LG 55LE5400 55-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LED HDTV

Review by J. Davis for LG 55LE5400 55-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LED HDTV
Rating:
This is written from the perspective of a first-timer in the world of HD and large screens. I held off until I was satisfied with the picture quality, thickness, and price of LCDs. After more than a year of research online and in person, LG won out over all others, for the above reasons and the matte screen. Our TV faces a wall of windows.

We had a tough time deciding on a 47″ or 55″. Our viewing distance is only 10′, and we didn’t want to overwhelm the room with an obnoxiously sized TV. In my exhaustive research on TV viewing distance, several points kept repeating, namely that 1) few people regret getting a TV that is too large, but many regret getting a TV that is too small; and 2) if a TV seems too large at first, it will rapidly become “just right”. Ours didn’t seem too large at first, and I’m VERY glad we didn’t get anything smaller, and we could even go a bit larger for HD material and more of an immersive feel. The only possible problem as I see it is there is more work involved in watching movies on a larger screen – your eyes have to move more. This is especially obvious when a scene cuts back and forth between two people talking, with one of them on one side of the screen, the other on the opposite side. It’s something to get used to.

Non-HD material: as expected, it doesn’t look as good as it did on a CRT TV. With some material, such as cartoons, it’s not just a TV size/resolution issue – there are compression artifacts everywhere that look awful up close. This is a function of the digital source, though, not the TV. The TV just makes it more obvious. Regular DVDs look better once you adjust the picture – the “Standard” setting is vivid but unrealistic.

HD material looks spectacular. I thought Avatar would look great, but it’s better than I hoped it would be. HD picture quality is a no-brainer with the LGs and you can see them in person compared to other sets at any time, so I won’t go into more detail than that. The matte screen diffuses light and it’s perfect for the room.

Now for the dreaded audio sync issue. The TV I received does have it, badly with the blu-ray player, very slightly with HD cable (you can’t tell unless you really look for it, and some channels are worse than others). There seems to be a lot of misinformation about this, and people everywhere are returning TVs and blu-ray players, getting technicians to come out and update their firmware and even replacing the mainboard in the TV, none of which seems to help.

Here’s the scoop – it’s a problem with the TV, not the blu-ray player, at least in the case of this TV. Apparently the HDMI input circuitry slows down the audio, causing it to fall behind the video. This has been a problem with several manufacturers’ LCD TVs for years, including some from Samsung. There is no fix available from LG for this, and I don’t think there will be until enough reviews complain about it. There are a few solutions, however:

1) Use component video cables for blu-ray instead of HDMI, which was my permanent solution.

2) I was able to eliminate the problem with HDMI/regular DVDs by setting the DVD player’s output to 24hz (cinema) instead of 60hz. There’s no flickering or loss of picture quality that I can detect. This trick didn’t work with blu-ray DVDs, so I went with the component cables instead.

3) Use an A/V receiver that has a delay feature, and route your HDMI through that. I don’t have one, so I don’t have any more information on this.

I’m giving it 4 stars for the outstanding HD picture quality, low price, and the thin matte screen. If it wasn’t for the audio sync problem, it would very easily be 5, but I can’t reward LG for something that has been an issue with their sets for so many years.