LG B3 OLED TV Review

The TV has an elegant style similar to other LG OLEDs. It has a thin silver border with slim bezels. Otherwise, it has a center-mounted stand with a thin panel and a mainly gray body.

The center-mounted stand has a small footprint and keeps the TV stable, but it doesn't prevent all wobble. However, it doesn't take the TV long to settle after it starts wobbling, so it isn't an issue in practice. It's made from plastic even though it looks like metal. The stand lifts the TV about 2.1" above the table, so placing a soundbar in front of it blocks part of the screen.

Footprint of the 65" stand: 22" x 9.5"

The LG B3 OLED has a metal back panel, and the part housing the inputs is plastic with a brushed aluminum look. Some of the inputs are side-facing and easy to access with the TV wall-mounted, but the back-facing ones are harder to reach, and you can't make the TV sit flush against the wall if you have cables plugged into the back. Unfortunately, the back-facing ports are the TV's two HDMI 2.1 bandwidth ports.

There's a clip for cable management to help keep your setup clean.

The TV has excellent build quality. It's well put together, and there aren't any obvious quality control issues. It has a solid metal back panel, and while the plastic portion with the inputs does flex quite a bit when pushed, it's not a problem during use. Despite the stand's small size, it still supports the TV well, and there's only a bit of wobble from front to back.

The LG B3 OLED has a nearly infinite contrast ratio like every other OLED. As each pixel can individually control its own brightness due to OLED's self-emissive technology, you can have super bright highlights next to pixels that are completely off, leading to perfect blacks with no blooming or haloing.

Since pixels can be completely turned off next to pixels that are lit up to their maximum brightness, the blacks surrounding bright elements are perfect and don't have any blooming.

As with other OLED TVs, this TV doesn't have a backlight, but its self-emissive pixels give it the equivalent of a perfect local dimming feature with no zone transitions. We still film the zone transition video on the TV so you can see how the screen performs and compare it with a TV that has local dimming.

There's no difference in dark scene behavior between the calibrated picture modes and Game Mode.

The TV has decent HDR peak brightness. It's enough to make some small highlights stand out, but its overall HDR experience isn't as good as other OLEDs, like the LG C3 OLED.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Cinema
• OLED Pixel Brightness: 100
• Adjust Contrast: 100
• Peak Brightness: High
• Color Temperature: Warm 50
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off
• Auto Dynamic Contrast: Off

Here are measurements with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'On':

The LG B3 has decent HDR peak brightness in Game Mode, although it's slightly dimmer than in the other calibrated picture modes.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Game Optimizer
• OLED Pixel Brightness: 100
• Adjust Contrast: 100
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: HGiG
• Peak Brightness: High
• Color Temperature: Warm 50

Here are measurements with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'On':

Here are measurements with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'Off':

The PQ EOTF tracking of this TV with HDR10 content is nearly flawless. There are a few minor bumps along the way, but most scenes are displayed at exactly the brightness level the content creator intended. There's a sharp cutoff at the TV's peak brightness with content mastered at 600 and 1000 nits, causing a loss of bright details in extremely bright scenes. Inversely, the TV slowly rolls off when it gets near its peak brightness for content mastered at 4000 nits, preserving fine details in the process. You can also see how different Dynamic Tone Mapping (DTM) settings impact the EOTF here.

The TV has okay SDR peak brightness. It's enough to fight glare if you have a few small lights around, but scenes with larger areas of bright colors, like in hockey or basketball, are dimmer due to the Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL).

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Expert (Dark Space, Night)
• OLED Pixel Brightness: 100
• Adjust Contrast: 85
• Peak Brightness: High
• Color Temperature: Warm 50

Setting Peak Brightness to 'Off' reduces the aggressiveness of the ABL but also lowers the peak brightness to about 260 cd/m² in most scenes. Setting the input to Game Mode or PC Mode, or setting the 4:4:4 Pass Through option to 'On', locks the Peak Brightness option to 'Off'. Here are measurements with the setting disabled:

• Peak 2% Window: 268 cd/m²
• Peak 10% Window: 269 cd/m²
• Peak 25% Window: 270 cd/m²
• Peak 50% Window: 268 cd/m²
• Peak 100% Window: 160 cd/m²
• Sustained 2% Window: 259 cd/m²
• Sustained 10% Window: 258 cd/m²
• Sustained 25% Window: 258 cd/m²
• Sustained 50% Window: 256 cd/m²
• Sustained 100% Window: 155 cd/m²

The LG B3 has an excellent HDR color gamut. It has fantastic DCI-P3 coverage, which is the most common color space used in most HDR content, and has good coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space. However, tone mapping is off with both, resulting in inaccurate colors, especially with green between both color spaces.

The LG B3 has very good color volume. It displays dark and bright colors well, but its lower peak brightness limits it when it comes to displaying very bright colors. Like all OLEDs, it excels at dark, saturated colors.

The LG B3 has excellent pre-calibration accuracy in SDR. It displays colors well and has minimal inaccuracies to the white balance. However, the color temperature is on the cold side, giving the image a blue tint, and gamma is slightly off from the 2.2 target for moderately-lit rooms, as most scenes are a bit too dark, more so in very dark scenes.

The TV has incredible accuracy after calibration. It's easy to calibrate thanks to its already excellent pre-calibration accuracy. The grayscale was easy to configure, and all white balance issues are gone. The colors are now fantastic, and the TV's gamma and color temperature are now exactly on target.

You can see the full calibration settings used here.

The TV has great gray uniformity. The screen is uniform throughout, and there isn't any noticeable dirty screen effect in the center, which is good for watching sports or using it as a PC monitor. Like any OLED, there are faint vertical lines in near-dark scenes, but they're hard to notice unless you look for them.

Black uniformity on OLEDs is perfect due to their self-emissive pixels; there's no blooming or halo effect around bright objects.

The TV has an outstanding viewing angle. Colors shift slightly when you watch the screen at an angle, but it's minor, and you really won't notice this in practice. You certainly won't have any issues using it in a wide seating area.

The LG B3 has fantastic reflection handling. The intensity of bright lights is significantly reduced, and overall glare isn't an issue for this TV.

The TV has decent gradient handling in HDR. There's some noticeable banding in the entire range of grays and greens, but other color gradients are smooth overall.

The TV has great low-quality content smoothing. There's no noticeable macro-blocking in dark areas, but some fine details are lost in the process.

The LG B3 has good sharpness processing with low-resolution content, but it's not as good as the Sony A75L OLED. Some small details are lost, but the image is upscaled well overall.

These results are with the following processing settings:

• Adjust Sharpness: 16
• Super Resolution: High

The LG B3 uses an RWBG subpixel layout; all four pixels are never on simultaneously. You can see the green pixel here. Note that this TV's subpixel layout causes issues with text display on Windows, as ClearType isn't well adjusted to non-RGB subpixel layouts.

Like all OLED displays, this TV has a nearly instantaneous response time, resulting in incredibly clear motion with minimal ghosting behind fast-moving objects. There's some overshoot in shadow details, but it's minor and not noticeable.

The TV isn't technically flicker-free as there's a slight dip in brightness every 8 ms, which coincides with the 120Hz refresh rate of the display. It's very different from pulse width modulation flicker (PWM) on TVs with LED backlights and isn't noticeable.

The LG B3 OLED has an optional black frame insertion feature (BFI) that reduces the appearance of persistence blur caused by the TV's nearly instantaneous pixel response time. Unfortunately, it can only flicker at 60Hz, which isn't ideal for 120 fps games. BFI also reduces the TV's perceived brightness, which is noticeable in practice.

This LG B3 OLED TV offers an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the appearance of motion. Like most TVs, it struggles with fast-paced content, resulting in noticeable artifacts and loss of detail. These issues are noticeable even with lower settings, but it's not nearly as obvious.

Like all OLEDs, there's noticeable stutter with low frame rate content due to their incredibly fast pixel response time. It's very noticeable in slow panning shots in movies, although some people are more sensitive to it than others. The black frame insertion feature and the motion interpolation feature can help reduce the appearance of stutter, but they both have their drawbacks.

The TV can remove judder when watching 24p movies or TV shows, even from sources that can only send a 60Hz signal, like a cable box. Sadly, movies aren't judder-free when BFI is enabled.

The TV supports FreeSync and HDMI Forum VRR and is G-SYNC Compatible certified, ensuring a nearly tear-free gaming experience from any VRR-enabled source. It works well across a wide refresh rate range, even when it drops very low, as the TV supports Low Framerate Compensation (LFC).

The TV has low input lag, resulting in a very responsive gaming experience. Although it's still not as good as high-end gaming monitors, it's better than most TVs and good enough for most gamers. These results are with the Boost Mode setting set to 'On' in the 'Game Optimizer' menu.

The LG B3 OLED supports most common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz on HDMI ports 3 and 4. While there are some text clarity issues due to its subpixel layout (see the Pixels section for more information), it still displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with all supported resolutions. HDMI ports 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth and don't support certain signals, like 4k @ 120Hz with chroma 4:4:4.

This TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 supports on HDMI ports 3 and 4, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4K @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR.

This TV is fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers on HDMI ports 3 and 4, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, Dolby Vision gaming @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, and FreeSync.

The TV has two HDMI 2.1 bandwidth ports, but one of them also doubles as the eARC/ARC port. That means that when a soundbar is connected to the TV, you only have one HDMI 2.1 bandwidth port left for your high-speed devices. Sadly, the tuner only supports ATSC 1.0, so you can't use it for over-the-air 4k channels.

This TV supports eARC, allowing you to pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver through an HDMI cable.

The TV has a decent frequency response. It's good enough for the dialogue to sound clear and bright, but you need a dedicated subwoofer to have the best sound experience with proper bass.

The TV's handling of distortion is okay. The TV gets loud, but the speakers struggle to handle distortion when being fed multiple simultaneous frequencies, as seen in their high levels of intermodulation distortion. The TV performs better when dealing with distortion from individual fundamental frequencies (THD).

The TV runs the 2023 version of LG's proprietary smart interface, webOS. The interface is fast and easy to use, and it supports user profiles, so you can customize the home page for different users.

Unfortunately, like almost all smart TVs, there are ads throughout the smart interface, and you can't fully disable them. There are two settings in the 'Home Settings' menu, namely the 'Home Promotion' and 'Content Recommendation' settings, which remove the top banner ads and suggested content from the home screen, but there's no way to remove ads from the apps page.

Like other webOS-equipped TVs, the LG B3 has a great selection of apps, and you're sure to find your favorite content.

The LG Magic Remote has a point-and-press feature that makes it easy to navigate through the menu. The built-in mic allows you to ask it to change inputs, open apps, and search for content. Unlike the LG C3 OLED, there's no mic built into the TV for hands-free control.

The button is underneath the center of the TV, allowing you to turn the TV on/off, change inputs, adjust the volume, and switch channels.

• Remote
• 2x AA batteries
• User manuals and stickers