LG 47 SL 9000 47″Flat-panel LCD Review

What Hooked Us:

Excellent motion clarity.
Loads of picture settings.
Low power consumption.
Accurate 24p reproduction.

Why We Grumbled:

Bluish residual illumination.
Weak sound from the built-in speakers.
Way too little contrast.
Reflective front panel.

The Final Verdict:

LG’s chic new flat-panel scores plus-points for its gorgeous design, accurate video processing, decent motion clarity, and low power consumption. But we’re scoring it down for the weak blacks, bluish residual illumination, reflective front panel, and low contrast ratio — home-cinema fans will find the last point particularly hard to swallow.

Multimedia

In this respect, the LG has plenty to offer. Features include a USB media player for photos, music, and video files — including videos in DivX-HD format. An additional Bluetooth function allows you to transmit photos from a mobile phone to the TV — or to listen to the TV’s sound via a Bluetooth headset.

Other Features

The large number of picture controls impresses —you can, for example, adjust the gamma, secondary colours, and colour balance. On top of these, the menu also provides a selection of test patterns and an electronic colour filter, which replaces the potentially inaccurate colour filters used in colour adjustment — what more could a video addict want?

Operation

The LG’s clear menu and backlit remote control make operation especially user-friendly. A handy history list, for example, lets you call up recently viewed channels, but the LG disappoints during TV reception: The channel lists show anything but sensible pre-sorting, there’s no sorting at all for digital reception, and you can’t access pay-TV channels. On our test model, digital-cable reception only worked if we set the TV’s location to Norway or Finland. We also found the doubled-up AV modes in the picture menu far too complicated.

Picture Quality of Standard-Definition Signals

Users will find the best picture quality in the “isf Expert1” preset, with the “AV Mode” switched off. With the right settings (see Ideal settings), the LG produces a bright picture without consuming a great deal of power.

The analogue TV picture could be more detail-rich, but it’s largely free of noise and displays authentic colours. In comparison, the digital-TV picture (DVB-T and -C) shows significantly more detail — if you increase the sharpness slightly, which you can even do separately for vertical and horizontal details.

The video inputs — above all the Scart-RGB and HDMI inputs — work excellently, producing a detail-rich picture that remains flicker-free even in camera pans. The letterbox-zoom setting stretches the picture horizontally by about eight percent, making faces in particular look noticeably too wide. For Scart signals, you should select the middle colour-temperature setting, since the picture will otherwise look too brownish.

Coloured details are often swallowed up in signals arriving in standard definition (576i/p) via HDMI, but you’ll only notice this when a picture contains strong colour contrasts. One irritating aspect is the TV’s reflective glass front panel.

Picture Quality of High-Definition Signals

The LG’s processing of HDTV pictures leaves no cause for complaint: Even tiny details in various test patterns display clearly and without edge-ringing. The picture also retains all but a few fine details during motion — or it does, at least, if you keep the “Backlight” setting at no higher than 30 percent. If you value authentic cinema-style video, you should switch off the “TruMotion 100Hz” technology — while this improves motion clarity in TV pictures, it flattens film motion completely, and can even produce picture errors in complex scenes.

In the factory setup, we noticed a slight green tint, but the user can combat this with the help of the colour-temperature setting. Once the picture is adjusted correctly, bright scenes deliver an excellent picture, as we saw in the fourth chapter of “Casino Royale”: The picture looks consistent, and the colours look natural; the gamma and colour reproduction look correct even from side-on viewing angles. Horror fans, however, might find the bluish haze in night-time scenes irritating. Such scenes also lack depth as a result of the low contrast ratio.

Sound Quality

The 47 SL 9000 sounds incredibly thin. And as if that’s not bad enough, the tested model buzzed and hummed occasionally.

Ideal Settings

Picture Mode: isf Expert1

Contrast: 90

Brightness: 52

H Sharpness: 50

V Sharpness: 50

Colour: 57

Tint: 0

Dynamic Contrast: Off

Noise Reduction: Off

Gamma: Medium

Black Level: Low

TruMotion 100Hz: Off

Colour Gamut: Standard

Edge Enhancer: High

OPC: On

* These settings apply to realistic playback of HDTV/Blu-ray material through the HDMI interface in a darkened environment. Manufacturing and HDMI playback device deviations may necessitate slight adjustment.

Full Specifications