LG OLED55B7 vs Philips 55POS9002 Ultra HD OLED TV comparison review

Picture quality

Picture analysis and calibration performed using Portrait Displays Calman 2017 Ultimate for Business software, SpectraCal C6 colorimeter and VideoForge and Murideo Fresco SIX-G pattern generator.

LG OLED55B7	Philips 55POS9002

You can get settings after calibration by visiting my Payhip store >>

Panel quality and backlight features

* – grades 1-4, 1 = bad, 2 = average, 3 = good, 4 = excellent

LG OLED55B7V grey uniformity check on 10% and 50% patterns (same results on Philips 55POS9002):

Signal processing

* – grades 1-4, 1 = bad, 2 = average, 3 = good, 4 = excellent

High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wider Color Gamut (WCG) in UHD content

* – grades 1-4, 1 = bad, 2 = average, 3 = good, 4 = excellent

Picture quality – overall

* – grades 1-4, 1 = bad, 2 = average, 3 = good, 4 = excellent

Based on the scores both TVs collected in the series of different tests, LG OLED55B7 won the picture quality section but not by a lot. Both TVs perform really well in both SDR and HDR content as well as standard, high- and ultra-high definition. I saw an improvement compared to 2016 HDR TVs in terms of factory color accuracy that is important for a vast majority of users that will not – from this or that reason – professionally calibrate their TV. Still, both TVs need to be switched to picture modes other than those activated by default as factory picture quality is really poor.

Backed by the same WRGB OLED panel as well as UHD Premium certificate, it was very interesting to compare picture processing between these two TVs. One of the benefits of Philips’s new P5 picture processing is improved upscaling sharpness which cannot be fully matched by LG even with increased Sharpness and Super Resolution controls. P5 handles upscaling very nicely and even though I prefer as neutral picture as possible, I really liked how processing was done. I suggest you play around with Sharpness control till you find the optimal value – for me, it was between 1/10 and 2/10 (this also depends on how far away you sit from the screen).

On the other hand, noise reduction yielded surprising results. When all Noise reduction controls were turned off, LG had cleaner noise in the image. Philips’s noise was more coarse and distracting. But once Noise reduction was activated, Philips had a cleaner picture with nice amount of details in it. As I do not mind noise in the picture, especially if we talk about film grain, I liked LG’s picture more.

Both TVs handle standard definition interlaced content well, with sometimes visible aliasing on the edges even though HQV Benchmark 2.0 Blu-ray disc revealed correct cadence detection on every test sample. Again, Philips has an upper hand here as its Sharpness control works better and can help improve the perception of details with low-resolution content.

MPEG noise reduction is of limited success on both TVs and I was a bit surprised that P5 performs exactly the same as LG’s processing. Though both TVs can make compression artifacts a bit blurry so that they do not stand out too much, they cannot make highly compressed content to appear amazing. No TV on the market can do that, so for the best result you should turn towards quality content providers or Blu-ray/UHD Blu-ray.

PC users will like the fact that on LG OLED TV after certain luminance level the screen will not vary in brightness depending on the content. I discovered that around OLED Light value of 25/100, the luminance is the same regardless of how many pixels are active. Philips 55POS9002 does not have such function implemented.

SDR-to-HDR conversion was better on Philips as it was more subtle and did not deteriorate picture accuracy as much as the one on LG. LG’s HDR Effect option as low as “Light” was changing gamma too much so the picture would appear artificial.

Both TVs still exhibit vertical stripes when displaying uniform near-black content, which is something that is plaguing current OLED technology. Even much more expensive OLED TVs such as Panasonic TX-65EZ1002 suffer from this issue. In reality, I was not bothered with it during this test and I do not see it on my 55EA980V OLED TV that I have for over 2 years now. I am sure most of you will say the same.

For some reason, I write about UHD HDR at the very end of this summary despite this type of content being the star of the show. UHD HDR content looks amazing on both sets – picture dynamics were excellent and a real joy to watch every content I could get my hands on. Using Samsung UBD-K8500 and OPPO UDP-205 Ultra HD Blu-ray players, I watched many scenes from The Revenant, Despicable Me 2, Planet Earth II and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in HDR10 format.  Backed up by measurements as well, both TVs show improvement over 2016 UHD HDR TVs in terms of color accuracy and great tone mapping with many details in highlights. Philips even has a particular control for adjustment of tone mapping, HDR Perfect, that at the end I left at Maximum for the best result.

There is no winner in the HDR section as both TVs perform equally great, but this goes for HDR10 format only. The advantage LG’s B7 has is the addition of Dolby Vision support that I verified to work on Despicable Me 2 UHD BD disc. Dolby Vision uses dynamic metadata that applies different brightness parameters for each frame as opposed to HDR10 which uses static metadata for the whole content. Rtings website has a wonderful guide comparing HDR10 and Dolby Vision, check it out for more details.

Despite the technical aspects that should lead to better picture quality in case of Dolby Vision content over HDR10, I did not find the former as impressive as expected on LG B7 OLED TV. Both looked great, much better than SDR, but Dolby Vision appeared to be somewhat brighter, like when you play around with gamma control. This was the reason why more details in shadows on Dolby Vision version were visible. The vibrancy of colors and gradations to me looked the same. Since I did not have two exactly the same TVs like Vincent from HDTVtest had in his comparison, I had to rely on comparing the same disc first on LG and then on Philips OLED TV and by speeding up Dolby Vision version on OPPO to briefly get HDR10 “slideshow”. I will compare in detail Dolby Vision and HDR10 in the future, hopefully in a better way to get more concrete results.

Winner: LG OLED55B7