Con Narrow viewing angle
Like most VA panel TVs, the Sony X900E suffers from massive image degradation due to the viewing angle. The maximum viewing angle of this TV is only 17 degrees.