Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsFirst Week with our first full HD TV
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2011
First, I want to qualify this review with two important details. This is our second "HDTV" but only out first 1080p full HD TV. Second, we have only had the TV for a bit under a week.
Now that that is out of the way I wanted to share my initial thoughts. Our previous TV worked well, but was starting to look "wrong." The picture would occasionally be very dark and anytime we watched a dark scene we had to bump the brightness all the way up to make out details. When I went TV shopping I decided we needed a few specific features.
-1080p
-120hz
-1,000,000:1 or better contrast ratio.
I searched several sites, found several TVs at the top of the list which would fit in the video cabinet, and then started looking for the best deal. Finally found the price we wanted and pulled the trigger on this unit.
It came in a very large box. I wasn't home and my wife had a hard time getting it into the house. There were no handles or other convenient way to carry or move the box. When I opened this large shipping box there was the original package with the TV inside. Compared to our old 32" LCD it was much much thinner, about 1/3 the thickness. Everything was in good shape, except the bottom of the box appears to have been opened before. The contents do not appear to have been touched previously though.
The stand must be assembled if it is going to be used. Two parts, 4 screws holding it together plus 4 screws to attach to the TV. The wifi is included as a separate USB dongle and one component and one composite input use a 8mm cable adapter. I can't speak to the quality of the video through those inputs as I didn't need them, but I hooked up the cables so they wouldn't get lost. There are also two cable keepers included. One has the power cable inserted and the other in place for the AV cables. They work well for collecting the cables at the TV, but certainly won't help after that point, and shouldn't be expected to.
The motion remote is both like and very unlike a Wii remote. The basic shape and feel reminds me of the Wiimote, but the functionality isn't the same. This is a benefit and annoyance. The wiimote requires you to point directly at the TV to use, and can be affected quite a bit over distance. This remote uses accelerometers, more like a hand held mouse, to move the cursor. I find myself pointing it at the TV and getting frustrated that it doesn't put the cursor where I want, but then being happy if I'm kicked back on the couch and don't want to point at the TV, a few flicks will move the cursor around the screen. Fortunately, it has the ability to just use the directional pad to make selections as well, for when I'm getting frustrated at getting the cursor where I want. Unfortunately I haven't found an easy way to re-enable the cursor without pressing the home button to exit and then again to get back into the home screen.
The home screen strongly reminds me of the Wii homescreen as well. You can program a few apps then click to access more apps. It's simple and intuitive. I setup our Wifi, did an update, and connected to Netflix in just a few minutes. Quality on Netflix is equal to the quality on our Playstation 3. I prefer the LG Netflix because it is using the older Netflix interface, not the one the PS3 updated to a while back.
We have Dish with HD programing, and the quality is outstanding, as is gaming and BluRay from the PS3. I did some tweaking on the image settings, but the factory settings we pretty good to start with. If I had a complaint it would be that the images is too good. With TruMotion on high special effects can't steal home anymore. I mean that the loss of blurred edges with movement can make it harder for special effects artists to blend the effect with live action. I can't blame the TV though, this is much like the changes to on screen makeup for live shows like the news when the HDTVs first dropped.
I tried looking for bad pixels but couldn't find any. I know there have to be some, but the pixels are small enough that I'd have to look with a magnifier of some kind to find them, at normal viewing distance it is perfect. I have notices that fonts often have jagged edges though, not sure if this is the TV, or part of the software I am using such as the NetFlix app. Close Captioning doesn't seem to have this issue and nothing on broadcast or recorded media (DVD or BluRay) suffer from this issue).
Audio is good for a TV. The speakers aren't far enough apart, and don't have any bass to speak of, but the highs and mids are clean. I enabled to built in Clear Speech and notices an immediate improvement on spoken word clarity, but there is also a slight digital quality to voices. It reminds my of the sound of recorded audio that I've processed for clarity without adding additional ambient noise or reverb. The issue is very minor and I can't hear it with every voice, just ones that are probably at the edge of the normal voice range, kids voices being the most noticeable.
I played with a couple of the Premium Apps, but at this time the Amazon Video App doesn't link with our Amazon Prime account for free streaming videos, or if it does I haven't figured it out. I have only really been able to use the NetFlix app, which I mentioned above. Since we just Dish there isn't any tuning, so we haven't used the built in tuner either.
In short, I feel we got a great deal on this TV, the largest that will fit in our cabinet, great picture, reasonable sound, and easy to use.
~~~~~Update~~~~~
We have had this TV for 2 years now. It has been an excellent TV with a few minor issues.
1) The wand remote died after a few months. It was a cool novelty but not something we really used that much so no big loss.
2) The Netflix app gives us occasional issues and I have to reset it. This is a little more annoying because I think we watch more Netflix than anything. This doesn't happen often, maybe every two or three months. We will try to watch a show and Netflix starts giving us access errors so I have to hunt through the menus to find the right one to tell it to forget the Netflix account, then I can open up the Netflix app and put my username and password in again. This fixes it every time so at least there is a work around, but it is kind of annoying considering I've never had to do this on the PS3, Wii, or WiiU.
Other than those minor issues I love this TV and would buy it again in a heart beat. If we need to buy a new TV I'll be looking for whatever replaces this one in the future.