Originally Posted by
thootsÂ
Folks,
I bought a 47LM6700 a week ago, and I thought I'd chime in with my thoughts so far.
I bought it without doing any research at all -- I was replacing a 42-inch Toshiba with an enormous two-inch bezel, if not more, so I was looking for a thin-bezel set so I could get a 46 or 47-incher in there. I bought at a local Video Only store that I've bought all of my big sets from, and it was the most obvious candidate for my size and price range. And, I've generally been happy with the LG image quality I've seen.
And then I wandered in here, to see what I've gotten myself into. ;-)
My set was built in May 2012, and has firmware 03.21.12 -- it has the TruMotion controls, and I don't know that I have any real need to update that for anything newer. I'm hooking up a Comcast DVR box, a Panasonic Blu-ray player, a PlayStation 3, and an old Toshiba HD DVD player that I use for a couple of things that never, ever made it onto Blu-ray.
I really had a heck of a time trying to get the picture settings right -- I finally tried some of the settings folks have posted after calibrating with the WOW disc, and then tweaked them a little bit to meet my tastes. It seems that Dynamic Contrast is the root of all evil -- while it produced some of the contrast I wanted to see, it really seemed to absolutely wash out faces and other details. So, turning that off was really the key to getting a good picture.
I also had a huge problem with sound synching up with the picture -- I just use an old Pioneer VSX-9500 receiver, and, with the cable box on HDMI 1, the TV lagged severely behind the sound from the cable box audio output into the receiver. I tried the Blu-ray player on HDMI 2, and there wasn't a problem there, and that's when I realized that HDMI 1 was the only input with ARC -- so I moved everything up one input, and put my rarely-used HD DVD player on HDMI 1. That was the trick -- getting the heck away from HDMI 1. Now the sound synchs well enough with the picture.
That's pretty much the story for the setup -- once I got everything figured out, I'm pretty darn happy with the 47LM6700. I'm not seeing any problems with bleeding or flashing or cloudiness, though I'm not taking any efforts to "find" them -- I just don't notice any problems at all with my real-world usage. I've set the TruMotion to User step 3, and I don't see anything worth whining about in the on-screen motion.
Some other bits:
A full week after I bought the set, I finally figured out that the stand swivels -- I had put the TV on a swivel platform initially, so I pulled that ugly thing out from under it, so everything looks quite a bit better now.
I suppose the Magic remote is good for the Smart TV functions, but I mainly find it irritating for everything else. I finally figured out that I could use the up/down/right/left buttons around the wheel instead of pointing at things, and that helped. In the end, I decided to get a modern universal remote, and picked up the Vizio XRU300 from a local Walmart for twenty bucks. It actually works quite well, and is super-easy to program with the learning function.
I just tried plugging in a USB thumb drive the other day, and while it works quite well, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to control anything once a video is playing. There is a little bar at the bottom of the screen with playback controls that appears when you first choose the input, but I can't find any remote function that pops it up again -- all I can do so far is to hit the Exit button, and bail out of the input completely. And, of course, there is no documentation from LG about any of it. So, any sage advice about how to play, pause, go back or forward and such, would be greatly appreciated.
This is my first 3D set, but my general impression of 3D prior to buying it was that 3D was just ultra-fakey and kind of ridiculous. Comcast has some good 3D stuff in its On Demand content, so I've played with it a bit -- but it still seems to be just kind of "fake" to me -- I'm not sure I'm sold enough on it to go get a 3D Blu-ray player and start buying 3D versions of movies and such. I'll play around with the Comcast content for a while and see if it grows on me.
Oh, and one final thing: I'm really very satisfied with the 47LM6700's sound quality. Sure, it won't have the bass you can get from a sound bar with a subwoofer, but I've got the big system (the Pioneer receiver plus a pair of JBL L-150A floorstanding speakers -- an old, "big iron" system that I prefer to the tiny little surround systems of today) when I want bass and power. But, otherwise, I appreciate how the 47LM6700's sound has enough bass and plenty of control to get the sound I want for most other situations. The Clear Voice II really does help for normal TV with plenty of talking -- I just started playing with it, and I need to see what it does to the overall balance of everything. But, the bottom line is that I'm plenty happy with the sound when I don't need the big system, and I've found that to be pretty rare with a lot of the TV sets I've had in the past.
In the end, I guess the biggest thing I can whine about is the true lack of documentation, whether it be included with the set, or the on-screen guide, or anything LG provides online. My question about "how on Earth do you control playback when using the USB input" is a good example -- as far as I can tell, LG provides ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that explains how it works. At the least, I sure haven't found anything yet!
Otherwise, I'm pretty happy -- the thin bezel let me put a 47-inch set in the same limited space where I could only fit a 42-inch set with "normal" bezels. And, now that I've got everything more or less dialed in, I'm ready to just sit back and enjoy!
thoots
