Hands on: LG W6 review

As we rolled into Vegas the day before CES 2026 was about to kick off, we thought we had a pretty good handle on what LG would be launching there. We were wrong.

LG, it turned out, was keeping a little surprise up its sleeve in the comely shape of a relaunch of its beloved ‘Wallpaper’ series of ultra-thin OLED TVs.

LG’s first Wallpaper TV rodeo happened way back in 2017, wowing all who saw it with a paper-slim design so thin that you could actually flex its corners as you attached it to its magnetic wall mount. The resulting screen actually felt more like a window than a TV.

We should say right away that the new W6 Wallpaper TV is not nearly as slim as that. But it is considerably thinner than any C-, G- or even M-series model LG has launched, so you can see why LG wanted to mark it out with the resurrection of the Wallpaper name.

Has its performance been in any way compromised by its design, though? And is it really different enough to LG’s new G6 to warrant its existence?

We will have to wait until we have the W6 in our dedicated test rooms for a full review before we deliver our final verdict, but we went hands-on with the TV at CES to deliver some early impressions.

Price

LG hasn’t yet confirmed pricing for either of the 77- or 83-inch screen sizes the W6 is going to be available in.

However, LG spokespeople were at pains during our demo session to say that the W6 won't be nearly as expensive relative to the step-down G6 as the original Wallpaper generations were.

Expect ‘just above usual flagship OLED’ pricing, then, rather than ‘Premier League footballer’ levels of expense.

Design

For us, the W6 design is both gorgeous and a little bit controversial.

On the controversial side, the Wallpaper TV represent the chunkiest wallpaper we’ve ever seen. Seriously, you’d need quite a few layers of even wood-chip paper to get to the 9mm of depth the W6’s pack out back. This means it doesn’t pack the same ‘how is that even possible?’ wow factor that the old Wallpaper OLEDs did.

Happily, the W6 is still a seriously attractive bit of engineering art. In fact, you could even argue that it’s more gorgeous than it could have been if LG had gone for the same insane thinness of its predecessors.

Its 9mm depth makes it around half as deep as LG’s already beautifully slim G6, and that extreme slimness is emphasised both by the ingenious flush (and we do mean flush) wall mount brackets the set ships with, and the substantial screen sizes that sit at the front of such slender frames.

There’s just enough depth to the screen’s side panels to allow LG’s designers to squeeze a corrugated effect into the seriously attractive, almost stone-like side panels, too.

And LG cunningly leaned into this effect on its CES 2026 showcase booth by recessing a W6 into a wall of attractively large stone tiles. It even went to the trouble in this tiled wall presentation of filling the W6 screen with a photograph of what the tiles that would have gone where the screen was would have looked like. Basically, the screen was almost invisible.

Putting an image on the screen showing a photo of the replaced tiles reminded us that the new Wallpaper TV benefits from LG’s Gallery+ feature.

This provides a store of more than 5000 regularly updated digital artworks that users can use as screensavers. The Gallery system also lets users upload their own photos to the screen, and even provides a generative AI image generation system to help you create your own AI artworks.

This idea of turning a TV into a painting works particularly well when that TV is as slim as a typical mounted painting, as the W6 is.

The W6 couldn’t be so slim if it had to contain all the connections you would normally expect to find on a TV. So it’s not surprising to find it shipping with a version of the Zero Connect boxes we’ve seen shipping with LG’s M series OLED TVs over the past couple of years.

This box carries four HDMIs, among other things, and is capable of transmitting Dolby Atmos sound and 4K/165Hz video losslessly to the screen without any physical connection – and, it’s claimed, with hardly any extra latency.

The Zero Connect box for the W6 is far smaller than the ones seen with previous M series OLEDs, and is even kitted out in an attractive textured outer skin to give it more lifestyle appeal. Though you can, if you wish, hide the Zero Connect away in a cabinet, provided the walls of that container aren’t too thick. The transmission range of an unobstructed Zero Connect box is claimed to be around 10m.

One last point worth adding to this extended design section (well, it is a designer TV) is the mounting bracket mentioned earlier.

This genius affair features a pair of incredibly thin brackets that you fit on the wall with the help of an included template, and an ultra-clever ‘slide on’ mechanism that sees the TV connect firmly to your wall just by slotting it onto the brackets, with gravity providing all the connection force you need. If ever premium big-screen TVs were designed to make even the most useless DIYer feel like a custom install king, it’s the LG W6.

Features

We can be a bit briefer here than we were with the design section, thankfully. Not because the W6 doesn’t have a lot going on (it actually does), but more because we’ve already covered many of its features in our LG G6 hands-on.

The W6 is basically a G6 but thinner, so its design is actually its most important feature. We’ll cover the key points briefly again here, though, for anyone who hasn’t yet checked out our LG G6 page.

First, the panel at the W6’s heart is the new so-called Hyper Radiant premium type found in the G6. A panel capable of delivering yet another significant brightness increase – as much as 20 per cent is being claimed – over the ground-breaking brightness achieved by the Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels in last year’s G5.

This brightness is achieved, LG is keen to stress, without leading to washed-out colours. On the contrary, LG claims that the brightness helps the G6 and W6 screens unlock more of the colour spectrum than any previous LG OLED TV – while retaining, of course, the immaculate blacks and pixel-level light controls that OLED is famous for.

The W6 also features a new ‘reflection-free’ filter that greatly reduces the appearance and intensity of reflections on the screen while retaining the glossy screen finish that some AV fans prefer to the matte look you get with the zero-reflection screens of many premium Samsung TVs these days.

The W6’s new picture features are controlled by LG’s new spectacularly over-named Alpha 11 AI Processor 4K Gen 3 chip, with its ‘dual AI engine’ processing power, ever-expanding abilities to identify and react to different content types, and new elements focused on improved 4K upscaling and a genuine attempt to convert SDR content to HDR.

The expanded AI brainpower in the W6 also leads to a growing range of AI-related features within LG’s WebOS smart platform – or perhaps it might be better to say, from our experience of it at the CES 2026, that the latest AI developments are focused on simplifying the way we interact with the extensive array of AI and smart features the TV carries.

The AI processor plays a key role in the W6’s audio systems too, as we’ll cover in the sound section. And, finally, its use of a wireless connections box doesn’t prevent it being able to support such key gaming features as support for 4K resolutions (with VRR) at frame rates up to 165Hz.

Picture quality

From what we’ve seen of the W6 in action so far, it really does look set to be a seriously special TV. Worries that its ultra-thin design might lead to picture compromises versus the G6 just don’t seem to hold water at all.

Black levels look just as deep, rich and neutral, for starters, with no obvious signs under the CES show lights of any green or magenta tinting, even if viewed from the side.

The upgraded brightness peaks LG claims the Hyper Radiant panel can hit really do lead to a level of intensity – in terms of general full-screen brightness and, especially, peak HDR light highlights – that’s clearly visible to the naked eye.

There’s nothing forced about the extra brightness either. Direct side-by-side comparisons between a G5 and G6/W6 screens with the same content reveal that, as well as looking clearly brighter, HDR highlights actually appear with more subtle detail/less clipping on the new brighter screen.

In fact, the general sense of sharpness and detail across the image was clearly significantly higher on the G6/W6, an effect LG spokespeople attributed to the new models being able to render finer but also more extreme contrast than the preceding G5, allowing each pixel in an image to effectively enjoy extra definition.

Since this extra definition is being achieved by improved light control rather than anything as basic as simple sharpness enhancement (at least when it comes to native 4K playback), it feels entirely natural and immersive rather than forced, gritty or over-processed.

While we weren’t able to feed the W6 any of our own favourite test content during our time with it, we’d tentatively say that LG has potentially solved the slight colour striping issue that could appear over subtle colour blends with the G5 series. Colours generally enjoy beautifully rich, vibrant saturations that definitively prove that the Hyper Radiant panel isn’t just ramping up white to achieve its extra luminance at the expense of the key red, green and blue elements that make ‘true’ TV colour.

Colour volumes have increased in line with the raised brightness, in other words, rather than the brightness increases leaving colour saturations behind.

We didn’t detect any obvious increase in noise in dark areas either, despite the panel’s more extreme contrast capabilities, and interestingly, motion handling appeared slightly more natural on the W6 than it was on the already impressive G5. Though this area, perhaps more than any other, is one where we’ll need to spend much more time with a W6 in proper test conditions before we can be certain this improvement is as consistent as it appeared at first glance.

Aside from not being able to sustain the sort of full-screen brightness levels that the new generation of premium LCD TVs can, we’re struggling to find anything negative to say about the W6’s pictures from what we’ve seen so far. Fingers crossed this carries through to the finished product.

Sound quality

While squeezing the same picture technology the G6 uses into the W6’s svelte designs seems to have been relatively straightforward, getting speakers into the chassis was apparently – and unsurprisingly – far from easy. Especially as LG doesn’t do as Sony does with its OLED TVs and use the TVs’ screens themselves as speakers.

Instead, long ‘chimney’ speakers running vertically down the W6’s rear into ports that emerge from the screens’ bottom edge are provided to try and deliver a decent amount of mid and low frequency sound, and are especially important given that there’s no space on the W6’s back panel for any rear-mounted woofers.

LG remains confident enough about the W6 audio system, though, to still equip the sets with the brand’s AI Sound system, which can up-mix even a basic stereo source to a virtual 11.1.2-channel sound stage.

Thanks to the extremely non-sterile sound environment the W6 was presented in, we don’t feel able to comment usefully on how successful LG might have been in getting a big sound out of its new Wallpaper models.

While the limitations inevitably placed on a super-slim TV’s speaker system are extreme, though, the efforts LG seems to have poured into making the W6 sound more than the equivalent of a couple of tin cans and a length of string appear promising.

Early verdict

While the W6 isn’t as mind-bendingly skinny as LG’s original Wallpaper OLED TVs, its wireless connectivity and integrated speakers mean it comes without the massive external soundbar/connections box those first Wallpaper TVs shipped with.

It’s also looking likely to be much more affordable than those original Wallpaper TVs, too.

The design is also still supremely elegant and beautifully constructed, while the wireless connectivity appears to work flawlessly in terms of causing no apparent loss of picture or sound quality.

We can’t say for sure yet how successful or otherwise LG has been at fitting a workable sound system into a TV as slim as the new Wallpaper TVs, but impressions of its pictures so far, at least, are remarkably good for a TV with such a design-led background.

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