LG 42LV5500 Review

Introduction

Design

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The LV5500 isn't at the height of TV fashion, but it still looks good.

The LG 42LV5500 is an attractive TV, with all smooth lines and beveled edges. The glossy black finish is highly reflective, which may bother some people, and not only for its near-magical predilection for picking up fingerprints. There’s the additional distraction of a light on the lower right side that blinks every time you push a button on the remote. We tried to disable it, but to no avail.

The LG 42LV5500 ships with two remote controls: a more traditional type of remote and the new Magic Motion remote. The Magic Motion remote is quite different. It functions like a pointer: When you aim at the screen, a little icon appears and tracks your motion. There’s a certain novelty to it, but the overall interface is too slow to make this your primary remote.

The LG 42LV5500 comes ready to connect to a multitude of devices, both old and new. There are four HDMI ports, two USB ports, two component and two composite connections in the back. One of each uses the traditional RCA-type sockets and one of each uses a 1/8th-inch socket. LG includes adapters for the latter. There are outputs for both analog audio and digital audio, an LAN port, an RS-232C socket and a place to plug in your wireless control system for home theater universality. Also, included in the box is a thumb-drive-sized device that gives the LG 42LV5500 the ability to connect to a Wi-Fi network in your home.

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Smart TV Features

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A great multimedia platform with a sensible and user-friendly approach.

The LG 42LV5500 has a healthy array of streaming content options split into two distinct categories. There’s a “premium” section and an Apps section. The premium content is just that—stuff you probably want. You’ll find Netflix, Vudu, Facebook, YouTube, and several more content providers and apps already pre-loaded. This page is customizable, as well, so you can download apps and bump them to the first page of the menu.

When you hit the Menu button on either remote, you arrive at a sort of “mission control.” The live video feed (via HDMI, composite AV, etc.) appears in the upper left corner. The rest of the screen is a menu of all the other types of media the TV has access to: premium content providers, LG Apps, local media like USB memory sticks, and a full web browser. We think this is a great setup.

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Picture Quality

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With top-notch color accuracy and a decent contrast ratio, this LG's picture is great.

There's a lot that's really great about the picture produced by this LG and only a few areas that detract from its overall performance. One of these areas is the addition of a permanent local dimming feature, which attempts to level the TV's backlight to aid in the production of darker shadow tones and brighter highlights. You can't turn it off, which irked us; it doesn't work very well. A tie-in with this feature is the LV5500's black level itself—it simply doesn't get very dark.

Those minor problems aside, the LG 42LV5500 tested with excellent color accuracy and an acceptable contrast ratio. Its motion performance was great—everything that isn't film or film-based video content benefits from the TruMotion setting, which is user-adjustable. All in all, this LG produces a consistently high-quality picture that looks objectively correct. Videophiles, rejoice.

Conclusion

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The LG 42LV5500 ($1099 MSRP) is a strong television in many regards, but we definitely prodded to find some weak points.

First the good news. Color performance doesn’t get much better than this. It will deliver exactly the colors that the movie and TV producers wanted you to see (provided you follow our handy calibration recommendations). Secondly, the multimedia options are excellent. LG did a great job creating a simple, easy to use platform that takes your TV beyond the living room and onto the internet for a myriad of streaming content and apps. So far, only the top-end Samsung TVs have matched them in this regard.

Now for the bad news. The LG 42LV5500 has a weak black level, like so many LGs we’ve reviewed. As a result, the contrast ratio is weak, especially when compared to similarly priced Sony and Samsung TVs. We can live with that, as the color performance is so damn good. Others may disagree.

Overall, the LG 42LV5500 may have its faults, but we heartily recommend it for the videophiles.

Science Introduction

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We've told you that the LG LV5500 looks great. Its color accuracy is spot-on, producing both colors that are accurate and the proper range of those colors. Its contrast ratio is acceptable and it showed us no visible color temperature error during testing, which is a rarer result than you might think. Best of all, it handles motion-based content handily by employing a very well-rendered TruMotion setting.

Color Accuracy

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Color accuracy is of utmost importance to all display technology and the LV5500 is a solid role-model.

There is an international standard for high-definition TVs, called Rec. 709, which dictates the ideal colors that a television should display. To determine just how accurate a TV's displayed colors are, we test its basic 1,024 greys, reds, greens, and blues that it displays and uses to make all of its more complex colors, then we compare them to the requirements of Rec. 709.

This test revealed that the LV5500 is extremely accurate, as its color gamut matches the Rec. 709 ideal color gamut almost perfectly. Its red point was just a hair over saturated—negligible during viewing—and its white point proved to be a touch too cool. Otherwise, the LV5500 is going to display all content accurately; you'll be seeing what the director, illustrator, or artist intended you to see.

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Color Temperature

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After color accuracy, the consistency of color temperature is very important; this is another area where the LV5500 shines.

Color temperature is a difficult concept to explain; to say it relates to a consistency of a color would be false, as it actually references the literal temperature, in Kelvins, of the light that is half of the saturation of a television's displayed hues and shades. The more "colorful" or vivid a color is, the more saturated (with color) it is said to be. The part that is unsaturated—the light that helps it travel to human eyes—should be produced with consistent temperature across the TV's whole input signal.

The LG LV5500 tested with consistent color temperature across the entire input spectrum. It was, in a word, perfect. While there were a few divergences detected by our light spectrometer, they are not perceptible by human eyes. For human purposes, the LV5500 tested with no visible color temperature error. It is very common for a TV to display a warming effect as it darkens from white to black, but the LV5500 skirted this problem area—an impressive result.

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Other Tests

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