LG 37LG5000 review

The LG 37LG5000 is a native 1080p TV with a 37in viewable area, and at just over £500 is an absolute bargain.

It’s very similar in design to the 32in 32LG3000, and includes a similar textured remote control. It also uses the same clear menu system with large picture icons, and when you bring up the list of inputs, it will show you which ones are available by highlighting the corresponding icon.

We plugged in our Blu-ray player at full 1080p and 24p and weren’t initially impressed by the image quality. Like the 32LG3000, the 37LG5000 uses a number of image-processing technologies to adjust colour and contrast. You’ll need to adjust these settings to find the image that suits your room and lighting. The Fresh Contrast setting merely seemed to brighten the image, bringing out detail in dark areas while washing out colours; the Fresh Colour option can bring back the colours in the image, but can make them oversaturated; the Black Level setting was hard to get right, and we found that at the Low setting it was too dark and at the High setting it was too bright.

The 37LG5000 includes an option that its smaller sibling doesn’t: Intelligent Sensor. We found this too harsh, as it seemed to turn up contrast and colour to the maximum and felt overblown. It also added edge enhancement and dynamic contrast, which made images look grainy. If you like vibrant images or watch TV in a bright room this may be to your taste, but our preference was for the Standard image mode with a few minor tweaks.

The 37LG5000 doesn’t include any motion-processing technology or a 100Hz panel found on some newer TVs, but overall image tracking was smooth. Plugged into a DVD signal at 576i, it did a great job of upscaling the image, and we found little ghosting or signs of aliasing. You can plug in a PC over HDMI and VGA, and image quality was great on both in our tests. Using HDMI we had to set the aspect ratio to Just Scan, and we preferred the crisper image we got over VGA.

The TV tuner found the analogue channels in just over two minutes, but took another three minutes to find the digital channels. There’s an option to skip analogue, though, if you’re in an area with Freeview. The image quality of Freeview channels was slightly fuzzy, but the digital noise-reduction option helped to mitigate this. Once again, we found a minimalist approach to image processing got the best out of the Freeview picture. The EPG shows only six channels and lacks a preview, but it was functional and clear.

The 37LG5000 has no serious flaws. For just over £500 you’ll get a full HD 37in TV. To quibble over a slightly overprocessed image or a lack of a preview in the EPG would be akin to checking your gift horse in at the dentist. It wins our Best Buy award.