Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
This is my first flatscreen TV. I bought the TV based on 4 specific features: 120Hz refresh rate, the LED backlight (and resulting power savings), the ability to play video files from USB, and 24P Real Cinema feature. I'm glad I made the purchase. Setup was easy, with only 8 screws to attach the stand to the TV. The unit is stable. I'm impressed by how thin the TV is. All the front lights can be turned off. The screen is a matte finish (no reflective cover). The TV doesn't have networking capability, but I wanted to buy the best TV I could afford and then use a Blu-ray player to provide the network interface. I didn't know much about HDTVs a week ago and what I learned after about 8 hours of research and reviews is that the picture I actually see on the screen is heavily dependent on the source signal and the many different conversions the signal may go through (frame rate, aspect ratio change, deinterlacing, etc.) before it actually gets to the screen (the result of not feeding it a pure 1080p HDTV signal over an HDMI cable). I was really frustrated over looking at TVs in retail stores because doing comparisons side-by-side, I figured, was useless unless I knew what the original source video was and whether or not all the settings in the TV were set right. I ended up buying this TV because I figured it would give a great picture so long as I fed it with good source video. So far, that's true. Right now, I only have a DVD player and a USB hard drive connected to it. My cheap little $20 DVD player outputs in 480i or 480p. The 480i signal has less jaggies on this TV than 480p. My guess is that the deinterlacer in the DVD player is low quality, so the 480p signal fed to the TV is not so good. I'm confident a 480p signal will look better once it's coming from a decent upconverting DVD player or Blu-ray player. All my anamorphic widescreen (1.78, 1.85, and 2.35) DVDs display great with the TV set to 16x9. 4:3 TV stuff (like old X-Files videos) display properly too. DVDs are clear, crisp and smooth. I'm really impressed by the ability to play videos from a USB drive. So far I've played .avi, .mkv, .vob and .divx files up to 720p quality and file sizes between 500 MB and 2.1 GB. (When I hit the Info button on the remote, it looks like most of my .avi and .mkv files are encoded as MP4 and H.264, if that helps.) Windows .wmv files do not play. Quality is beautiful! No stuttering or pixilation. One problem I've faced, however, is the audio and video getting out of sync on some videos after about 20 minutes of play (the video starts to lag behind). I've been able to re-sync it by pressing stop and play. (Maybe it'll get fixed with a firmware update? Or maybe it's a problem with my files?) By the way, USB videos can be resumed from where you left off if you press stop or if the video stops. Once in awhile, videos will just stop on their own, but I'm able to start them again and they'll pick up and play just fine where they left off. I don't know if that's an issue with the file, the USB drive, or the TV. Aspect ratio modes are limited in USB mode: I only get the option of "Original size" or "Full" (which expands the video to the entire TV). I haven't had any problem yet with the "Full" setting because all my video files appear to be encoded in widescreen formats. The LED backlighting is adjustable, either by changing the AV mode (standard, cinema, sports, etc) or by setting the power saving feature to "Auto". At full strength, I see some LED light vignetting at the corners of the screen when there's just a black image being displayed. (I see the same thing on my LED PC monitors). By comparison, the shade of black present in the vignetted areas is still blacker than the blacks produced in the video. I don't have much to compare it to, but the remote works just fine for me. It took a little bit to figure out how to get to all the features (especially the 24P Cinema Mode, which is a couple menus deep). Sound is just fine for my tastes. The volume runs from 0 to 100 and gets plenty loud enough to be too loud when sitting about 7 feet away. Sound quality is fine and actually has a pretty good frequency response range...it's not tinny or muffled. ClearVoice does add some crispness to voices. TruMotion is kinda neat. It "interpolates" and inserts additional frames which really smooths out motion on any video I've fed it so far. Sometimes the results are desirable...sometimes not. On a "I am Legend" DVD, for example, setting the TruMotion to "Low" smooths out the video and adds to the quality in my opinion. It does add a little bit of the "Soap Opera Effect"--unnaturally clear and smooth video when compared to traditional 24-frame per second movies, so I just turn TruMotion off if I don't like the result. On some of my HD video from the USB drive, TruMotion makes motion more blurry, so I just turn it off. Again, the benefit seems to be dependent on the frame rate and quality of the original video signal. The 120Hz refresh rate and the 24P Real Cinema mode are all about displaying film and video at their native frame rates without the need to do "pull down" frame rate conversions to the video signal which can cause judder (stuttering). I'm still learning about "judder" and "pull down" so I really don't have anything to compare good vs. bad video quality. I can say that I don't experience any stuttering no matter what DVDs I play. I love the quality I'm getting out of this TV right now and it's only going to get better when I can actually feed it full 1080p signals. I will definitely look at LG LED-LCD TVs when it comes time to buy a bigger TV for the living room. I learned a lot about this TV's features by reading the online manual at LG before I bought. I now have the CD manual which is 178 pages and goes into a lot more detail about what the TV can do. If you want a copy, send me an email at rgknowlton at hotmail dot com. ******************** 3 month update. I now have an LG BD570 hooked up to the TV and I think the TV is amazing. When fed a full 1080p signal, the picture is absolutely stunning (Planet Earth, Life, Avatar, etc.) I've fed it everything from 380MB TV rip files to full quality MKVs. I am very pleased with the quality: Even the quality of the smaller video files is more than I expected from normal viewing distances. DVD upconverting through the player also displays beautifully on the screen. Once in awhile when I try to play VOB files from a hard drive, the TV won't expand the image to full screen, and once in awhile I get a video that the TV won't play (e.g. no CODEC for it). It certainly isn't enough to bother me. Whatever the TV won't player I can usually play through the BD570. Between the two, 9 out of 10 files play correctly. I like the TV so much I'm seriously considering one of its big brothers for out main living room TV.