LG 42LV5500 LED LCD HDTV Review

Motion Performance

The LG 42LV5500 was a strong performer in our motion tests. We saw few artifacts and the objects were relatively smooth. Now, this all comes with a caveat. In order to get the "smoothest" performance, we had to enable the TruMotion feature in the menu. What this feature does is to insert additional frames in between the original frames from the source video. Most of the time, the TV does a pretty good job figuring out what those frames should look like. You can also scale up the "aggression" of the smoothness and judder reduction.

For sports and any content shot on video, the TruMotion generally helps. There's a lot less color trailing and judder. For film-based content, though, the picture looks quite bizarre. Film (and film-like video) is meant to have a certain blur. When it doesn't, it looks overly-sharp. In summary, TruMotion can be great, but be sure to experiment. It's a "sometimes food." More on how we test motion performance.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps

The LG 42LV5500 had no problems displaying native 24fps content. To bet the best performance, locate the Real Cinema setting in the menu and make sure it's enabled. More on how we test 3:2 pulldown and 24fps.

Resolution Scaling

The LG 42LV5500 has a native 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution, but much of the content you watch will be of a lower resolution. It's up to the TV's internal processing to upscale that data to fit the screen. Overall, it's quite good at this job. More on how we test resolution scaling.

480p

With 480p content, there was a 1% overscan loss on all sides.

720p

With 720p content, there was no overscan loss, but extremely high contrast / high frequency patterns could result in some discoloration.