I stared at the LG G6 next to Samsung and Sony sets – and what I saw surprised me

New TVs aren't the easiest things to place in context sometimes. Take a tour around a plush CES exhibition booth like the one LG put on this year in Vegas, and you'll come away impressed as anything by the likes of the W6 Wallpaper TV and OLED evo G6, but it isn't the easiest to know how they compare to the competition.

This week, though, I got to see the LG G6 not just on its own, devoid of comparisons, but lined up against its own predecessor, the five-star LG G5, as well as the superb Sony Bravia 8 II, and the Samsung S95F to boot. That's three five-star TVs from last year, lined up against LG's next OLED G6 flagship.

What did I learn? Well, in some regards, LG's new set represents a really clear step up on its predecessor, taking some small annoyances with the last generation of hardware and solving them at a stroke. In a couple of key ways, though, I have some reservations.

Starting with the unequivocally good, there's raw picture quality from an optimal viewing angle. LG showed us a few deliberately dark and dank scenes, freezing the frame to point out that even sets as brilliant as the array of 2025 displays can show obvious banding with the most challenging material.

The G6, though, was clearly the best in the field on that front – its ability to show grades of dark colour without obvious transitions is nicely upgraded, and surely stands as one of the best consumer panels available from that point of view.

I mentioned optimal viewing angles earlier, though, and not by coincidence. From basically any side-on angle, the G5 had a really quite noticeable green tint to its picture that I can't quite get my head around, and I know it's not the first generation of LG's OLEDs to lean that way. The image below makes it relatively easy to see (with the G6 being the middle set with the plaque above it).

LG's attitude (via spokespeople) seemed to be that top-class panels all have some colour science at their heart, and that while its tuning might have a slight green hue, that's only really in contrast to, for example, a red one in other sets (like Sony's). Whether you're happy with that explanation is a matter of your own attitude, but I was fairly struck by how obvious the green was in the G6 – especially since last year's G5 didn't have the same problem.

That said, the G5 is dimmer, and it left me feeling like there was a middle ground that could have resulted in nothing but upsides, instead of needing qualifiers. We'll obviously know a lot more when we're able to review the G6 for an extended period, too.

LG was also keen to show off the new sound tuning of the TV, and it was indeed warmer and bassier than the G5's presentation. Some people might find it a little more overbearing, to be honest, and a new AI enhancement mode for sound struck me as overdone – but I'm a Filmmaker mode purist with a 5.1 sound system, so that's maybe not a huge surprise.

It can detect speech, effects and a few other layers and theoretically arrange them more clearly for you. We watched scenes from Saving Private Ryan, for instance, that made quieter moments lean more heavily on the dialogue volume, while the famous Omaha Beach scene was far louder and heavier on the explosions with the mode turned on.

To my taste, though, the tradeoffs weren't worth the benefits – those tweaks left some parts of the soundscape underserved, and it felt a little like loudness was the main selling point, rather than accuracy.

Of course, that leads me to a major caveat, and one that applies to my reservations about AI modes and indeed that green tint – these are likely solvable by individual users pretty easily.

I simply wouldn't use AI picture or sound modes, which is an easy way out, and LG offers enough tweaking options in its menus (including more tone-mapping options this year) that it's not a challenge to imagine being able to neutralise the image fairly straightforwardly.

So, a few hours with the G6 has left me super intrigued to see how it scores with reviewers (including our own) when it's closer to being available. It's clearly a panel capable of some astonishing stuff, but it might showcase some internal tension at LG between buzzy AI features and the more straightforward upgrades that are more telling in the long run.