LG B9 OLED TV Review

The LG OLED B9 is a high-end 2019 TV. It replaces the 2018 LG B8 OLED. Since picture quality is very similar among all OLED TVs, the additional features and the design is what differentiates them. The main competitors are the LG C9 OLED, LG E9 OLED, Sony A9G OLED, and Sony A8G OLED. For LED competitors, the Samsung Q80R and the Sony Z9F can be considered the main ones.

The design of the LG B9 is outstanding. Overall, it resembles the design of the 2018 LG B8, although this year's model feels a bit less premium. This TV has a plastic stand, whereas the previous model has a metal one. The stand supports the TV well, but can't prevent all wobble. The back is plain and the TV is thin, just like most LG OLEDs. The build quality is excellent, and you shouldn't have any issues with the TV.

The stand of the B9 OLED is plastic and looks very similar to last year's B8 which, however, was made of metal. The B9's stand allows more wobble than last year's model.

Footprint of the 55" TV stand: 21.9" x 9.3".

The back of the B9 is plain. The upper part is made of metal, and the bottom is plastic and houses the electronics. Some of the inputs are facing sideways and some are facing outwards, which can get in the way if you wall-mount the TV. Cable management is serviced with the aid of a little clip on the back, very similar to the B8.

Just like most OLED TVs, the B9 has very thin borders that aren't distracting. There is a very small gap between the edge of the bezel and the start of the pixels.

The LG B9 is a very thin TV. It's thicker at the bottom where the electronics are housed, but even then it's still thin and won't stick out much if you wall-mount it.

The build quality of the LG B9 is excellent. It doesn't feel as premium as the C9 or E9, mainly due to its plastic stand that allows more wobble and the plastic housing of the electronics that flexes easily. Overall, you shouldn't have issues with the build quality of this TV.

The B9 delivers perfect blacks, just like all OLEDs. It can switch off individual pixels, which creates an effectively infinite contrast ratio.

The LG OLED B9 doesn't need a local dimming feature since there is no backlight. Each pixel is self-emitting and can turn off or dim itself. In a dark room, this looks great, with no visible blooming around bright objects. Subtitles are also displayed perfectly.

The LG B9 has good peak brightness with SDR content and is suitable for a fairly bright room. Its brightness is in the same ballpark as the LG E9 and is a little brighter than last year's LG B8. Its Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL) is aggressive, similar to the E9, and it dims the screen significantly when larger areas of the screen get bright.

This TV, just like the C9 and the E9, has a new Peak Brightness setting that adjusts how the ABL performs. If you set it to 'Off', most scenes are displayed at around 266 cd/m² and there is no real variation in brightness according to the scene content, which is great. Increasing this setting to 'Low', 'Med', or 'High' increases the peak brightness of small highlights.

We took our measurements after calibration in the 'Expert (Dark Room)' Picture Mode, with Gamma set to '2.2', Color Temperature set to 'Warm2', Peak Brightness set to 'High', and OLED Light set to '100'. These were also the settings that gave us the brightest image.

The HDR peak brightness of the OLED B9 is decent. It's in the same ballpark as last year's LG B8, but can't reach the brightness levels of the C9. The ABL is a little less aggressive than the ABL found on the E9 and the C9, but you'll still notice the change in brightness with different content.

The HDR brightness measurements were taken in 'Cinema' mode, with OLED Light set to '100,' Peak Brightness set to 'High', and Color Temperature set to 'Warm2'.

Different picture modes and color temperatures will produce different results. We measured the 2% window at 767 cd/m² in the default 'Vivid' (HDR) Picture Mode.

The gray uniformity on the B9 is excellent. There's hardly any dirty screen effect, which is great for sports fans. The uniformity is just as good in near-dark scenes. Just like the E9 and other OLED TVs, you might notice some very faint horizontal and vertical lines when you're displaying almost black scenes in a pitch-black room. It's unlikely that you'll notice this under other conditions.

The LG B9 has outstanding viewing angles. The brightness and black levels are good even at very large angles off-center. Just like the E9 and the C9, colors shift and lose accuracy at smaller angles. They're still better than most LED TVs, but not as good as VA panel TVs that use a special filter like the Samsung Q80R of the Sony Z9F.

Perfect black uniformity on the B9, as expected from an OLED TV.

The B9's reflection handling is outstanding. Just like on the C9 and the E9, the glossy filter diminishes reflections by preventing them from scattering across the screen. You should have no issue placing this TV in a room with many light sources.

The purple tint you see on the image is the result of the anti-reflective coating and is also found on other TVs like the E9 or the Q8FN.

The accuracy of the B9 with its pre-calibration settings is poor. Most people will notice the inaccuracies in the pure whites, as the color temperature is warm with a yellowish tint. Enthusiasts, however, will also notice some inaccuracies in the colors. The gamma follows the target well, but some brighter scenes don't have the proper brightness.

The LG OLED B9 has remarkable accuracy after calibration, and you can only spot any remaining inaccuracies with the aid of a colorimeter. Unlike the C9 and the E9, this TV does not have an auto-calibration feature.

You can see our recommended settings here.

Great upscaling of 480p content, like from DVDs, without obvious upscaling artifacts.

The OLED55B9PUA upscales 720p content, like from TV boxes, well. It offers the same features as the C9 to improve upscaling. Although visually we didn't notice any difference in our test patterns, it might make a difference for some content.

1080p content looks almost as good as native 4k content on the B9.

4k content looks perfect.

The B9 has a wide color gamut and can deliver vivid colors with HDR content. The TV follows the target PQ curve closely (although some very dark scenes are crushed) until it rolls off relatively sharp near the TVs peak brightness. In 'Game' mode, the EOTF is nearly identical.

If you find HDR too dim, the TV has two options to help you make it brighter. Check out what to do on the TV settings page here.

The color volume of the B9 is good. It's significantly better than last year's LG B8 and better than this year's E9 and C9, although this could be due to panel variance. Due to its WRGB pixel structure, the TV can produce bright whites but can't deliver bright saturated colors. The perfect contrast ratio, on the other hand, allows the TV to produce dark saturated colors with no issues, unlike many LED TVs.

The LG B9 has good gradient handling, but not on par with the rest of the LG TVs. Some banding is evident not only in our test pattern but also with normal content. This was not expected from the B9 and we had to confirm the results three times.

Just like the C9, this TV has a Smooth Gradation feature, which, however, can't remove banding in our test photo. With normal content, when Smooth Gradation is set to 'Low', it doesn't do much, so you should set it to 'High' to see significant improvement. However, then you risk losing some fine detail.

Although there are no signs of temporary image retention on the panel of our B9, some panel variation is to be expected. On the E9 we tested this year, we observed some faint temporary image retention.

This test is only indicative of short term image retention, and not the permanent burn-in that may occur with cummulative longer exposure to static images. We're currently running a long-term test to help us better understand permanent burn-in. You can see our results and read more about our investigation here.

Update 11/01/2019: Updated text to include our stance on burn-in.

Although we don't expect most people who watch varied content to have any issues, OLED TVs, such as the LG OLED B9 do have the possibility of experiencing burn in.

This TV has three features to help mitigate burn-in. We recommend enabling the Screen Shift option, and setting Logo Luminance Adjustment to 'Low.' There is also an automatic pixel refresher that can be run manually if needed.

You can read about our investigation into this here.

Like all other OLEDs, the B9 uses 4 sub-pixels, but all 4 are never used at the same time. This image shows the white, blue, and red sub-pixels. You can see the green sub-pixel in our alternative pixel photo.

The response time is nearly instantaneous and this is excellent. Motion looks crisp and there is almost no blur trail behind fast-moving content. This, however, causes stutter on movies and some people might be bothered.

The LG B9 doesn't flicker as it doesn't use PWM to dim the screen. This helps motion appear smoother, but results in some persistence blur. The slight dip in brightness that you see in the graphs appears every 8ms and coincides with the TV's refresh rate. This should not be noticeable.

Update 11/26/2019: A recent firmware update fixed the black frame insertion feature on our B9. It's now working properly.

The LG B9 has an optional black frame insertion feature, known as OLED Motion, which can help improve the appearance of motion. Like the C9, enabling this option always causes judder when watching 24p content, like movies.

The LG B9 has a motion interpolation feature and can interpolate content up to 120fps, which is excellent. However, just like the E9, the TV continues to interpolate even when it displays very busy scenes and this creates many artifacts that can become bothersome.

See here for the settings that control the motion interpolation feature.

The LG B9 has stutter due to the nearly instantaneous response time that holds each frame on the screen for longer. This is especially noticeable in movies' slow panning shots. You can use motion interpolation to minimize it.

The LG B9 can display 24p content without judder no matter the source.

See our recommended settings to remove judder here.

Update 11/27/2019: The B9 is now compatible with recent NVIDIA G-SYNC graphics cards, and is officially certified as G-SYNC compatible.

The LG B9, just like the C9, has a native 120Hz refresh rate. It only supports HDMI Forum's new HDMI-VRR format. Currently, this is only supported on new Xbox Ones, or with a recent NVIDIA graphics card. The B9 is officially supported by NVIDIA's G-SYNC compatible mode, which is enabled automatically when connected to a recent NVIDIA graphics card.

This TV has a remarkably low input lag as long as you are in 'Game' mode. It's much better than last year's B8 and about the same as the C9 and the E9.

The LG B9 now supports an Auto Low Latency Mode to save you the hassle of having to switch to 'Game' mode each time you want to play a game. See our recommended settings for Gaming.

The LG B9 supports most of the common resolutions we test for. Just like the other LG OLEDs we tested this year, the B9 supports 1440p resolutions. It can display proper chroma 4:4:4 in all of the supported resolutions except 1080p @ 120Hz. To display proper chroma 4:4:4, the input icon must be changed to 'PC' from the Home Dashboard, and the HDMI ULTRA HD Deep Color setting must be enabled for the port in use. Some of the supported formats require that the HDMI ULTRA HD Deep Color is enabled to display properly.

The B9 is advertised to support HDMI 2.1, but with no HDMI 2.1 sources currently available, we can't test it. We will retest and update the review once an HDMI 2.1 source becomes commercially available.

This TV supports eARC when connected to a compatible AV Receiver, which allows it to send higher quality DTS:X and Dolby Atmos via TrueHD sound from an external device to your receiver. Like the 2018 LG OLEDs, it also supports DTS and Dolby Digital passthrough to a standard ARC receiver.

This TV has a decent frequency response. The low-frequency extension is decent, similar to the C9, but slightly worse than last year's B8. This results in a bass without much thump or rumble, but with a decent amount of punch and body. The frequency response above the TV's LFE allows the TV to deliver clear dialog. Finally, this TV gets fairly loud without too much pumping and compression artifacts under maximum load, which is especially good for noisy areas.