LG 42 LG 6100 42″Flat-panel LCD Review

What Hooked Us:

Excellent motion clarity if you turn down the brightness.
Decent SDTV signal processing.
Super-sleek design.

Why We Grumbled:

Low maximum contrast.
Imperfections in HDTV processing.
Weak sound.
No S-Video or headphone connections.
Judder in 24p movies.

The Final Verdict:

OK, this is a great everyday TV — it’d be unfair to say otherwise. What we can say is this: The LG disappoints with inaccurate HDTV processing and weak contrast. But a washboard-esque construction — standing just four centimetres deep — and a gorgeous, glossy design might lead many buyers to throw caution to the wind: You’ll quickly find yourself falling for the 42 LG 6100’s svelte exterior. And to the TV’s credit, expert users will love the deep colour-adjustment menu. All in all, this LG is a bit of a mixed bag.

Multimedia

High-flying multimedia capabilities were more the exception than the rule when this TV hit the shelves around a year ago. Like many TVs of its time, the LG has a USB socket that plays back JPEG photos and MP3 music, but lacks a network connection and digital-video-playback capabilities. Photos appear in high definition, but fail to display the highest level of detail.

Operation

The slender, well arranged remote control has a back button for jumping between the five most-recently viewed channels, but no button for switching picture format directly — this only quick way to do this is via the “Q.MENU” button. The “Expert” menu provides finely adjustable controls for colour balance and gamma, for example. The channel list is handy, but the long delay when switching channels will vex even patient users.

Features

The 42 LG 6100 uses a light sensor to adjust brightness and colour temperature to suit the ambient illumination. In daylight, therefore, the colours become cooler, and since this means the screen is filtering the backlight to a lesser extent, the picture gains useful reserves of contrast and brightness. But you can’t adjust settings such as colour saturation and sharpness while the sensor is active, and the TV announces each of its automatic adjustments on the screen — this quickly begins to grate on the nerves. Other features include a hybrid tuner for analogue TV and DVB-T — but not digital satellite or cable — and a Level 2.5 Teletext decoder.

Picture Quality of Standard Signals

The “Cinema” preset delivers the most natural TV picture, but we advise also turning down the sharpness slightly and switching off the noise filter. You should also get rid of the “TruMotion” technology: This improves motion sharpness in TV signals, but introduces overly smooth motion to movies, whose picture is actually meant to show slight judder. Skin tones then lack some differentiation and look too evened out, but stock tickers on a TV news channel display clearly. Via the Scart input, the LG produces a picture with only average sharpness, but the video processing impresses, producing accurate, flicker-free progressive video from 576i signals via both Scart and HDMI. With “Real Cinema” activated, the LG displays movies in optimum quality, but TV material is better off without the technology.

HDTV Picture Quality

Even in the best preset, the picture suffers a slight cyan tint, producing a colour temperature of 7,400 Kelvin. It is at least possible to optimize the colours, but you’ll have to live with the weak contrast. In night-time scenes, the LG fails to produce an impression of depth. And in bright scenes, the problems continue: In all three HD resolutions (1080/60i, 1080/60p, 1080/24p), shadows around contrast-rich objects reduce the fine-detail reproduction — you can see this in the white text at the start of “Casino Royale”, for example.

Unfortunately, pulldown judder appears in film-based video, regardless of whether it arrives at 24 or 60 hertz. We also noticed occasional judder in HD test sequences with 60 motion phases — just like we saw with films. The LG also ignores blacker-than-black and whiter-than-white shades; this can jeopardize accurate differentiation of the brightest and darkest areas.

Sound Quality

The speakers don’t point directly towards the viewer, and lack clarity when reproducing speech. Music sounds flat, and the seven-band equalizer provides only limited relief.

Ideal Settings

Picture Mode: Cinema

Contrast: 95

Brightness: 53

Sharpness: 40

Colour: 55

Tint: 0

Colour Temperature: Warm

Fresh Colour: Off

Gamma: Medium

Black Level: Low

TruMotion: Off

Noise Reduction: Off

* 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