Grayscale & Brightness, Expert 1 Mode

Brightness (100 IRE Window) 52.1 / 47.4 ftL

Primary Color Point Accuracy vs. SMPTE HD Standard

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.