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The Short Form
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| $2,600 ($3,199 list) / LGUSA.COM / 800-243-0000 |
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Snapshot
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| A very good picture and sexy styling add up to a solid recommendation for LG's new LCD |
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Plus
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| • Accurate, natural color and lifelike highlights • Extensive picture adjustments and memory settings • Excellent standard-def processing • Cutting-edge styling |
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Minus
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| • Remote isn't backlit and has no dedicated button for screen modes • Occasional artifacts from TruMotion processing |
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Key Features
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• 1,920 x 1,080p resolutionn • Four HDMI 1.3 Deep Color inputs • 1080p/24 compatibility • 120-Hz TruMotion processing • 10-point grayscale calibration • Inputs: 4 HDMI, 2 component-video, and 1 composite-video; RF antenna, VGA (plus PC audio in), USB, and RS-232 control • 45 1/2 x 34 1/4 x 17 in (with stand); 99 1/4 lb |
As I checked out LG's 47LG60, a 47-inch 1080p-resolution LCD, I couldn't help but think of the old Zenith slogan (LG bought Zenith in the late '90s): "The quality goes in before the name goes on." There's plenty of innovation here, beginning with the styling. The sculpted-metal backside is painted in a high-gloss red (dubbed "Scarlet") that makes for a striking side view, while the swiveling stand is rimmed in the same red and topped with a chrome mirror finish. The front bezel is high-gloss black, and there's a clear plexiglass cutout below the screen with an etched LG logo, whose perimeter glows red and then white when you turn on the TV and is accompanied by a New Age ditty. Thankfully, the light and sound are defeatable, but it all makes an impressive statement.
The LG's input selection is reasonably generous. There are four HDMI 1.3 jacks (including one in the side-mounted convenience jackpack), though only one composite-video input. You also get a PC input and a USB port for a photo- or MP3-laden flash drive.
The slim remote lacks backlighting, but its mostly large and well-placed keys made it easy to find the important buttons in the dark. An AV Mode button lets you cycle through some of the picture modes on the fly, which is nice. But instead of having a dedicated button for changing screen modes, you have to use the Quick Menu button to bring up the appropriate menu. Screen modes include 16:9 (mild overscan), Just Scan (pixel-for-pixel), Zoom 1 and 2, and one that automatically selects a mode based on the program format.
SETUP
The LG offers a wealth of picture presets, including two Expert modes that can be tweaked with advanced controls. The latter include some elaborate options for setting white balance or grayscale — the key element of an ISF calibration. A technician can set individual levels of red, green, and blue for each of the 10 brightness (or "IRE") levels typically applied during calibration, allowing for dead-on results (see Test Bench). The set also has individual saturation and tint for the primary and secondary colors, and Black Level and Gamma controls to deepen the blacks and bring out shadow details, respectively. (I left Black Level in its default Low position, and typically left Gamma in its default Medium setting.) Unusually, the LG allows all seven of the picture modes to be customized for every input. So, for example, you can tweak both the Cinema and Sports modes for your cable box without having any impact on how these modes look with other devices, and then use the remote's AV Mode button to switch between them on the fly.
After calibration, I experimented with the other advanced menu functions, deciding to keep the Fresh Contrast and Fresh Color auto modes off, and setting Noise Reduction at low or medium depending on the source material. The LG's 120-Hz TruMotion processing was mostly left off or on its Low setting.
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Tuning into a Universal HD channel showing of Dante's Peak, I was struck by the LG's lifelike picture. The set reproduced highlights in a way that gave well-transferred movies — even on regular DVD — a you-are-there look reminiscent of crisply shot video, but without the usual tell-tale busyness or noise. In a scene where Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton are up in the Rockies, I noticed how convincingly the halo of sunlight around their heads looked. And the green pines, the blue sky, and the denim hue of Brosnan's well-worn shirt were all displayed accurately. Black levels, while not as deep as on our reference plasma or the LED-driven LCDs I've looked at, were in line with what I've seen on most LCDs. Shadow rendition, meanwhile, was very good. In a scene where Brosnan and Hamilton sit at night on her dimly lit porch, I could see details in Brosnan's shock of dark black hair and the fine texture in the wood siding behind him.
I next moved on to the Blu-ray Disc of High School Musical 2, a movie that just hemorrhages bright color. The reds of the banners, gymnasium markings, and cafeteria tables during the title sequence looked punchy and clean. The colors and details of the costumes exploded off the screen during the opening dance number, from Zac Efron's striped blue polo to Corbin Bleu's lime-green T-shirt to the bejeweled gold neck strap on Ashley Tisdale's red blouse. Even the bus was a perfect school-bus yellow. And the LG easily laid bare the difference between Tisdale's pinkish complexion and Vanessa Hudgens's olive skin tone.
Standard-def programs looked exceptionally clean with only modest application of the Noise Reduction control, which did its job without causing notable loss of detail. Good DVD transfers, like The Fast and the Furious Collector's Edition, retained the realistic highlights I saw on HD material with virtually no evidence of mosquito noise or jaggies.
Meanwhile, clips from various test discs proved that the set's TruMotion processing was highly effective at smoothing judder on slow camera pans and retaining detail in fast-moving objects. But it could also introduce artifacts under some conditions, such as the unnaturally jerky head movements of an FBI agent in a scene from Furious and obvious moiré distortion in some car parts in another scene. (Both of these effects disappeared when TruMotion was turned off.) Though these incidents were few and far between, I mostly kept TruMotion off and engaged only its Low setting when the program material seemed to call for it.
BOTTOM LINE
At around $2,600 on the street, the 47LG60 is among the pricier 47-inch LCDs out there. But this is a fine TV that offers unique styling, outstanding color, and superior video processing that was deft at handling day-to-day standard-def material — something critically important yet overlooked in many TVs. And while there might be other sets that deliver deeper blacks, I found the picture punchy, dynamic, and engaging. Now, what else has the inheritor of the great Zenith tradition got up its sleeve?
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Grayscale & Brightness, Expert 1 Mode
IRE |
Before Calibration |
After Calibration |
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20 |
7767 |
6472 |
30 |
7213 |
6510 |
40 |
7062 |
6519 |
50 |
7023 |
6513 |
60 |
6968 |
6497 |
70 |
6874 |
6525 |
80 |
6990 |
6524 |
90 |
6985 |
6516 |
100 |
6768 |
6503 |
Brightness (100 IRE Window) 52.1 / 47.4 ftL
Primary Color Point Accuracy vs. SMPTE HD Standard
Color |
Target X |
Measured X |
Target Y |
Measured Y |
Red |
0.63 |
.617 |
0.34 |
.338 |
Green |
0.31 |
.275 |
0.60 |
.596 |
Blue |
0.155 |
.149 |
0.07 |
.097 |
Cyan |
0.225 |
.217 |
0.329 |
.315 |
Magenta |
0.321 |
.319 |
0.154 |
.159 |
Yellow |
0.419 |
.401 |
0.505 |
.507 |
The 47LG60 performed better in the lab than most LCDs I've tested to date, proving it to have accurate color, good grayscale delineation and gradation, and superior processing for the handling of standard definition and interlaced programs.
Out of the box, the picture from the set's default Vivid preset was horrifying — bright, glary, and oversaturated. It also suffered from grossly exaggerated digital blocking noise. However, the Cinema and Expert modes (which start out looking the same before any adjust ment) looked quite good, and I watched happily for a while on Expert 1 without making any adjustments at all. Grayscale for these modes tracked consistently around 7,000 K for much of the brightness range — a not-terrible result that most consumers could probably live with without popping for a full-scale ISF calibration, though at its worst the set measured +713 K of the 6500 K standard. Adjusting grayscale with the Expert menu's 10-point White Balance controls and a colorimeter allowed me to bring tracking to within ±28 K from 20 to 100 IRE — virtually dead on . . . A swing up in the darkest (and sometimes the very brightest) IRE windows is very typical of LCDs; it's notable here that the TV tracked perfectly down to 20 IRE.
The primary colors measured nearly dead-on as compared to the HDTV standard, although green came up a touch undersaturated, and the color decoder test showed only a modest -2% green error. I was able to correct this with the dedicated green color control in the Expert menu.
Black and white step patterns and ramps showed nice even delineation across the brightness range, though the blacks didn't go as deep as on our reference Pioneer Kuro plasma or Samsung's LED-driven LCDs. But they were by no means problematic, and once I set the TV's Brightness , Gamma, and Black Level controls to their optimum settings I didn't find myself constantly tweaking the settings the way I normally do with TVs that suffer in this area.
Screen uniformity for the LG was excellent for an LCD; gray fields looked essentially pure all the way down to a super-dark 10 IRE with no obvious hotspots. Only at 0 IRE could I detect a slight glow from the backlight around the edges of the screen. Viewing angle was a bit more narrow than I've seen on some sets, but on the plus side, the screen's matte finish handled ambient light well &emdash; keeping glare to a minimum. Overscan measured a modest 1.5% for the 16:9 mode and 0% with Just Scan selected.
The set fully and very cleanly resolved 1080i/p and 720p signals via HDMI and component video, but fine resolution turned out to be highly dependent on the setting of the Sharpness control. This would normally be turned down to something close to its zero point to eliminate any evidence of artificial edge enhancement, but putting the control much below its default midpoint setting of 50 began to noticeably reduce resolution as observed on a multiburst test pattern. My compromise was to turn it down to about 40, which left a touch of visible enhancement but nothing most people would get upset about. I normally turn sharpness to a touch above zero anyway to avoid softness in the picture, but I've never seen a sharpness control that could interfere so heavily with detail reproduction.
The 47LG60 performed as well or better on the Silicon Optix Blu-ray and standard DVD torture tests as any TV I've ever tested, acing virtually every test. It was rock solid on both the HQV Blu-ray Video and Film Resolution Loss tests (with TruMotion processing turned off), as well as on the jaggies tests that check for video deinterlacing artifacts. The LG's noise reduction circuitry was excellent, providing subtle reduction of the modest noise in the high def test clips without robbing the image of significant detail at any setting. Switching to the Benchmark standard def DVD feed as 480i, the set again proved itself capable of jaggies-free deinterlacing, and its noise reduction provided serious clean-up without eliminating detail.
The TruMotion circuitry did a great job smoothing out judder in slow camera pans and in preserving fine detail in moving objects, but could introduce distortion as well. A pan of stadium stands on the HQV disc looked silky smooth with TruMotion turned on — something I've rarely seen. But engaging TruMotion also caused a small touch of instability in the Film Resolution Loss Test's moving test pattern, and I noted some weird (if infrequent) artifacts while watching a DVD of The Fast and the Furious. In one scene, I saw some unnatural jerkiness in the head movements of an FBI agent as he simultaneously sat down and swiveled his neck toward his colleagues; I suppose the combination of vertical and horizontal/diagonal motion must have bollixed the processing, because it went away when TruMotion was deactivated. In another scene where the camera does a fast vertical pan down a column of auto parts laid out on a garage floor, the grille-like front on one of the parts picked up some very noticeable moiré distortion that also went away when I turned off the TruMotion function. On the other hand, the FPD (Flat Panel Display) Blu-ray test disc has excellent moving resolution test patterns and video clips that include cars and alphanumeric characters zipping across the screen, and engaging the TruMotion noticeably reduced blurring and ghosting on these tests without any obvious degradation.