LG 55LE8500

Motion Performance

Motion Smoothness (7.75)

Blur is significantly reduced by the 240Hz mode. We didn’t really see much improvement between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ settings, however, so you should probably stick to low, given the artifacting the feature causes. Also, 240Hz causes some crazy artifacting in movies.

With 240Hz on low, the TV did pretty well with 1080p playback. We saw minor blurring, which lead to some lost detail, but nothing major. We saw a lot more blurring on 1080i playback, unfortunately, regardless of the 240Hz setting. It wasn’t so much to totally ruin the 55LE8500’s otherwise good score in this area, but it did bring it down.

Motion Artifacting (7.00)

The 240Hz mode has the potential to cause some serious artifacting issues, but as long as you keep it set to low, you should be ok. On 1080p playback we hardly noticed any issues at all, just some minor shuddering. Solid blocks of color might distort slightly as they move across the screen, creating little tails behind them in addition to the normal shadowing we typically see. On 1080i playback, the shuddering got significantly heavier, so bad that fine patterns had portions that flashed. Fortunately, although these issues were noticeable, they were fairly rare in occurrence. More on how we test motion performance.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps (7.50)

On our 3:2 pulldown and 24p tests, we put Real Cinema Mode on, which helps reduce judder and artifacting. We also switched off every flavor of 240Hz, because they caused all kinds of flashing badness.

The 55LE8500 did well on our SMPTE pattern test, with only rare, random instances of fine patterns flashing. A second test uses footage of a slow pan across an empty stadium. Here, we noticed a crawling effect over the backs of the seating that was a bit worse than what we typically see from a TV in the 55LE8500’s class. More on how we test 3:2 pulldown and 24fps.

Resolution Scaling (7.50)

Chances are, your TV will be displaying a lot of content that’s not within the TV’s native resolution. Standard definition broadcast is in 480p, DVDs come in 720p, broadcast HD content runs at 1080i, and Blu-rays use 1080p. Here, we test how well the TV performs showing non-native content. More on how we test resolution scaling.

480p

While we didn’t see any major issues with 480p content, we did see a handful of minor ones. We noticed some slight shimmering on fine patterns, and some edges were a bit soft. Overall, though, the 55LE8500 did well at this resolution.

720p

This is where we started having some issues. We saw some very minor coloration in patterns alongside the shimmering effect mentioned above. This means fine patterns might have a slight pale green tint, probably not enough you’d notice. Some finer details blurred together. For example, a set of alternating black and white lines looked almost like a solid grey block. It was very hard to see the individual lines.

1080i

Here we saw all the issues from 720p, only magnified in severity. Fine patterns had all kinds of false coloration, ranging from pale green to greenish grey. The shimmery effect was also worse. Small font was hard to read, which might’ve been due to the weird sharpness rules mentioned above.

Other Models in the xxLE8500 Series
For more information on other models in this series, check our Series Comparison Page.
LG 47LE8500 47 in.