LG 47LK520 LCD HDTV Review

Audio Quality

10W speakers are okay, they are enough to be adequate, but they are not the quality you get from external speakers, obviously.

Within the sound menu, there is a surround sound setting called Infinite Surround. Infinite Surround is a pretty audacious claim, considering first that there are only a possible of 360º with which to surround something, second that the speakers do not surround you at all, and third that the function doesn't even work that well. This setting makes for a more immersive sound yes, but it's also a little echoic. We felt more involved, but it was definitely too reverberant to be the soundscape we were intended to hear.

Menu Interface

There are two menu systems on the LG 47LK520: Home and the Quick Menu.

The main menu system is called Home on the remote. Home proves to be an extensive look at the settings you can change, but it is not organized as well as we hoped. Finding certain settings, like the TruMotion mode, can be difficult only because they are not where you would expect them to be. Menus within menus are out of the way and take up quite a bit of screen space when roaming through them.

Conversely, the Quick Menu is a bit easier, but does not give you access to as many settings. The Quick Menu is a small wheel that appears on your screen when you press the Q-Menu button on the remote. Many of the items are greyed out because they require certain signal inputs. These greyed out sections take up space that could be used for video processing modes or audio settings. Some users may find the Quick Menu to be useful for changing between video modes, but you will need to use both less-than-intuitive menu systems to fully control this TV.

Instruction Manual

We gave the manual for the LG 47LK520 the usual points for having a table of contents, and font sizes that didn't blind us. That being said, we also took away a couple of points because the manual is supposed to be a catch-all for LG's entire cadre of LCD TVs, LED LCD TVs, and their plasma sets also; 37 different televisions in all.

This is just straight laziness. So many of the features described in the manual come with parenthetical disclaimers like: (this feature is only available on some of the televisions listed). That's right, the 26-inch featureless LCD model is probably so similar to the 50-inch plasma with 3D and networking capabilities that one manual for these two and all models in between should work. Thanks LG, that was helpful.