Customer Reviews

LG 55LH40 55-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LCD HDTV, Gloss Black

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I nearly pulled the trigger on a Samsung 55" model but while chasing the cheapest price, ran across this LG at Best Buy for $1799. Detailed info is hard to find, but it was available for store pickup so I took a chance without seeing it first since I could return it easily. I am glad I did. I cannot imagine a better picture. Observations:

Container is 56-1/2" x 40" x 21" with 2 hand holds on each end. Two adult males handled it without much difficulty. Comes with stand attached. Clip the bands, lift the bottomless box up and put it where you want it. I did not, but plan on 3 people to wall mount it.

You are not going to get home theater audio out of any unit without a subwoofer. It is simple physics. This one sounds pretty good for what it is. You can easily connect it to a home theater system with the Digital Audio Out or RCA ports. It has no separate Subwoofer Out port.

I read an article that expounded on the limitations of the human eye to distinguish contrast at any one light level. Think of waiting for your eyes to adjust to bright or dark conditions. The point made is that contrast specs are BS. Test eqpt might measure another TV as having more range than this one, but I don't think your eyes would detect a difference. This TV has good black levels and maintains them as you crank up the brightness. I still think plasma has the best picture but can't live with its shortcomings. I question the benefit of LCD LED backlight beyond reduced energy consumption and a skinnier unit. Maybe it improves black levels?

If you have digital cable as a primary source, don't blame muddy dark areas on a TV. It is just excessive compression they use to save bandwidth. Sat TV is generally better. OTA broadcast is beautiful. Everything falls short of 1080P DVD. A gamma adjustment can help tweak this problem. This TV has some "expert adjustments" including gamma and black level. I haven't played with them, yet.

One of the imaging engineers I work with gave me a chart that shows the limitations of the human eye with respect to HD. Per the chart, you have to get a lot closer than normal viewing distances to see the difference between 480, 720, or 1080 resolution. This TV is big enough that it might matter to some folks and it looks great up close. I start to see the screen door effect at about a 24" viewing distance. Even with eagle eyes you would not see it at a comfortable viewing distance.

SD content looks very good but you can't make it HD. The interpolation algorithms work well. NTSC (the old analog standard, what you get from a VCR) is 320 x 240. Standard DVD is 480P. This is an area where you could see big differences between products.

TV's are moving toward becoming personal computers. I can see future units having a PDA for a remote and full capabilities. That will be cool. I can't wait. This one doesn't have any of that except a USB port for displaying pictures and playing music. It appears that computer capability is what makes a big difference in price. In my opinion, the most capable units are still pretty lame. This is the bottom of the line model but the only difference is the computer features. This TV has a PC port. Online streaming content is 480P, at best, and extremely compressed. I don't think it looks good on a big screen.

Menus are well designed. This TV makes it easy to optimize to your preferences. I did not like the "Auto" setting for picture brightness. I wanted it brighter. Otherwise, the initial setup wizard did the job.

No S-video. Seems like it is being dropped by the manufacturers.

I would like to have 2 antenna inputs but the only TV I found that has two is Mitsubishi.

Since broadcast frame rates are around 30 fps and interlaced only refreshes half of the lines, I think the effectiveness of 120hz (240hz)refresh rate is pretty subjective and content specific. Same goes for the 24 fps movie source stuff on DVD. This TV has settings for these features. If I find them useful, I will update this review.

I could gush awhile, but I think I will watch the TV instead. When you read other reviews that gush, apply them to this one.

Thanks to all of you who share your opinions and experiences with us. It helps a lot. For TV, even visiting a store will not help much because they do not optimize the picture and the store lighting is usually green. So the brightest one tends to draw your eye.

I bought this because of the great price on Amazon. I was going to wait until Christmas and get the best price on a large 52+ inch LCD or plasma but saw this model on sale at Worst Buy for just under @1500. Checked Amazon and they had it for $1418.19 and thought with free shipping and no sales tax, I was getting it for a super bargain.

I was concerned about some consumer reviews I read. They all said the picture quality was fantastic, but there was a problem with the sync on the sound. I already had sound system hooked directly from my Comcast Digital Cable box so the sound sync problem never was an issue. In playing with the TV, I did try the speakers to hear how good they were and I wasn't very impressed. There is a sync problem when using the internal speakers so I just turned them off and will forever use my sounds system and get great sound.

The picture quality is really great. I was watching a few of our favorite shows on the first night we had it, and I noticed how much more detail I could notice with this TV. My old LCD was a Sharp 46 inch and while the picture was fantastic too, the detail level that this 55 inch provides is so much better.

Shipping was free and very fast. The item shipped from Phoenix and took a total of 7 days (ordered on Sat and delivered on Friday to be in my home.


Just a quick follow up. I have seen that the price on this TV has dropped.....but I also have noticed that the availability of this item is also very scarce. When you factor in free shipping and no sales tax, the price I paid wasn't bad at all. Also, the home delivery and set up is a great value.
I am very happy with this purchase. The low price and free shipping made this deal a super value! The only negative I can point to is the sound quality of the internal speakers and the sync problem. I read on another forum that they were able to overcome this with composite cables but I wanted the advantage of HDMI cables.

Overall, super TV image, super seller, and outstanding quality for the money!


One year update:

I have had this TV for over one year. There picture is still perfect and haven't had one lick of trouble. I am guessing you can't buy this anymore. The LED LCDs seem to be the new trend as they command a higher price.

Too bad this TV will probably last 20 years....and as long as it works, I am not buying another big TV.

I have had this TV for a few weeks now. Actually it is my second. The first one delivered came with the backlight not working correctly. It would turn on/off flicker all the time.

I called Amazon and got referred to LG customer service. LG customer service after going through an unsuccessful over the phone troubleshoot attempt opened a case for repair. Called Amazon back, gave the LG case number, and got the TV promptly replaced (old one picked up when the new one was delivered).

The new TV works great with standard and HD programing (cable), up-scaled DVD and Blue Ray content. Media PC output- connected via HDMI is equally crisp and clear. Controls are simple and intuitive, would definitely buy again.
Amazon service including customer service was outstanding, easy to reach and very helpful (native English speaking support - NOT some difficult to understand, outsourced service)!!

Hi Guys, I know it can be exhausting reading/researching all of the reviews about so many different flats. I started a year ago and was pretty convinced with Samsung but glad I didn't get any of them (650, 750...series, etc.) because the reviews a year later are not so hot. I was going to buy Walmart's Visio 55" 120hz this week for $1398 because it looked like a great flat and the reviews weren't half bad either. I went to Best Buy to get a surround sound (research on customer reviews was minimal for these because the flat was tiring enough, lol). Anyway, I saw the LG 55" 120hz for around $70 dollars more. The only perk over the Visio was this one had 70k ratio vs. Visio's 50k. Took it home and with the help of a friend, had the flat up and going an hour or so. Most of my time was invested with centering and installing the support bracket on the wall. I probably could have hung the sucker myself being it is only 70lbs but better to be safe. I hooked up my 5.1 and Blue-ray today. I am not hard to please as I have endured over ten years with an old tv (small tv at that, lol) from 1995 with no surround sound. I really think it's an awesome flat. I haven't adjusted one thing and the flat looks absolutely great. You will want a surround system or sound bar, the sound is just good ole tv quality sound. I will probably try some fine tuning when I get around to reading the manuals. Anyhow, for those that are interested, I bought the Sony DAV-HDX285 Home Theatre system and the Samsung BD-P3600 Blu-ray player. I don't like integrated units because of the possibility of one part going bad. I bought this particular Sony BR because it has the wireless network technology...I am listening to Christmas music right now from [...] as I write this novel, lol. I also use it for my Netflix movies. All of the components mixed together sound just like the movie theater in my living room, of course my living room is close to the size of one, 1200 sq. ft., lol. Anyway, I will report back here if anything goes haywire. One last thought, I didn't buy any of those very expensive warranty packages. The manufacture is good for one year. I figure if your product can make it one year it will probably do well for you beyond that. Merry Christmas all....Dave

I wanted to write this review so that hopefully it will help people as much as all other review for this TV helped me. I was very fortunate to find this TV with a price of 1299 over the weekend. Even though I have not had this TV long, the out of the box experience is awesome! The TV comes pre-assembled on the stand (Swivel stand should I note). Since I was hooking the TV up to a cable box and surround sound system that was already installed it made the installation process complete it under 5 mins. I will not rate the sound because I have the surround sound system working and have turned off the TV's speaker system.

You can not go wrong with this TV. The picture is breathtaking and the 120 hz tru motion technology is amazing. I do have to mention that is gets some taking used too but that is a good thing because i am convinced that this is the way we should have been watching TV from the start.

Great buy!

The TV has been great. It has provided great picture quality and I can't complain about the sound. I have HDTV, DVD, XBOX, and a computer all running to it and all of them work great with it. There is no S-video, but I haven't used an s-video cable in years so not a problem for me. The options to adjust the picture are great, and it never really gets warm (like some other TV's tend to do). I have really enjoyed this TV.

The only downside that I have experienced is the audio output (only Optical, not RCA). I wanted to run the red/white audio out to a set of auxiliary speakers, but the speakers don't have optical input and the TV only has optical output. That is probably my biggest and pretty much only complaint.

Forget about the 2 star review, I first purchased a 2500 dollar lcd for my media room, which spends much time as a pc monitor, I bought a 47 inch lg to replace it, it was 1100 dollars, Since then every tv is being replaced with lg units. The operation is good, the picture is every bit as good as the 2500 dollar set that didn't play well with pc's The HDMI problems are just as much a part of the technology as any problems with the tv, every link has to be 1.2 hdmi, or you will have problems, even then, hdmi can be tricky, The hdmi technology still needs improvement, Just that simple. Not the fault of the TV. I have many issues with other components with hdmi once in a while. Especially on some of the lame HD cable boxes, which are really brand and model dependent. The LG brabd represents tremendous value. A comment made on another review, claiming LG uses inferior components is false. Yes, lg does produce many other brands that are very inexpensive, and they do use lower quality components, if you bothered to look, the LG uses better power supplies. If you want to throw stones, take a look at all sony kdl series tv's, then the xbr, huge difference. This set cost's half of an xbr, and trounces the kdl series, at a lower or equal cost.

After reading reviews and searching around at best buy i decided that i didn't want to deal with all the worries of owning a plasma, seems like to much hassle for not enough gain. i also decides that i didn't really like the 240hz motion enhancers(i turn them off on this tv as well) given all that this tv had the best features for the least amount of money without the reliability issues of one other company.

Tne tv looks very cool, the bezel on the bottom is a little thicker than the others but the cool little on/off light that pulsates makes up for it. the screen has a nice matte finish that doesn't reflect much. the stand swivels which is cool (i mounted the tv on the wall but will save the stand for when i move).

I haven't noticed any of the sound delay as all of my sound goes through a surround sound system.

The built in image tweaking features are very extensive, its worth using a calibration dvd as the "picture wizard" is helpful but doesn't change a whole lot.

Awesome for the money, easy to setup and install, plenty of connections on the back. I definitely recommend this tv over most of the newer more expensive lcd tvs. the only lcds with the very noticeably better picture quality were the local backlit led lcd tvs. but they cost at least twice as much.

We're happy with the LG 55", sound and picture quality are excellent, tho it now has an add-on sound bar and sub-woofer. The TV arrived on time, the guys carried it all the way to the room where it was to be installed; even concerned about the box getting the carpet diry in that room and asked for a blanket or towel. The delivery men removed it from the box and were willing and ready to hook it up for me, a service from them we didn't need.
This is our first "big TV", the biggest previous to this being 37". We're thrilled with the HD picture, even the looks of this TV.

Everybody has one except me. So I went out looking for an LCD TV and I finally found one. This is the perfect size for my living room. Any bigger would be just too big (and you will start seeing pixels if you get a large TV in your small living room.)

Plug the TV, plug any regular rabbit ears antenna, and in no time, you may start to receive digital TV signals. I was able to pick up ABC, CBS, KPBS, and Fox channels all in High Definition just by using an old antenna. I don't watch that much TV so I'm not going to subscribe to Cable or Satellite. The channels I got are more than enough especially during prime time. I plan on renting or buying BluRay movies.

I haven't purchased a BluRay player yet, but when I do, it will be the LG BD390 (because it has NetFlix, CinemaNow, etc. internet-based entertainment services (This TV model does not have it. The model LH50 TV series does.). So, I haven't really tested this TV to its full potential. The LH40 and BD390 will be a great combo!

I like the EnergySaver mode. You can select presets (Min, Med, Max, Auto, etc.) on how much energy you want it to save. It will dim the picture which is perfect because at night when I dim my living room lamps, the picture is just too bright in the room. Dimming the TV using the EnergySaver modes helps with this issue.

The swivel stand is very useful.

If you're about 7 feet away and you have 9 guys sitting side by side in the living room, about shoulder-to-shoulder width apart from each other, The guys in the middle get the best viewing angle while guys #1 and #9 will be at a viewing disadvantage. The picture becomes dim for them, but still acceptable.

There is no S-Video input in case you plan on hooking up your old S-Video devices. Waaa! It would have been nice, but not really necessary.

In the first week of use, I noticed 2 dead pixels. This is a problem with any LCD (even my Samsung 24" computer LCD monitor has a dead pixel). But it's not noticeable at all when you're 3+ feet away and watching your favorite programs. You have to be about 4+ feet away so you don't strain your eyes anyway, dummy!

All in all, this is a great LCD TV. Don't think that low 70,000:1 contrast ratio is sub par compared to other LCD TVs out there. Sure, others will have their whites more white, and their blacks more black but this TV is just perfect. See if you can find this brand new for $1099. I did! ;)