2011 LG XXLV5500 SMARTTV / Impressions - Page 6

It's a 6 hour drive 1 way Not sure a friend would want to drive all that way and the cost of gas in an suv would be daunting lol

Thanks for the measurements, I think it'll fit no problem. It's big enough to fit a bicycle/skies in there and I fit a big sized desk last time... I'll see if I can get a measuring tape and measure my trunk though (it's a hatchback) I'm currently in a hotel about 1 1/2 hours away from Austin so I'll need to ask if they have a measuring tape.

Fry's in Austin's got the 47LV5500 for $799 right now. Pretty good deal

I was able to fit the entire Box in my G35 Coupe.

Oh yea, when was the last time they had the LW5600 on sale? I'm looking for the 47" model. Thanks for letting me know about the website. Is it okay to site the TVs flat (like lying on it's back) while in transit, or does it need to be kept upright?

If the LW5600 goes on sale pretty frequently, I might hold off.

Wish they had the Sony 909 for $999 again.

Does anyone know how much difference the local dimming feature makes for PQ?

I'm not too concerned with 3d and I can save several hundred dollars by going with the 5500, but I'm a bit turned off that it does not have lg's "local dimming" feature that is on the 5600, although I'm not sure what difference that feature actually makes.

These were my thoughts as well, and would also like to know

From all the specs I can find I can't find any that says the 5500 has local dimming? I went back and looked through the thread and still convinced that they're the same on both models of tv's. I'll have to visit a B&M and play with them both.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have the option of turning local dimming "off, low, medium or High" when I watch a video through the usb port but don't have this option when watching regular tv or bluray (looks like it's set to High for tv or bluray w/ no way to turn off).

You can see the local dimming in action when there is a black screen with a line of text. There are other posts on this thread that describe the dimming in greater detail so yeah, the 5500 does have that feature. LG has just chosen not to highlight it for some reason. (probably to give the higher end models more consumer value?)

How does it compare to the 2010 model 47LE8500?

Probably doesn't compare very well at all considering the 8500 was full backlit LED and this one is just edge-lit with local dimming(8-9 zones i think)

Yeah, I don't recall the 2010 LE5500 local dimming feature being well reviewed either. I sort of remember a bunch of reviews saying that it wasn't well implemented and took away from overall picture quality as there weren't enough zones. (12 only I think).

Travanx, I now have an Android tablet with the LG TV Remote app installed but for some reason it isn't working properly. When I first launched the remote app, it started up with the pairing process. I entered the (requested) pairing letters; then it recognized the TV & opened into a screen that looks like it's for the remote but it's blank. No remote, no keys, nothing other than a title bar & a blank screen. Aside from this, the TV is working normally with the LG remotes.

Maybe I missed some thing, but do you know what might be wrong here & how I can fix it? By the way, there was an LG Smart TV firmware update the other day. I wonder if that might have disabled the Android remote?

Hey guys!! I'm pretty new here. I was interested in getting this T.V. Played with the magic controller and thought it was pretty cool. But I didn't get to see any video clips to see how the picture quality was. I dnt kno to go with the LG LV5500 or the Sharp 60" 831U. You guys have any suggestions??

One thing I've noticed with the LV5500 is that in some/certain scenes you can really see the side edge lights shining into the picture.

One example would be "the Shining." At around 46 min into the movie there is an outside shot where the background is mostly snow. You can clearly see that there is a bright glow coming from the edges of the set. I also really noticed this while watching the desert scenes of the movie "Dune."

Not sure if this is acceptable to me just yet.

Hi guys, just wondering how the black levels on the LV5500 compare to an older LG LCD (non-LED) model? My current TV is the LG 42LH40 from '09. Most of my TV viewing is nighttime movie watching with no lights turned on. In order to get as good a black level as I think is possible on an LCD, I have the backlight setting on mine turned down to 5 (for reference my other settings are Contrast:96, brightness:50, sharpness:42, color:50, colortemp:warm, gamma medium). So my set is turned down pretty low, and I get pretty decent black levels with that, but I still would like to upgrade to a set with better levels. I know the LE8500 from last year is supposed to be terrific but it's just too big for my space (unfortunately 42" seems to be becoming a slightly harder to find size these days).

Also, as I mentioned above the backlight on my LH40 is set at 5. If the backlight on the LV5500 (or other local dimming LED sets) is set similarly low, would that reduce the blooming/banding effects of the local dimming?

Raizer989, what is your backlight set at? I've no experience so far with edge-lit local dimming LEDs, only having had a standard LG LCD for the past couple of years, but as I asked in my post above I'm wondering if turning the backlight down helps reduce things like flashlighting, banding, and blooming?

Very cool additions! Can't wait to program my Harmony and check out some new menus.

Also, at the request of my Fiance, we upgraded from the 47" to the 55" LG. And she was right on with what she wanted. The 55" is amazing. I was the one trying to keep the 47" as I thought it was big enough, haha.

Have you noticed any PQ improvements after enabling local dimming?

Hello,

I'm looking for a new TV now and 47LV5500 looks like a good tv. However , I found out that 47LX6500 is cheaper in my country.

47LV5500 - 1050 Euro
47LX6500 - 1000 Euro

Difference is that LX is:
- 1 year old model of 2010
- 3D (LV is not 3D)
- 240Hz (vs 120 on LV model)

Do you think LX6500 would be a better buy since it is cheaper and has more features?

i just bought this tv. Overall impressions are positive but there is one glaring problem that is driving me nuts.

I understand that LG only licensed DTS in Korea, so all other sets will not decode DTS.

However, what is not clear (from online searching or manuals) is whether or not the optical out will pass through DTS (and other formats) untouched for a receiver to handle.

So I have two questions:

Can you pass through DTS to an external receiver using the optical out?
Can you pass 5.1 through the optical out (so far my receiver only "sees" a stereo signal even though the source is 6channel).

Hope someone here can answer this for sure because if this TV can't output 6ch to a receiver it makes the SmartTV function useless to me because all my source media is 6ch (combination of DTS, aac, ac3, etc).

Thanks for the answers...at least I finally know that I wasn't just doing something wrong. Guess back to the store with this TV. It's a shame too, because otherwise, this TV and the SmartTV stuff was actually pretty freakin awesome.

Gonna just pick up another WD TV Live plus. I have one in my house already and it's awesome...can pretty much throw any type of media at it and it will handle it.

Here's my first impressions with this TV set and it ties in pretty well with some of the recent comments and questions.

I had no intention of buying another LG after some issues I had with last year's model that forced me to return it. However, I went through Fry's last week and they had the 55" LV5500 on sale for $1199. Doh!! That's less than I bought the 47" LX9500 for about 6-7 months ago. I was weak and couldn't resist a deal like that. Plus they threw in a free Bluray player.

My goal was to have a bedroom TV that I could hang on the wall and have no other connections to it like speakers, receiver, computer, etc. The 9500 model was close. The DLNA feature was able to play back almost everything EXCEPT for DTS encoded sound, which makes up about 80% of my library. The real big downer though for the 9500 model was the connection to Netflix. I just couldn't get it to work. Netflix support couldn't make it happen and neither could the LG support line. So back it went.

The LV5500, however, has worked out some of the issues I had with the earlier model. I got it all plugged in and ready to go. I fired up Netflix and had a big helping of fail. It just made no sense to me. I messed with my router, wi-fi, hardwiring, etc. I called LG again and this time... this time we got it worked out and I was thrilled! For whatever reason, LG apparently does not like my dynamic connection. I went in and manually set a direct connection and pointed the DNS to the LG server and BAM - it worked perfect. One issue down.

The other issue was DTS. Ugh - what a pain. Seriously, I tried and tried to find a work around for that 6-7 months ago. I tried about 10 different media servers and found some pretty cool options, but nothing worked. However, LG went and absolutely surprised me with their workaround. The sales person at Fry's didn't know anything about this feature and it wasn't until I started trolling through the forums that I learned about PLEX. Can we get a round of applause for LG's collaboration with PLEX? What an absolutely amazing feature. The 2011 LG tv's come with PLEX software installed and can be accessed via the Media Link application found right next to the browser. You just download the Plex media server onto your computer instead of using the supplied Nero MediaHome software. It takes all of about 1 minute to set up the server. I clicked the option to get DTS working and it just kicks butt. The layout for the movie selection reminds of XMBC. There's a built in scraper so you get nice movie tabs with descriptions and such. It's much better looking than the DLNA option, which is basically just selecting folders and finding your media. Another cool feature is it automatically downloads subtitles.

As far as the picture quality and other performance related things - in my opinion, the source material is always the most important. I think almost all new TV's look pretty fantastic displaying 1080p blurays. It was probably for this reason that I chose to go for a more mid level TV than sticking with a 9500 caliber type set.

The performance of last year's LX9500 tv is much higher than the LV5500 or any of the other 2011 LG models I've seen on display so far. It had local dimming & was a full array backlit set. I never saw any blooming or flashlight. I could catch a little banding every now and then, but it was negligible. When enabled, the THX and blacks were so good that I never even thought about a profession calibration.

The blacks on the 5500 are meh. There is obvious flashlighting in the corners because it's an edge lit set. I guess you could consider it to have local dimming with the energy saving function, although I'm not sure why don't just call it local dimming. I turned it off because I like a brighter set.

The colors look good to me. I can't tell a difference between the 480hz of the lx9500 vs the 120hz of the lv5500. There's no 3d, but no biggie - I never used it anyways. Most importantly, when I fire up a 1080p source both sets look fantastic. I really like the matte panel. The lx9500 had a glass cover and it was like a mirror during the day and also reflected the bedroom lights pretty bad at night.

Overall, I'm really happy with the LV5500. When weighing price vs performance & features, this set really stands apart from its competitors.

Anyone has calibration settings for this tv? I'm using the standard settings but it was too bright, so I reduced that and tweaked some other ones. It looks good, but I wanted to try other calibrated settings if someone is willin' to post them. Thanks.