LG LW980 (55LW980T) Full HD LED LCD 3D TV Review

The 55LW980T's flagship aspirations are obvious from the start, with a highly attractive design and well-built chassis. Like the high end models from many of their competitors, LG have opted for the single sheet of glass approach. This type of design is very popular at the moment and whilst it does offer an elegant and very contemporary look there are a couple of points of which any potential owner must be aware. The first is that since the entire front of the chassis is glass it will suffer from reflections so you need to be aware of this when you consider positioning and environment. The second consequence of using a single sheet of glass is that the 55LW980 is quite heavy so bear that in mind if you intend to mount it on a wall.

The overall colour scheme is unsurprisingly black with a black metal back and a black bezel surrounding the panel beneath the glass facia. This bezel is 2cm wide at the top and sides, and 4.5cm wide at the bottom and the whole glass facia has a clear plastic trim about 0.5cm wide around the entire outer edge of the chassis. Incredibly, the chassis itself is only 2.5cm deep which if nothing else proves that LG have succeeded in producing an ultra-slim display with full LED backlighting. The overall build quality is excellent and the entire display sits on a very solid stand that is made of black metal and glass. At the bottom right hand side of the screen there are some basic touch sensitive controls including On/Off, Volume, Programme, Home and Enter. At the rear - on the left hand side as you face the screen - are the connections and on the right hand side there’s the power cable. As is becoming increasingly common on these ultra slim displays, the power cord is hard wired to the rear of the chassis. This wouldn't be so bad if the cord was reasonably long, but at only 1.5m it might be too short for a lot of installations. There is a small access panel where you can rewire a longer power cord but a genuine detachable cable would be more user friendly for most people.

It would seem that every manufacturer this year has adopted a similar layout for the connections and the 55LW980 is no exception. In common with most slim line displays these days the connections are a combination of some that face downwards and some that face sideways. As you would expect from a flagship display, there is an impressive collection of connectors on the 55LW980. The downwards facing connections include a LAN socket, a VGA connector, a SCART socket (using a supplied adaptor), an audio in, an optical digital out, an antenna connector, component and composite video inputs (which use supplied break-out adaptor cables) and a headphone socket. The sideways facing connectors are composed of four HDMI inputs (HDMI1 includes the ARC - Audio Return Channel), two USB sockets - one for use with an outboard HDD and a CI (Common Interface) slot. In addition, facing outwards there is an RS232 connector, a wireless control connector and an additional set of composite video and analogue audio inputs using RCA style connectors. We still remain unconvinced by the position of the HDMI inputs and whilst we understand that the reason they aren’t facing downwards is because the connection might not be secure, if they are going to face sideways they need to be as far from the edge as possible otherwise the HDMI cables can be visible from the front. In this case the HDMI connectors are about 17cm from the edge of the 55LW980 but we would like to see these connectors positioned at least 20 to 25cm from the edge to avoid the problems of visible wires.

The 55LW980 uses the latest iteration of LG's menu system and, on the whole, this is a good thing as theirs is one of the best available because it is simple to navigate, quick to respond and comprehensive in its choices. Whilst LG has made some minor cosmetic changes, the basic layout and design of the menu system is essentially the same as last year. The major difference this year is the inclusion of the Home dashboard which essentially acts as a launch pad for any of the displays menus, the EPG, applications, media content or internet functions. Within the Home dashboard you will find a window for the current channel you are on as well as the current time, date and channel programme information. There is also access to Premium content and Applications, Inputs, the Setup menu and the EPG. Along the bottom is the Launcher Bar which, as the name suggests, allows you to launch streaming media, further apps, games and a web browser. Overall we rather like the idea of having a point from which you can access all the other features but there is one annoying problem. To access the Setup menu and thus the Picture menu, you have to go via the Home dashboard which is time consuming during calibration. We would have preferred it if there was a dedicated Setup button on the remote control to provide immediate access to the full Picture menu. Of course, once the display is set up you probably won't need to access the Setup menu very often and the main Picture modes can be accessed via the Q.Menu.

Once the main Setup menu has been accessed there are various sub-menus including Setup, Picture, Audio, Time, Lock, Option, Network and Support. The Setup sub-menu allows the user to tune in, set up and edit programmes for the EPG. The Audio sub-menu includes controls for setting up the sound mode, effects and volume level. As has become increasingly common with modern displays, as the chassis gets thinner so the sound gets worse. It's basic physics really, if you have tiny speakers that are hidden away in the bottom of the chassis and probably firing downwards you really can't expect great sound. As it is, thanks to some digital processing, the sound on the 55LW980 isn't too bad and is certainly adequate for basic programme watching. However if you're looking for that truly immersive film watching experience then you owe it to yourself to get some outboard amplification.

Within the Picture menu there is an option for choosing the Aspect Ratio and where possible always use the Just Scan selection as this will pixel map the incoming signal exactly and thus avoid any overscan or unnecessary scaling. There is also an Energy Saving function but all this does is dim the picture and is best left off and for the same reason the Intelligent Sensor picture mode is also best avoided. The other Picture Modes available include Vivid, Standard and Game but probably of more interest to the AV enthusiast is the inclusion of a pre-calibrated Cinema setting and two ISF settings. As is the case with all of LG's Cinema 3D displays there is no THX mode but Cinema mode is designed to offer a good approximation. The isf settings, called Expert1 and Expert2, allow a professional calibrator to access advanced picture controls and then lock them once finished. There are two settings allowing the calibrator to create two distinct presets, one for daytime viewing and one for night time viewing.

Within each Picture Mode there are standard controls such as Contrast, Brightness, Sharpness, Colour and Tint , as well as a Picture Reset function. However within the isf Expert1 or Expert2 modes there is also the Expert Control option which gives the professional calibrator access to an impressive array of picture controls. The TruMotion control activates the frame interpolation function and has a choice between Off, Low, High and User. As the name suggests, the LED Local Dimming controls the 96 LED blocks that illuminate the screen and dims them depending on picture content in order to create deeper blacks.

Given its flagship status the 55LW980 comes with just about every feature you would expect to find gracing a modern display. Aside from previously Cinema 3D, Nano filter and full LED back lighting, there is also TruMotion to improve image handling and LED local dimming to enhance the black levels and the dynamic range. We will discuss these features in more detail in the video processing and picture quality sections of the review.

Of course the 55LW980 has a built-in FreeviewHD tuner that is easy to setup and includes an EPG that is both sensibly laid out and intuitive to use. Our only complaint would be that it doesn't include a window for the channel you are currently on. There is also a recording and timer functionality that can be used in conjunction with an external HDD that can be connected via one of the USB sockets.

The biggest development this year has been in the area of internet capability and the 55LW980 includes LG's new Smart TV platform. Setting up the network is very straightforward because the 55LW980 has built-in WiFi but, if you don't have a wireless router, you can also connect to the internet using a LAN cable and the socket at the rear. As mentioned previously the Smart TV functionality can either be accessed via the Home dashboard or through the Premium button on the remote. Smart TV is a huge improvement over last year's internet platform which was frankly something of a disappointment and it now includes access services like BBC iPlayer, blinkbox, Acetrax, YouTube, Cartoon Network and Box Office 365, as well as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. There is also an on-board web browser as well as various applications that can be downloaded from the LG App Store. The user has the option to customise their Home dashboard and as mentioned previously LG have included a Magic Motion remote control for easy navigation of the Smart TV platform.

When it comes to sharing content, you can connect a digital camera, MP3 player or flash memory through the USB ports and then access the multimedia content via Smart Share on the Home dashboard. The 55LW980 also includes DivX HD and is DLNA compliant for streaming content. Finally, the 55LW980 includes LG's Dual Play feature which can be used with either the X-Box 360 or the PS3. The idea is that you purchase two pairs of special glasses, where on pair has polarised lenses going one way and the other pair has polarised lenses going the other way. The result is that when you look at the screen you only see one 540p image and so using the Dual Play function, each player sees only his view on the screen. Therefore when playing two player games, each player has a full screen image of their particular view rather than both views being squeezed into the same frame. It is quite a clever way of using the polarised technology for features other than just 3D.

As with all LG displays the 55LW980 comes with their excellent Picture Wizard setup function. This is a very simple and effective way of setting up your display to suit your viewing environment and is very useful for a novice or someone without a calibration disc. For the purposes of our out-of-the-box measurements we choose the most accurate preset and then optimised it for the viewing environment by correctly setting Brightness and Contrast. We found that the Cinema preset offered the best out-of-the-box performance, although the Expert1 and Expert2 modes were essentially identical to the Cinema mode suggesting they share the same basic setup. For these tests we selected colour gamut BT709 which should approximate Rec.709 and we also chose a colour temperature of Warm. The Cinema (and Expert) modes turn off the majority of special features but we also made sure the TruMotion was off, as well as the local dimming because we are interested in the panel's native performance.

As you can see from the graph below, the out-of-the-box greyscale performance was something of a disappointment with some quite sizable DeltaEs (errors). On the RGB Balance graph you can see that whilst green is reasonably close to our target of 100, blue is tracking about 15% too high and red is tracking about 15% too low. This will result in clear discolouration when viewing a stair step greyscale pattern and as such will impact on the overall colour accuracy of the 55LW980. However the gamma measurement is between 2.1 and our target of 2.2 which is better and the luminance of the gamma is also very good. Since the three primary colours are tracking in straight lines and since the 55LW980 includes a 10 point white balance control, we would expect to be able to noticeably improve the greyscale performance after calibration.

As you can see from the CIE Chart above, the overall colour accuracy wasn't too bad and most importantly the luminance errors were all very low. This is crucial because our eyes are most sensitive to errors in the luminance or brightness of colours. It is also good to see that of all the colours, the one with the lowest error is green, once again this is important because green makes up the largest part of the visible spectrum. The rather poor greyscale is obvious from the large error in white and the fact that white is clearly missing the target of D65. It is quite likely that most of these colour errors are the result of the inaccurate greyscale and once we calibrate it the colours will no doubt be even better.

As mentioned previously, the Cinema and Expert modes all gave the same out-of-the-box measurements but the Expert modes offer more calibration controls, specifically 10 point white balance and a colour management system (CMS). We chose to use Expert1 for these measurements but Expert2 would give the same results. A professional calibrator would most likely use Expert1 as a Day mode and Expert2 as a Night mode before locking the calibrated settings.

If the two point and ten point white balance controls interact with one another then it is always best to start with the two point to get the greyscale reasonably accurate and then fine tune with the ten point. As you can see from the graph above the greyscale performance is now reference with errors so low they are essentially perfect. The gamma is measuring between 2.1 and 2.3 with an average at our target of 2.2 and the gamma luminance is also very good. Overall this is an excellent greyscale performance and just the kind of result that we have come to expect from LG.

After calibrating the greyscale we saw an immediate improvement in the colour gamut and it only took a few small tweaks of the CMS to get a nearly reference performance in terms of colour accuracy. As you can see on the CIE chart, white is now correctly measuring at D65 and the overall errors are one or less which is indistinguishable to the human eye. As always we would like to see LG upgrade their CMS so that you had independent controls for hue, colour and luminance but in all fairness this is an excellent result and there isn't much more you could do to improve it what is an already excellent performance.

Video Processing

This year has been a mixed bag as far as video processing goes with many manufactures being unable to even detect 2:2 cadence correctly. In fact, as things stand, LG is at the head of the pack in terms of video processing with all of their current models being able to pass our review process. Of course as LG's flagship model, the 55LW980 was no exception and had excellent video processing that performed very well in all of our tests.

As usual we started with our PAL and NTSC HQV benchmark discs and first of all we checked the SMPTE colour bar test which the 55LW980 easily passed, correctly scaling the full 576i and 480i images without any loss of detail or unwanted ringing. The 55LW980 also scored well when it came to video deinterlacing with jaggies only appearing when the line was at an acute angle in the first test. In the second test the motion adaptive deinterlacing was also good with slight jaggies only appearing on the bottom bar of the three moving bars.

The 55LW980 performed well in the film detail test and correctly locked on to the image resulting in no aliasing. In the cadence tests the 55LW980 also correctly detected both the 2:3 (NTSC - USA/Japan) format and the 2:2 (PAL - European) format. The 55LW980 also correctly displayed film material with both horizontal and vertical scrolling video text, correctly displaying the words without any blurring or shredding.

The 55LW980 performed very well in all of the tests on the HQV and Spears & Munsil Blu-ray discs using high definition content. With the player set to 1080i the display correctly deinterlaced and displayed both the video and film resolution tests (provided the aspect ratio is set to Just Scan) and showed good scaling and filtering performance as well as good resolution enhancement. The 55LW980 also had no problems in showing video text overlaid on film based material and also handled 24p content without any problems, even the tortuous wedge shaped test on the S&M disc.

Using the S&M disc we checked the headroom performance of the 55LW980 from reference white (video level 235) up to peak white (video level 255) and it was very good with absolutely no signs of clipping. In addition, the 55LW980 also correctly showed detail down to a video level 17 and reference black below that to video level 0, as long as you had Black level set to High. If you used the Low setting the blacks will appear darker but you will be crushing them and you will lose shadow detail.

The 55LW980 has LG's new Motion Clarity Index 1000Hz (MCI 1000) feature which is just the latest version of their TruMotion interpolation software and it's still called that in the menus. Whatever it’s called, the concept is the same, to increase the refresh rate to improve motion handling and reduce blurring. Using the FPD Benchmark Software disc's scrolling resolution chart the 55LW980 measured around the 400 line mark without TruMotion enabled. This is a pretty good result for an LCD and things improved with TruMotion set to Low with the 55LW980 measuring around 700 lines. At the High setting and when set to High the motion resolution really improved with over 900 lines, which is excellent. Unfortunately, activating the TruMotion function results in the dreaded 'soap opera' effect and even on the Low setting film immediately looked like video. We would recommend leaving it off with film based content, although it can prove useful for better motion clarity on fast paced sports broadcasts.

Gaming Performance

For some reason the input lag on LG displays this year have been quite high with some measuring a delay of over 90ms even in Game mode. To their credit LG have been working on this and have released firmware updates in an effort to reduce the input lag. On the 55LW980 we measured an input lag of 45ms in Game mode which, whilst a lot better than some other LG displays this year, might still be a bit slow for the serious gamer. We tried naming the input PC - as some on the forums have done - but we found this made no difference to the measurement. It's a pity that LG can't get the input lag below 20ms because, as we mentioned earlier, 3D gaming is incredible with passive displays and if you include LG's Dual Play feature then the 55LW980 would be a choice item for hard core gamers.

Energy Consumption

As far as energy consumption is concerned the 55LW980 is incredibly efficient for a screen of this size. Obviously, due to the nature of the technology, LCD uses less energy than plasma and LED backlighting is more efficient than CCFL so we wold expect the numbers to be good. However an average measurement of 100W in calibrated mode is excellent for a 55" screen. When we went into 3D mode the brightness increased which pushed the energy consumption up but even then it only averaged 140W, which is still very good. Certainly if you're looking for a big screen TV without a big carbon footprint, then the 55LW980 could be the one for you.

Some people might wonder why we place so much importance on the accuracy of the greyscale but the answer is simple, if the greyscale is wrong then so is everything else. As we discovered in the out-of-the-box measurements, the initially inaccurate greyscale was affecting the colour performance but once we had calibrated the greyscale the colours were also more accurate. In fact, once calibrated, the 55LW980 was capable of a very accurate image with a smooth transition from black to white and natural looking colours and flesh tones.

With standard definition content the excellent deinterlacing and scaling came to the fore, resulting in some very nice images. The built-in Freeview tuner was able to produce some very nice standard definition material but as always the ultimate determinant of quality was the bandwidth being used by the broadcaster. The larger the screen the more obvious the macro blocking on Freeview broadcasts and for this reason DVDs in particular looked much better due to less compression artefacts.

Once we moved on to high definition content the 55LW980 was able to come into its own and thanks to the excellent deinterlacing, Freeview HD broadcasts at 1080i looked very nice, with minimal artefacting and plenty of high resolution detail. Moving on to Blu-rays and the 55LW980 had no problems with 1080p24 content, the resulting images delivered loads of detail and smooth judder free motion that had a very pleasant film-like quality. Again, because of the excellent greyscale and colour accuracy the images had a natural appearance with realistic flesh tones. The off-axis performance was also very good which means the 55LW980 probably uses an IPS LCD panel.

Of course the big question was how did the Nano filter perform and here the results weren’t quite as cut and dried. Our initial impressions were very good and thanks to the Nano filter we weren’t seeing any of the banding that plagued last year’s full LED backlit models. We also weren’t seeing any of the clouding or unevenness in the backlight that ruins so many LED TVs that use edge lighting. What we were seeing was a bright image, with a nice even backlight which resulted in a very nice high definition picture, especially during the day. The problem was that in dark scenes, especially in a darkened environment the blacks were very poor, in fact with the localised dimming off we were measuring black at 0.25cd/m2.

Besides the Nano filter, itself, the other development on the 55LW980 is the local dimming designed to help improve the blacks. This certainly worked and once you engaged the Low setting the blacks immediately improved, now measuring 0.05cd/m2. If you used the Medium or High settings (there didn’t appear to be any real difference between the two settings) the black levels now measured 0.00cd/m2 on both which is to be expected if all the LEDs are essentially turned off. The problem with local dimming is that the blocks of LEDs result in ‘haloing’ which is very obvious when looking at images off-axis. This was especially true on the higher settings where light objects against a dark background would emit an unearthly glow. Despite LG initially announcing that the 55LW980 would have 288 LED blocks, in actual fact the display only has 96 LED blocks and this might well explain the obvious haloing. Of course the only way to really eliminate the problem of haloing is to have an individual illumination for each pixel and there already is such a technology - it’s called plasma!

We found that using the Low setting for local dimming would result in good blacks with the minimum of haloing and to a certain extent the resulting images were very good with an impressive dynamic range and plenty of shadow detail. Unfortunately there was now another problem, the banding that was absent when the local dimming was off had returned once we activated it. The blocks of LEDs behind the Nano filter would on occasion be visible and we can only assume that this is also a result of the reduced number of LED blocks that LG actually used on the 55LW980. It would seem that users are faced with the choice of no banding but poor blacks or great blacks and occasional banding. It’s debatable how many users would notice either the banding or the haloing but obviously it is our job to draw people’s attention to these issues and then let them make up their own mind. As always our suggestion is that if you are thinking of buying the 55LW980, you demo it first

Whilst the 2D performance might have been something of a mixed bag, there were no such problems with the 3D, which was spectacular. It’s no secret that we have been impressed by the passive technology that LG use in their Cinema 3D TVs and the 55LW980 just reinforced that opinion.

As is always the case with 3D, there are a number of barriers that can prevent the experience from being both immersive and enjoyable. The first is brightness - or rather the lack of it - and this is one of the main complaints that people have about 3D at the cinema. Thankfully, TVs and especially LCD TVs, have far more brightness than a cinema projector, which when combined with the passive polarised glasses resulted in a wonderfully bright and punchy 3D image. These passive polarised glasses also have another benefit in that there is no flicker to distract you or cause eye fatigue and they are very lightweight so you forget you’re wearing them. As mentioned earlier they also have the benefit of being very cheap, not having to sync and not using batteries or needing to be charged.

The other barrier to enjoyable 3D is crosstalk which is when one eye is seeing the image meant for the other eye. This tends to be more of an issue with active shutter 3D where the refresh rate of the glasses isn’t fast enough but is far less of a problem with passive displays. In fact, in all the time that we used the 55LW980 for 3D viewing we never had any problems with crosstalk, even on difficult content.

The upshot of all this was that watching Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was nothing short of a revelation. Whilst the film has excellent 3D we found that the experience of watching it on the 55LW980 had far more impact than watching it on our JVC X3 projector. There is no doubt that this is in part due to the increased brightness which gave the images far more dynamic range in 3D. The absence of crosstalk and the reasonable screen size drew you in and each frame seemed to be full of depth. People often comment on the lower resolution of the passive approach but at no point were we aware of this and, in fact, quite often we found ourselves marvelling at the amount of detail we could see.

Thanks to the polarised glasses any of our concerns about black levels just weren’t an issue in 3D and the menu allows you to choose between Standard, Cinema or User settings. This means you can either go for a brighter but less accurate image or you can go for a more accurate but slightly dimmer image. You even have the choice of the User setting if you want to calibrate the 3D image but with 3D we tend to find that brightness and lack of crosstalk are the two most important elements.

As always we found 3D gaming to be fantastic fun on a passive display with the lack of flicker making long gaming sessions far more comfortable and the fast movement in some game play was also better rendered. The other big advantage of passive 3D is a very wide angle of viewing along a horizontal plane which, along with the cheap glasses, makes watching spectator events much easier. However it should be noted that passive 3D has quite a narrow viewing angle in the vertical plane so bear that in mind when installing the display. In conclusion all we can say is that whilst we’ve seen some very impressive 3D technology over the last year, the 55LW980 was undoubtedly the most fun we’ve had to date.