Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

**Review for 55LM7600** Yes, a nice TV. Great? Well, it could be, but there are some issues that LG will need to work on. The Good: Looks: LG really came up with a neat design where looks are concerned. The ultra thin bezel that surrounds the tv looks sharp. Others who have reviewed this TV have stated that the bezel is metal, but what I see is plastic. A nice durable stainless steel bezel would have been preferred, but LG decided not to go that route. The ribbon stand gives the TV a look that makes you think it's floating in air, another nice touch. Speaking of the stand, the stand is also plastic. Long term durability may be an issue, but so far so good. Again, something at the very least reinforced with metal would have been preferred since there is a rather large investment being held up by this engineered piece of plastic. Picture Quality: There are pros, and cons. The pros are that the picture is beautiful. With a little tweaking colors are rich and vibrant (LG ships the TV with the picture tuned to the cool side, which at first made the picture appear a bit weak and a tad washed out). Black levels are not the best, but I have to say that to my eye they are completely satisfactory. While you may think that you are looking into a black hole while watching a plasma TV when screen goes dark, you won't get that reaction here. I don't feel that this is enough reason though to pass on this TV or to detract from it's rating. With the help of LED dimming on this TV, the black level is still very respectable. Panel uniformity is very good, I have to admit that I had to order a replacement due to issues with the backlight bleeding through and causing the dreaded flashlight effect with the first TV that arrived (light carried around 7 inches out from the corners), but the second set resolved the issue with light colored corners and blacks that looked grey. There is still a small amount of light bleed at the top of the screen (about a ¼ inch band), but nothing that detracts from normal viewing. My experience has shown that to date there is no "perfect TV" on the market, with any new TV there seems to be some type of compromise. If flashlighting, blooming, edge bleeding, or blooming are going to be a huge issue for someone, my advice is to purchase a LCD TV with a standard florescent backlight, or direct LED backlight (plasma is another option, but the Panasonic ST30 I upgraded from suffered from burn in). Every LED edge lit LCD TV I have seen to date has shown these issues from one extent or another. You may not be able to see these issues in a brightly lit room or on the showroom floor of your local electronics retailer, but when you take it home and the lights dim, they will be waiting for you. Motion Handling: With the fast response time of the panel used in this television, motion handling was super as far as any LCD TV is concerned. One thing that did concern me was that in researching the panel used in this TV, the panel refresh rate is not a true 240Hz but rather a 120Hz panel and a 240Hz effect achieved from "flashing" the back-light. Viewing Angle: This TV features an IPS LCD panel and as far as viewing angles go, this type of panel will give you the second best viewing angle of all currently available TV's. Plasma and the soon to be available OLED are the only others to offer a better viewing angle. A conservative guess to my eye would be an off axis viewing angle of about 75 degrees before losing picture quality. Compared to the Samsung LED lit LCD I once owned this is nearly twice the off axis viewing angle I experienced before. If you decide to purchase any type of LCD TV I highly recommend making sure you look for a model with an IPS panel. 3D: Ok, I have to admit this feature is pretty cool. Before owning the LG we had a Panasonic plasma set that was also 3D capable, but with the price of the 3D glasses we never used it. LG not only offers passive 3D viewing, but they also include 6 pairs of glasses in the box. This is great because the glasses are light, comfortable, they don't require batteries, and the movie theatre glasses work just as well as those included. The 3D picture quality is outstanding with no cross talk, and amazing depth. Objects not only appear to jump off the screen at you, but they also appear to jump out in the distance through the screen and the wall behind it. USB: If you happen to have media backed up on a hard drive and would like to view content on your TV, LG has you covered. The USB ports support external devices and all types of content including MP4 and MKV. Cons: Magic Wand remote: For normal TV use the magic wand remote is a bit of a pain to use. We quickly turned to a universal remote so that we can directly input channels and easily use features such as last channel. If you are using the web browser, the wand remote is easier to use, but we don't find much use for the built in browser. Built in browser: The good news is that the built in browser supports flash, the bad news is that not all features on web pages seem to work. We enjoy using web services such as Crackle, and viewing past television programs on their respective networks websites. While the video does play, we have not found a way to enable full screen viewing. For this reason, we don't find ourselves using the web browsing feature much. Flashlighting / Edge Bleeding: Here is where LG really loses points on an otherwise great product. The first set that was delivered had a terrible flashlight effect in the corners of the screen. So bad in fact that dark scenes would appear gray, and colors were a bit washed out. I understand that all LED edge lit TV's have this issue to some extent, but this was really bad. When you look at the price of these products, you expect more. The second set does show some bleeding along the top edge with small arches of light showing from where the LEDs are positioned around the edge, but this is really only seen in a completely dark room with the TV tuned to a channel with no signal. By doing this, you are looking at a black picture and the TV appears to disable the LED dimming. This is not however a real world scenario for viewing. During normal viewing there are times when the top ¼ inch of the screen shows a little edge bleed, but it's again in a completely dark room when it can be seen. Dead Pixels: I was not expecting this. While watching one day on the second set that was delivered the screen changed to a commercial with a white background. There in front of me was a small black dot that upon further inspection turned out to be a dead pixel. Being that I had already exchanged one set for issues with flashlighting in the corners, the second set was returned and I called it quits with the LM7600 (as a side note, the meter on the TV showed only 136 hrs when the dead pixel appeared). Menus: We have found the menus to be a bit difficult and not entirely intuitive to use. The manual is extremely poorly written and offers little to no help with navigating the features of the TV. Along with the difficulty in using the menus, we also find it awkward that the channels are not placed in numerical order, but instead are separated by channel type. What you end up with is a separate channel listing for digital, air, and cable channels. It would be nice if LG would have grouped all the channels together so that TV channel 2 is just one click away from digital 2-1 instead of having to flip through all the air or cable channels to get to the digital channels and vice versa (see magic wand remote). Overall: If I had not experienced dying pixels on the second set, I would have gladly given a rating of four stars (subtracting one star for the flashlighting effect experienced by the first set). With the experience of having received two TV's that both had problems, and taking into consideration the price one will pay for the 55LM7600 I am forced to give a rating of one star to the LG 55LM7600. Maybe my expectations are unrealistic, but I expect value equal to the number of dollars I spend, and this experience really missed the mark. *I feel it is important to add the model reviewed was the 55LM7600. Different sized versions may or may not perform the same way due to the inherent differences in manufacturing LCD panels.*