Hands-On Review: LG 55LH90 55-inch LED-Backlit LCD HDTV

PLUS
Fabulous detail and depth
Great blacks and shadow detail
Easy-to-use Picture Wizard setup feature

MINUS
On some content colour can look a bit flat
A little larger/heavier than competing models

Priced at $3,500, this 55-inch LCD television incorporates LG's most advanced technology: 240Hz TruMotion video processing, and full-array LED backlighting with local dimming. The LED backlighting system has 240 zones that can be dimmed independently. LG's LH90 series also includes 42- and 47-inch models for $2,200 and $2,600 respectively.

Instead of fluorescent tubes, LED-backlit LCD TVs employ an array of light-emitting diodes as their light source. One advantage of LEDs is that they have a wider colour spectrum than the CCFLs (fluorescent lamps) used in conventional LCD TVs, allowing TVs that use this light source to produce a wider range of colours.

Full-array backlighting, in which LEDs are placed behind the display instead of around the edge, allows for a feature called "local dimming." LEDs behind dark areas can be turned down, while those behind bright areas can be fully illuminated. This should allow a wider contrast range, with deeper blacks and better shadow detail in darker areas, and more brilliant colours and better highlight detail in bright areas.

The 55LH90 is an attractive TV. Its screen is framed in a gloss-black bezel that's slightly wider than those on many current flat panels. There's a status light on the lower right that glows blue when the TV is turned on, and turns red when it's turned off; I find it a bit distracting. For stand mounting, the TV sits on a supplied swivel base. The screen is very good at suppressing room reflections. You can sit 45 degrees to either side before you notice significant dimming of the picture.

Settings: Out of the box, the 55LH90 comes up in Standard picture mode, with backlight set at 70, contrast at 90 (down slightly from the maximum setting), brightness at the 50 midpoint, sharpness boosted to 70, colour goosed slightly to 60 and local dimming turned on. The resulting picture is quite vibrant, and looks a little over-processed.

There are some easy ways to get an immediate improvement. The quickest and easiest is to select the 55LH90's THX Movie mode, which THX says is intended to "recreate the cinema experience at home." This setting cuts backlight to 30, boosts brightness to 53 and leaves colour at 60 and contrast at 90. In this mode, all these adjustments are greyed out, so they cannot be tweaked further.

A better option, and only slightly less easy, is to use the 55LH90's Picture Wizard. Choose one of the TV's custom picture modes, then invoke the Picture Wizard to see a series of test patterns on the screen, complete with instructions on how to use them. With the aid of the Picture Wizard, I boosted brightness to 58 from the midpoint of 50, turned the backlight down to 40, set contrast at 86, cut colour to 48 (just below the midpoint of 50), and set horizontal and vertical sharpness at 50. I also went into the Expert Control menu and set colour temperature at Warm.

The Picture Wizard is a fabulous feature, because it negates the need to use a calibration disc to set the TV up properly. After using the Picture Wizard, I used test patterns on Digital Video Essentials HD Basics to confirm that the settings I made with the Picture Wizard were accurate. The basic settings were bang-on; but the calibration disc did show that with the TV's colour test pattern adjusted correctly, reds were too intense. Taming them required cutting the colour setting to 40. This had the side effect of making other colours a bit too muted. The 55LH90's Expert Settings menu has many fine adjustments, which a professional installer might be able to use to tame the boosted reds without affecting other colours.

Evaluation: The benefits of 55LH90's advanced technology were obvious when watching the Seasonal Forests episode of Planet Earth on Blu-ray. Near the beginning, there's a segment where the camera does a long vertical pan up an enormous redwood tree. I've seen this shot go slightly blurry on some LCDs, but that didn't happen here, probably because of the TV's 240Hz TruMotion processing. Colour looked very natural.

In high-contrast scenes of the taiga in Canada's far north, there was exquisite detail in both dark and bright areas: sparkles and trails in the snow, branches in the coniferous forests and dark plumage on a crow. The LED backlighting with local dimming is surely helping the TV convey detail across this very wide tonal range. Dark details were convincingly portrayed in a nighttime scene showing tiny nocturnal creatures in South American coniferous forests. I was struck by the neutral character of the LH90's blacks and dark greys: there was no magenta or greenish overlay as you see on many lesser flat panels.
On some programming, such as the Blu-ray version of Valkyrie, colours looked slightly muted. This movie has a nostalgically muted look to begin with, and the 55LH90 emphasized this characteristic. But detail was excellent, and blacks were satisfyingly deep. The transition from black to shadow was perfect in dark interior shots, such as the initial bomb-making scene.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist on Blu-ray looked gorgeous. Blacks and shadow detail in the dark club scenes and nighttime New York City streets were superb. The film's warm colour palette was reproduced beautifully; skin tones looked great in facial close-ups, and faces had convincing three-dimensionality.

A high-definition broadcast of Game 7 in the Stanley Cup final also looked wonderful. Predictably, there was no motion blurring at all. Reds can be a weakness for many LCDs (on some models, reds have an orange hue); but on the 55LH90, the home uniforms of the Detroit team looked perfect. In close-ups of players, skin tones looked perfect and faces had great detail and depth.

Baseball was also good, though results varied depending on the broadcast. In a Blue Jays day game with the roof open, blacks in the home team's and umpire's uniforms were deep and neutral, and had lots of detail and texture. But the turf looked a bit muted, even as skin tones looked a bit rosy.

Overall, this state-of-the-art LCD television delivers excellent performance: inky blacks and excellent shadow detail, rock-solid portrayal of motion, and great detail. The one flaw with the picture settings I used is slightly muted colour on programming that is muted to begin with - Law & Order, for example. But programming with a vibrant look - say CSI: Miami - looks excellent. This issue is almost certainly something that a professional installer could address by configuring the LH90's extensive Expert Settings Menu.

Article Tags:  LG, LH90, LED, LCD, HDTV, CCFL, 55lh90, wizard, 240hz, trumotion, television, backlit, patterns, local, dimming,