LG 47LX9500 3D LED television

LG's best LED TV has deep contrast levels and great picture quality

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The LG 47LX9500 is a 3D LED television that has excellent image quality and a wide range of useful Internet video-on-demand features. We're not sold on its design and the quality of its 3D decoding, but otherwise it's a stellar LED television.

Pros

  • Great image quality and contrast levels, solid video-on-demand implementation

Cons

  • Mediocre 3D implementation, reflective screen (although not terribly so), some backlight cloudiness on high contrast edges

Bottom Line

LG's best 3D LED television is an excellent all-rounder apart from its mediocre display of 3D content. It has excellent picture quality and a very high contrast ratio, and offers some very well implemented video-on-demand features. Apart from the form-before-function glossy screen and occasional minor backlight cloudiness, the 47LX9500 is an excellent LED television that is among the best on the market.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 4,099.00 (AUD)

LG 47LX9500: Design, connectivity and features

The LG 47LX9500 has a very thin bezel surrounding its screen, finished in translucent plastic. It's attractive, but the glossy finish of the LCD panel easily picks up reflections in a bright room. The entire chassis is reasonably slim, measuring 31.6mm at its thickest point; considering that the LED lighting of the LG 47LX9500 is arranged across the rear of the screen rather than around the edges, this is an excellent achievement.

The last backlit LED television we looked at was the Sharp LC52LE700X — its matrix of individually controllable LED lights allowed it to display deep black levels alongside full-brightness whites. LG's approach is similar, with a sheet of white LEDs that use local dimming to dynamically alter brightness levels across the screen.

Four HDMI ports and the usual range of component, composite and VGA connectors make for a solid suite of video inputs. There's also an Ethernet port for connecting to a wired network and dual side-mounted USB host ports for media file playback.

The LG 47LX9500 includes the same class-leading collection of video-on-demand applications as the LG 55LE7500 LED TV. The ease of use of the integrated BigPond Movies service gives this TV a significant advantage over most other manufacturers' IPTV offerings.

LG 47LX9500: Picture quality, motion performance and 3D playback

The LG 47LX9500 has excellent picture quality that rivals competitors like the Samsung Series 7 (UA55C7000) LED, Sony BRAVIA KDL52-LX900 and Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX800. After running through the television's picture setup wizard we found black levels to be very deep, with the panel effectively disappearing when in a darkened room with no content displayed. With The Dark Knight playing via Blu-ray we saw great detail levels in dim and bright scenes, with fine image detail retained even when the screen was displaying very murky and poorly lit content.

Our only issue with the LG 47LX9500's backlighting manifests in the rare situations where the screen is displaying small, bright areas against a black background — the most common example is watching the ending credits of a movie or television show. We noticed that the backlighting of the 47LX9500 produced a small amount of cloudiness around text, with a slight bloom of light visible. This is only a minor annoyance and is lessened if you've lowered the television's brightness.

Sharpness was slightly high at default settings, but after lowering it we found the LG 47LX9500 could display smooth and detailed 1080p video with no exaggeration of edges or excessive noise. Upscaled 480p DVD content and broadcast television was also handled well.

LG's 3D technology operates in a similar fashion to Samsung's, with active shutter polarised glasses working in tandem with a frame-switching mode on the television itself. Like Samsung, LG's televisions can interpolate 2D content into 3D.

We found the 3D effect with Coraline and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs to be mostly acceptable, but fast on-screen movement introduces visible crosstalk and edge blurring. LG's glasses are the cheapest on the market at the moment at $99, which may be a deciding factor if you've got a large family or 3D-crazy mates.

LG environmental policy and conclusion

LG's environment policy outlines some of the company's sustainability efforts, including minimising its carbon footprint and producing greener products.

The LG 47LX9500 has excellent picture quality and a good range of included features. It's not the best 3D TV on the market, but for regular movie watching it's a great choice.

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Read more on these topics: lg, lcd tvs, LED TV, home entertainment, led tvs, LCD tv

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