LCD TV Reviews

The LG’s resolution was also superb. The optimum positions of the two Sharpness controls were just short of the middle (default) settings, which produced a uniformly crisp image across the entire screen. We’ve become accustomed to seeing detailed images on 1080p sets, and the LG is up there with the best. With a good HD source, you won’t have any complaints. SD sources (DVD) looked fine as well, but if you can’t clearly see the superiority of HD on this set, then you’re reading the wrong magazine.

Let Me Count the Ways
We’ve spilled plenty of ink in the past discussing LED backlighting and local dimming. However, there are always new readers (we hope) who want to know what all the fuss is about. If you are in this group, be aware that the majority of LCD LED sets aren’t local dimming. In fact, only a very few are.

Unlike plasmas, LCD sets don’t produce any light of their own. A backlight (traditionally composed of fluorescent tubes) must be positioned behind the LCD panel. The image forms when the LCDs either block or pass this light.

LCDs aren’t perfect light blockers, but if the backlight modulates to assist the LCDs in doing their job, a set can produce close to a pure black. Fluorescent backlighting isn’t suitable for this application, but LEDs are tailor-made for it. In a local-dimming set, the LEDs are arranged in clusters behind the screen. LEDs can cycle on and off very rapidly, and the brightness of each cluster, or group of clusters, changes dynamically according to the brightness in the area of the image it services. If the region is dark, the light from the LEDs dims. If it’s bright, the LEDs ramp up.

While the LCD panel itself still does the main job of creating the image in a locally dimmed display, locally dimmed backlighting can dramatically deepen an LCD set’s black levels (and improve the shadow detail). Few sets—LCD or otherwise—can match the 47LE8500’s deep blacks.

I don’t know of any Blu-ray Disc that presents a greater challenge in this respect from beginning to end than Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. When you combine that disc’s almost continuously dark image with crisply defined detail, you have a reference disc (though not for color, which is almost monotonically brown). It looks exceptional on the LG. At the end of chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2, you’ll find the mother of all low-contrast sequences, as Professor Dumbledore and Harry travel at night to an English village that’s lit by practically nothing. The LG’s image pops as well as the scene allows, and it never leaves you wondering what’s happening. The same occurs with the brief night scene at the beginning of chapter 3, when Harry ends up in a dark field outside of the Weasleys’ house, or in any of the disc’s flood of dark, difficult scenes.

However, when you turn off the LED local dimming (there’s a control for this in the picture menu), the LG’s image on such material collapses into a soupy gray. The difference is not subtle.

Although the LG’s black level is good on most (but not all) fades to black, you can still make out the screen in a darkened room as a very dark gray. The same for those black bars, especially if the scene you’re displaying is dark. However, I can count on the fingers of one hand the LCD or plasma sets we’ve tested that can do as well as this one or better. That includes most sets whose names do not begin with a P and end with an R.

Local-dimming HDTVs have a tendency to create halos around bright objects in otherwise dark scenes. Joel Silver of the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) has dubbed this the Tinker Bell Effect. It increases as the number of separately addressed LED clusters that make up the backlighting decreases. With most material, this was not an issue on the LG. But in the star field at the beginning of Stargate: Continuum, several of the brightest stars were surrounded by a hazy but clearly visible glow.

Off-axis performance is another bane of most LCD sets. However, LG uses an LCD technology called In-Plane Switching (IPS), which offers the best off-axis performance I’ve yet seen in an LCD. With local dimming on hand to squelch the main recognized weakness of IPS designs (mediocre black levels), you get the best of all worlds. Even at 45 degrees off axis—sometimes more—the 47LE8500 produced no obvious degradation of either bright or dark images.

Conclusion
Is this LG set perfect? No. But what HDTV is? One or two others (also local-dimming HDTVs) have done as well or better with respect to black levels (and perhaps in how they suppress those halos). But they were nowhere near as impressive in their off-axis performance. And no set we’ve checked out to date has had better color or resolution. LG pulls it all together here in the Infinia 47LE8500. Highly recommended.