[by PC World staff]

The LG 47LW6500 is the first ‘Cinema 3D’ panel we’ve had the chance to take a look at — LG is the only manufacturer in Australia opting for passive rather than active 3D in its LED TVs. The technology promises to get rid of headaches while offering a cleaner and better tri-dimensional experience, and it has cost advantages as well thanks to much cheaper glasses. We loved the 2D picture quality of the LG LW6500 — it’s a great TV for watching Blu-ray movies, although digital TV did seem a bit noisy at times — and 3D has some legitimate improvements over a Samsung or Sony 3D TV. It’s not all perfect, though, with a significant deficit in 3D detail compared to other 3D TVs.

LG LW6500: Design, connectivity and setup

The LG LW6500 is a reasonably attractive LED TV, but its build quality is noticeably inferior to a Sony or a Samsung. The television’s plastics just feel a little cheap, although when you’re looking and not touching this isn’t a big deal. Thankfully the screen of the LG 47LW6500 is not as glossy as previous LG TVs or current competitors, which makes viewing in a bright room or in direct light less of an ordeal.

Being a reasonably high-end TV the LG LW6500 has a comprehensive range of digital and analog video connectors — we used HDMI for all of our testing, but the TV also has single component and composite video inputs. There’s also VGA for connecting older PCs, and a digital audio output for connecting a set of home theatre speakers. Two USB 2.0 ports mean you can connect a portable hard drive or USB flash drive to play back a range of video, audio or image files — DiVX HD, JPEG and MP3 files are officially supported.

Running through the setup of the LG 47LW6500 is a simple procedure — connect power and antenna cables, turn the TV on, run through a (quick) TV channel scan, and you’re ready to go. We also took the extra time to set up the LG LW6500’s integrated Wi-Fi networking, so we could use the TV’sSmart TV Web features. You can also use the LW6500’s wired Ethernet network port to access the Internet, but Wi-Fi cuts down on tangled cables without compromising connection speed.

LG LW6500: Picture quality and performance

We were really impressed with the picture quality of the LG LW6500 when it came to watching 1080p Blu-ray video. For a panel costing several hundred dollars less than an equivalently sized Samsung LED TV like the Series 7, the LG 47LW6500 was able to display a good deal of fine detail in our Terminator: Salvation and The Dark Knight test Blu-ray discs. Being an edge-lit LED TV we found that if any bright white areas were being displayed on-screen, blacks tended to be a little bright and grey. However, this issue is common to almost all LED TVs. Similarly, the screen’s colour accuracy is reasonably realistic without sacrificing vibrancy or outright brightness.

See the original story here: http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/tvs/lg/47lw6500/392595