LG 32LD460 HDTV review

Size matters.

Before i start, i m not a pro in A/V, so this is simply an from a consumer perspective.
Lets start with my rationale in getting this HDTV. First is HD video format taking off and my cute little 22" couldnt display them in their true glory. Why not bigger, some may ask. Because of the close viewing distance, fear of huge pixel pitch size would degrade the sharpness and introduce excessive aliasing, furniture size constraints and lastly the price. Since 32" recently introduce full HD resolution, it have been added in my wanted list for quite some time.
Now why HDTV and not monitor? 30" monitor comes with 2560x1600 which offers gorgeous picture quality but would create massive problem in getting playable frame rates for current crop of games. Since the resolution is higher, the price of a 30" is also more expensive than its HDTV counterparts. Another issue that plague monitor is their poor viewing angle other than higher end models, but it seems viewing angle has never been an issue for HDTV. For the price i paid for this HDTV, i could barely get a 24"LCD monitor using IPS or VA technology which offers better viewing angle.
I choose HDMI1.3 connection for better picture quality and since its a newer format, hopefully offering a smoother set up. Well i m wrong. 1:1 pixel mapping didnt work out of the box, and i have to adjust overscan settings in my ATI catalyst and turn on the scanning profile called "Just scan" on the TV. Even then, something is amiss, sharpness. Using all the default profiles, all the text is over sharp while play back of movie is alright. To my horror, it does not comes with a profile meant for PC input so i have to calibrate it manually. After 2 days of time consuming effort, i still couldnt achieve the type of crisp and sharpness for text. Colored text seems to bleed to its surrounding making it hard to read, while red color seems to be suffering the most. After poking around some settings, color intensity seems to be causing the color bleed. Unless i intent to use a monotone HDTV, removal of the color text issue seems out of my ability. So any A/V pro input on this issue is very much welcomed.

HDMI color bleeding and poor red color contrast

VGA fix it all =D



UPDATE (080710): Text issue seems to be fixed by naming the HDMI input to PC. However, the color is still off and the red text issue still exist, albeit no longer as bad. Taking advice from others, i also linked up my vga connection and it produced pretty clean image by default. Now before the money i spend on the gold plated 1.3 HDMI goes down the drain, i have to work harder to calibrate to at least match the vga quality...

UPDATE (120710): Gave up hope on calibrating on HDMI and decided to exchange the HDMI cable with the shop. So back to the ancient VGA, which i guess, isnt that bad after all. May invest in a high quality VGA cable some day.

UPDATE (170710): Purchased a DVI to VGA cable with thicker insulation to prevent noise degrading the signal. Composite Sync seems to work on this cable and the color reproduction is gorgeous. Best of all its half the price of the freaking HDMI cable.


With all outstanding issues corrected,now heres the updated report card on image quality.
Reading text at 80cm away is good since the text appears bigger on a HDTV. However, its is no longer as smooth as a high resolution PC monitor. Microsoft Cleartype front would help smooth out some aliasing but if you desire super smooth, high resolution text, HDTV is NOT for you.
Surfing experience is great, if you are like me, ignores the slightly aliased text. Pictures would look bigger too, without losing any visible detail. But low resolution image that have been blown up with lots of pixelation and artefacts going to look very bad. The larger screen estate benefit web browsing pretty little since horizontal resolution did not increase over my previous monitor.
On the gaming front, its more or less a hit and miss. Due to massive amount of physical screen estate of of almost 3m^2, you going to have some trouble keeping track of those tiny GUI spreaded to all 4 corners of the screen. That is especially true in action RTS like supreme commander 2 and C&C franchise to name a few. However, games like FPS and driving sim really enjoy the larger display providing larger view angles and easier to spot further enemies. In terms of rendering quality on larger pixel pitch some noticeable aliasing so you may want to increase your antialiasing multiplier. Since the width of this HDTV width resolution also grow to 1920 from 1680 while the height remain unchange. So more demanding games in my library like Metro2033 and crysis seems to become rather choppy, barely holding its head above 30fps even without increasing anti aliasing.
Next up is video playback, which is simply what HDTV is made for. Fire up a 1080 movie and you will die in orgasmic visual pleasure. 720 looks great while 480 look decent since i enabled some video enhancement for my cpu and gpu to crunch on. But if you have some old school video using 4:3 format at vcd quality, you are gonna puke. The HDTV really multiply the flaws of the low bit rate, low resolution video thousand fold that it become viewable only after i sit at least 2m away.
For my objective of calibrating this TV set is to get natural color and decent image quality across all activities on a PC without switching profile. Something to note is this tv is a pain in the ass to calibrate. Settings would be disabled for different type of input and the expert calibrating mode doesnt seems to unlock them. Worst of all, dedicated mode like VIVID or SPORT adjusted some settings that isnt accessible in the expert mode. In other words, you couldnt reproduce most of the pre tuned picture profile on the expert mode which kind of defeat its purpose isnt it? So i decided to go through all the picture profile and decide for myself which one i like most then tweaked the settings from there. Eventually i choose STANDARD mode since it didnt have oversharp problem like SPORT and not oversaturated color in VIVID. The color temperature and contrast seems to be perfect, which expert mode doesnt seems to be able to reproduce at all. However i have to reduce the backlight significantly to 40% for comfortable viewing and reduce the contrast to 90% for more natural looking color. Next in increasing brightness to 55% to allow seeing in horror games featuring dark environments but sacrifice darker black for better movies. The outcome is clean images in text processing and games while having a softer image during video playback. Video quality of course doesnt look like those super sharp, extremely bright, ultra saturated color and insane contrast you see at electronic store. But it kind of suit my preference althought you may think otherwise.
With picure quality fully calibrated to my liking i decided to mess around with the TV speakers. My GPU support HDMI audio so i decide to give it the TV speakers a try and may be use it as my center of my sound stage. Looks nice on the specs rated at 30W +30W virtual surround sound but its actually horrible that i drop the idea immediately and disable the speakers. Its lucky i drop the idea since i stopped using HDMI input and switch to my newly purchased DVI to VGA which doesnt support bitstreaming making audio connection to the TV slightly more complicated.
Having to wallmount this babe since its height with stand is taller than my table. So lots of wire management to do in preparation for the installation. And gosh, over the years of adding more hardware and just conveniently hiding them behind my monitor, the amount of wires is now brain numbing. Didnt really suceed in clearing the clutter entirely but at least i get to clear the TV area free of any wires.
Overall no regrets but pure visual enjoyment in investing on this HDTV as my PC monitor. The journey to garden of eden starts out pretty sour but rewarding once you get there. Its rather disappointing of the pretty flaky support for PC input using HDMI since this is a new 2010 model. Other issue is having eye fatigue and headache after long hours of usage. I used to energy saving profile to lower the backlight quickly without having to mess around deep in the settings when i m doing text processing and web browsing. It reduces the strain to a rather acceptable level but long hours of video or gaming is still out of question. Actually its pretty good "feature", forcing me to have a more balance lifestyle and spend more time on studying or accompany my significant other. XD

Guess there wont be a 37" for me...