Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsJury is still out. Great picture quality, TERRIBLE integration with other devices.
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2019
Great display. Great user interface. Great remote. But "bad" for some important details...
THE GOOD:
Picture quality is amazing - have not done a lot of 4k viewing with it yet, so more to come on that.
But the quality is obviously great. Amazingly bright and vibrant colors.
The remote is very nice, and the OS uses a pointer/cursor, which makes it easy to navigate around the UI when changing settings, etc.
The central processor seems to be really fast - everything is very responsive - user interface, volume changes, etc.
FOR THE PRICE, I was hoping for better interoperation with home theater gear and devices.
My lower-end, older, Samsung tv integrated just fine with my AppleTV box and home theater - this LG does NOT.
It could be that I simply have not learned the settings yet, so, again, I'll update this later. My setup: Yamaha home theater receiver, AppleTV, Tivo Bolt (for over-the-air broadcast), Blu-Ray player. Tivo bolt is connected directly to TV, everifying else via the home theater. [A little explanation - the Tivo Bolt DVR sucks at HDMI output, so I have to connect it directly to the TV; can't connect through the home theater without getting black screen. Thus, I need to constantly switch between two inputs on the LG, and it doesn't seem to auto-sense which input is newly active.]
Audio quality: not amazing, but decent sound quality coming out of the speakers. High end is not quite there, but good low end. Have not adjusted (or even found) EQ settings for audio.
THE BAD:
A) Does NOT switch input sources when I power up the AppleTV (connected via HDMI ports on a home theater).
So, you have to keep going to the Home screen and choosing an input source. The TV seems to just stay on whatever source you last used - so I have to manually switch input sources a lot. It's possible the Tivo could be screwing everything up, since it really never sleeps or powers off, so perhaps there's an active signal on the HDMI, and this confuses the LG. Not sure.
B) Does not sense power-off. So if I sleep the AppleTV, the TV remains on. Pain in the rear.
C) Does NOT integrate with volume changes in home theater - so you have to turn the TV's volume down. And you can't then control the home theater volume with the TV remote. That is just lame - my older TV handled this seamlessly. I've played with the settings for this and still no success.
D) The preset display settings are just ridiculous. The color saturation is so high that lots of things look unnatural - like a football game. The team uniforms are glowing and the field is neon green. A few other settings are too muted or too dark. So, you will have to change their presets. Not a big deal, but why have so many presets that are the same? Again, if I had this with a bargain tv it wouldn't be an issue. But a TV that cost me almost $2k? They should've dialed this in better. Also, regarding the color clarity, I find the black levels to be nice and deep, but no definition at all - I can't see detail in black colors, and it's very noticeable.
E) No auto light sensing of the room? None of the presets for the display seem to respond to room brightness. My cheap tv did, why can't this expensive one? They have "power saver" presets, but they don't seem to adjust to room brightness. So this means you're going to have to change existing presets in order to create the right brightness for your various situations (say, all lights on, and low-lighting for movie viewing). Then, you'll have to manually switch between those settings when needed. Pain.
F) One serious bug in their display technology - watching football, the ball, when thrown, looks semi-opaque. As if the compression or frame rate settings are not rendering it every frame. The ball looks semi-transparent, as if the grass on the field is showing through the ball, making it harder to track. I've not yet found any display settings that will let me adjust this (usually it's the motion or smoothing algorithms on these 'smart' tv's). But this is a serious flaw - will this tv not do sports well?
G) Bad ergonomics for using with a wall mount. How do you move this thing around? The display panel is so thin, there's not way I'm going to grab it form the top corners and swivel the TV - I'm sure the glass would burst. So for a wall mount, you're going to have to really loosen up all the swivel joints so that you can more easily move the tv. And, in moving it, I guess grab it from the bottom, where the CPU housing is, because grabbing a 1/4-inch sheet of glass seems like a bad idea. Does no one at LG every swivel a TV from side to side?
I love this thing, but now I'm forced to do a lot of research and testing settings just to get basic things working that used to work for me on a much cheaper tv. In the mean time, I'm forced to use three remotes often.
I'm terribly disappointed with the lack of integration with a home theater setup. Especially at this price.
Will update this review after more testing and research (fun - not!). I just want to watch tv, I don't want to be an HDMI sync expert.
