LG B7A OLED 55" (OLED55B7A) vs Sony X720E 49" (KD49X720E)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Sony X720E makes an excellent computer monitor because it can smoothly display sharp and crisp images since the TV has full 4:4:4 color support, short input lag, and well-handled motion blur.

The full 4:4:4 color support allows the X720E to process non-compressed, computer-generated video inputs. Therefore, the TV can display sharp and crisp images, without any detail loss. This is especially noticeable while working with text and other vector graphics.

Additionally, the TV’s input lag of 19.7 ms ensures that it takes less than 20 ms for a TV to display an image change after you press a button. Such delay is almost unnoticeable to a human's eye.

The combination of handled motion blur and low input lag makes this 4K60 TV a great companion to the latest generation consoles, like the Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, and Wii U. Additionally, the TV’s full HDR support allows you to fully experience HDR-enhanced games such as World of Tanks, FIFA 18, etc.

The 43-inch model of Sony X720E does not take up too much space on a work desk as the TV comes with a compact, 9.4-inch by 21.9-inch stand.

Unlike the majority of OLED panels, this LED TV does not suffer from image retention problems. You can leave the TV on for long periods without having to worry about pixel damage.

The reasonably small panel size of 43-inch means you can still be comfortable looking at the screen up close. Therefore, you can conveniently use this TV as a computer monitor and sit as close as 2.2 feet away from it.

The main interface of the smart OS does not feature advertisements or sponsored content.

Regarding connectivity, this TV is has everything you'd currently want. It has three HDCP 2.2 compliant HDMI 2.0 ports, digital and analog audio output ports, and an Ethernet port. Additionally, as the TV has a composite input interface, you can enjoy playing your retro consoles, such as Nintendo or Sega without having to go through the hassle of signal conversion. HDMI, USB, and analog coaxial ports are situated on the side of the TV so you won’t have any problem accessing them even if it’s mounted on a wall.

This TV does a fantastic job when it comes to upscaling low-resolution content. In a nutshell, it can upscale 480p, 720p, and 1080p content to 4K resolution while preserving details and sharp edges. Great for those with a collection of old DVDs or Blu-ray disks.

The IPS panel of the Sony X720E gives you an extra bit of flexibility when it comes to finding a good viewing spot as its maximum viewing angle is 41 degrees; a double of what the competitors with VA panels can offer.

The combination of reasonably high peak brightness and semi-gloss screen finish allows this TV to deal with reflections and glare efficiently. Its 340 nits of brightness are more than what its direct competitors, including The VIZIO M-series and Samsung MU6300 offer. Furthermore, as the X720E diffuses up to 97.6% of ambient light, it does not suffer from reflections.

The Sony X720E has all the bits and pieces needed to deliver the excellent experience of watching sports and other fast-paced content. The TV has good control over its motion blur, excellent color uniformity, and wide viewing angle.

The X720E needs only 7.5 ms for its pixels to change their color; as a result, fast-moving objects don’t leave long trails on the screen, meaning that the motion blur effect is almost negligible.

Good color uniformity is another parameter that really makes a difference when watching sports. It allows the TV to display beautiful and uniform sports fields and pitches, without any unwanted artifacts. The maximum color deviation of this TV is below 2.5%, which means that the TV can sustain stable and uniform colors throughout its screen. The X720E has the best color uniformity in its range.