LG B5 OLED  TV Review

The LG B5 has decent peak brightness in HDR, but it's a step down from the LG C5 OLED. Small highlights stand out enough for impactful HDR, but large bright scenes are dimmer. Mini LED TVs like LG's 2025 flagship LG QNED92A are a better choice for watching very bright content, like hockey.

The results above are with the TV in its most accurate mode with 'Dynamic Tone Mapping' disabled. Enabling this setting usually increases the brightness in some scenes but sacrifices accuracy, but in the case of the B5, it actually decreases the peak brightness of our real scene measurements:

• Hallway Lights: 735 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 483 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 288 cd/m²

Switching to the Game Optimizer picture mode noticeably decreases HDR brightness, so highlights don't pop out as much.

The results above are with the TV in its most accurate mode with 'Dynamic Tone Mapping' disabled. Just like in Filmmaker Mode, enabling this setting here slightly decreases the peak brightness of our real scene measurements:

• Hallway Lights: 547 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 382 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 244 cd/m²

The LG B5 has mediocre peak brightness in SDR. While most content is bright enough to overcome glare in a moderately lit space, you'll need to switch to one of the less accurate picture modes for a bright room. Even then, really bright content, like most sports, doesn't get bright enough to overcome glare.

The TV has a nearly infinite contrast ratio, giving it perfect contrast. Due to OLED's self-lit pixels, it displays bright highlights next to perfect inky blacks, making it very impressive in a dark room.

Since OLEDs don't use lighting zones and instead have individual pixels that can be lit up to their maximum brightness next to pixels that are turned off, there's no haloing when bright elements are surrounded by deep blacks.

The LG B5 is an OLED without a backlight, so its self-lit pixels give it the same performance as a TV with perfect local dimming and no zone transitions. We still film the zone transition video so you can see how it compares to an option with local dimming.

There's no difference in dark scene behavior when the TV is set to the Game Optimizer picture mode.

Because OLEDs can turn off individual pixels, the TV has perfect black uniformity with no halo effect around bright objects.

The LG B5 has excellent color volume in SDR. It has full coverage of the BT.709 color space used with the majority of SDR content, and decent coverage of the wider BT.2020 color space. Unlike the LG B4 OLED, colors aren't desaturated at higher lightness levels, suggesting that LG isn't driving the white subpixel as much.

The color volume in HDR is good. The TV displays dark saturated colors nearly perfectly, thanks to its superb contrast. Brighter scenes don't fare quite as well, as it doesn't display colors nearly as bright as pure white in HDR.

This TV has excellent pre-calibration accuracy in SDR in the most accurate mode. The white balance is a bit off across the board, but not noticeably so, and the overall color temperature is very close to ideal. Gamma fluctuates across scenes but remains close to our 2.2 target, and color accuracy is amazing.

The LG B5 is very easy to calibrate, and although most people won't notice the difference, it's nearly perfect after calibration.

See our full calibration settings.

The LG B5 has fantastic accuracy in HDR before calibration. Its white balance is fantastic, with very few noticeable errors, and the overall color temperature is nearly perfect. The color accuracy is excellent, but there are some mapping errors throughout.

There's very little benefit to calibrating this TV in HDR. The white balance and color accuracy are slightly better after calibration, but it's not a significant difference and the errors are still noticeable.

The TV displays most content at the brightness level the content creator intended due to its fantastic PQ EOTF tracking. With content mastered at 600 or 1000 nits, there is a gradual roll-off near its peak brightness to maintain some detail in bright highlights. With content mastered at 4000 nits, the TV starts rolling off at a lower brightness level, as it preserves gradation over boosting highlights.

The TV has very good low-quality content smoothing. It does a great job smoothing out macro blocking and pixelization without removing most fine details.

The TV does a very good job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Details are clear enough, but very fine details are hard to make out.

Sharpness processing was calibrated with no over-sharpening for low-resolution content, with the following settings:

• Sharpness: 16
• Super Resolution: High

The TV has very good HDR native gradient handling. There's some noticeable banding in dark grays and bright greens, but all other colors have barely any noticeable banding or posterization.

This TV doesn't have the issues with banding and diagonal lines that affect the LG C5 OLED and the LG G5 OLED.

The TV's input lag when using the Game Optimizer picture mode is very low across the board, ensuring a very responsive gaming experience.

Its input lag is a lot higher outside of its gaming mode, so there's a noticeable delay when navigating menus using an external player.

Below are some additional input lag measurements.

4:3 @ 60Hz:

• 640x480: 12.7 ms
• 800x600: 34.9 ms
• 1024x768: 13.5 ms

SDR Filmmaker Mode with the Game Optimizer setting Enabled and the Input Label Set to 'HDMI':

• 60Hz: 21.8 ms
• 120Hz: 13.3 ms

HDR Filmmaker Mode with the Game Optimizer setting Enabled and the Input Label Set to 'PC':

• 60Hz: 23.0 ms
• 120Hz: 12.8 ms

The LG B5 supports all common formats up to 120Hz. It displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with any supported resolution, which is important for clear text from a PC.

There are two settings you can use to passthrough proper chroma 4:4:4. The first is to change the input label to 'PC.' The second is to enable the '4:4:4 Passthrough' setting in the 'HDMI Settings' menu.

The LG B5 supports all three types of variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing. It works across a wide range of refresh rates, including sources that support Low-Framerate-Compensation (LFC), which ensures that your games remain nearly tear-free even when the refresh rate drops below the panel's minimum refresh rate.

No surprises here, the LG B5 delivers incredibly clear motion at the maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. There's a tiny bit of overshoot in transitions from black to anything else, but it's minor and not really noticeable.

This TV has a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz, so these results are the same as the max refresh rate section.

Dropping down to 60Hz doesn't change the TV's motion handling much. Most transitions are still extremely quick, but there's still some noticeable overshoot when it changes from black. There's also noticeable persistence blur due to the nature of a 60Hz refresh rate.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so it automatically switches to Game Optimizer to get the lowest input lag.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, FreeSync Premium Pro, and Dolby Vision gaming. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so it automatically switches to Game Optimizer to get the lowest input lag.

Unfortunately, due to the TV's nearly instantaneous pixel response time, there's stutter with low frame rate content, which is most noticeable during slow panning shots.

The LG B5 OLED does a very good job of interpolating 24fps content to 30fps. The motion interpolation feature has outstanding consistency, but motion still lacks some fluidity. The TV's nearly instantaneous response time causes stutter that minimal motion interpolation can't fully eliminate. As a result, slower camera movements in low frame rate content are still a bit choppy. 

The LG B5 removes 24p and 25p judder from native apps and external devices that send a 24Hz or 25Hz signal, like an Apple TV with the 'Match Frame Rate' feature enabled. The TV also properly removes judder from 24p content that's being sent to it in either 60p or 60i. However, it doesn't completely remove 25p judder from 60p signals, which causes motion to look a bit jittery if you're watching certain European content from an older streaming device. 

To remove judder on this TV, the Real Cinema setting must be enabled. Unfortunately, this setting is locked when OLED Motion Pro (BFI) is enabled, so movies and TV shows aren't judder-free when BFI is enabled, since the BFI feature only flickers at 60Hz.

This TV is completely free from micro-judder with all 24p and 25p content, so motion in complex scenes is mostly smooth.

This TV has a superb cinematic response time. It's much slower transitioning to or from dark shades, so dark scenes don't look quite as good as bright ones.

The LG B5 OLED is free from any transition artifacts when watching movies, shows, and sports. There isn't any ghosting or unwanted intermediate colors during transitions, so colors remain consistent and pure, even during fast-paced scenes and sports.

This TV doesn't have a traditional backlight and doesn't use pulse-width modulation (PWM) to dim each pixel, but it's not completely flicker-free. There's a slight dip in brightness that corresponds to the TV's refresh rate. This differs from the PWM flicker on TVs with LED backlights and occurs on every OLED display on the market. It's not noticeable, and most people won't be bothered by this, but it can still bother people who are extra sensitive to flicker.

It has an optional black frame insertion (BFI) feature that reduces the appearance of persistence blur caused by the TV's nearly instantaneous response time. It can only insert black frames at a 60Hz refresh rate.

The TV is alright when handling direct reflections. The panel's coating only slightly dims reflections, so lights shining directly on it still appear on the screen.

The TV's black levels barely raise in bright environments, so blacks stay deep no matter how many lights there are.

The TV handles mixed lighting conditions quite well. It reduces the intensity of ambient lights to a good degree, but unfortunately, it does so with some diffraction artifacts present on the screen.

The TV's ambient color saturation is good in brighter environments; it loses some of the pop in its high-luminance colors, but, overall, it's still colorful.

The TV's viewing angle is excellent, although far from perfect. Its colors start shifting rather early when you move to the sides, giving the scene an increasingly green hue. At wider angles, the entire set of primary colors lose some of their vibrancy. Still, this is a great pick for a wide seating arrangement.

The TV's gray uniformity is good. Like on many OLEDs, there are some faint vertical lines, which are more noticeable in certain scenes, but overall, you'd be hard-pressed to notice them from a normal viewing distance.

The TV uses a WOLED panel with a RWBG pixel structure where all four pixels are never lit at the same time. Due to its subpixel layout, it has minor issues with displaying text on Windows since ClearType isn't well optimized to non-RGB subpixel layouts, but most users won't be bothered by this.

The white subpixel does an excellent job helping the TV display bright whites, but it dilutes the color purity of greens and reds.

Unlike the LG C5 OLED and LG G5 OLED, this model doesn't have any diagonal lines as a result of dithering.

The LG B5 supports the full 48Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 on all four HDMI ports. This allows you to take full advantage of multiple high-bandwidth devices, such as if you own multiple current-gen consoles and a high-end gaming PC.

The LG B5 OLED TV passes through all Dolby Digital options. However, it doesn't support any DTS audio formats commonly used on physical media. LG has supported DTS on all of their 2023 and 2024 OLED models, but they've dropped support across their entire lineup in 2025.

Our unit has intermittent issues when playing some Dolby Atmos content. Even though the TV displays "Atmos" in the info banner, sometimes audio would simply not play. A power cycle sometimes resolved the issue, but it would then come back, forcing us to power cycle the TV again. Factory resets did not solve the issue.

The LG B5 OLED has a very sleek and modern design, very similar in tone to 2024's LG B4 OLED.

The feet hold the TV very well, and there is minimal wobble when it's pushed on. The feet lift it about 3.4 inches above the table, so pretty much any soundbar will fit underneath without blocking the screen. It comes with two plastic clips that can be attached to the feet for cable management.

Footprint of the 77-inch stand: 140.3" x 12.6"

The LG B5 OLED has a dark gray metal back panel with a design reminiscent of the LG C5 OLED. It also has a matching dark gray plastic central panel that houses the inputs. Some of the inputs face the side and are close enough to the edge of the TV that they are accessible when it's wall-mounted, but the back-facing inputs are nearly impossible to reach if you have it mounted to the wall. If you use a mount like LG's Slim Wall Mount that mounts the TV very close to the wall, the backports are unusable unless you use a 90-degree HDMI adapter. Since one of those back-facing HDMI ports is the eARC port, this really limits you if you want to wall-mount the TV with a soundbar plugged in.

The LG B5 OLED's two feet do the trick and look good, and the new LG C5 OLED inspired back is a welcome addition. Our unit had two dead pixels on the panel, but aside from that, there are no quality control issues with the TV, and it's built solidly.

The LG B5 OLED TV runs the 2025 version of LG's proprietary smart interface, webOS. The interface supports user profiles, so you can customize the home page for different users. LG promises at least four years of webOS updates on their TVs, and you get updated versions of the operating system once a year.

Sometimes, the TV kept default to PC mode, even after setting the input label to HDMI. We found that we could get around the issue by setting the label to HDMI twice, but it would still sometimes stay stuck in PC mode.

There are two settings in the 'Home Settings' menu, namely the 'Home Promotion' and 'Content Recommendation' settings. These settings remove the top banner ads and suggested content from the home screen. This gives your home screen a clean look, but there's no way to remove ads from the apps page.

The TV comes with LG's new 2025 Magic Remote. Like the old version, it can be used as a pointer, or you can use the traditional buttons to control it. Unfortunately, LG ditched the number pad on this new remote, so you can't assign quick launch shortcuts anymore. There's also no dedicated input button, so you have to use the home dashboard to switch inputs.

• Remote (with 2x AAA batteries)
• User manuals
• Cable management clip

The TV consumes a maximum of 230W of power, which is a bit more than the 214W maximum that the 2024 LG B4 OLED consumes, although we tested the 65-inch B4, so the comparison isn't 1:1.

The LG B5 OLED TV has a mediocre frequency response. The TV speakers don't produce much bass, but the sound profile is well-balanced enough that the dialogue is clear, especially at lower volume. Unfortunately, the speakers don't get very loud, and there are compression and pumping artifacts at maximum volume.