LG 50LF652V review

LG’s range of LF652V smart TVs sit at the top of its Full HD range. You don’t get the premium stand design, advanced image enhancement or OLED technology that you would in LG’s Ultra HD range, but it does at least come with LG’s latest WebOS 2.0 smart TV system. The model we reviewed was the 50in 50LF652V, but there are also 55in (55LF652V) and 42in (42LF652V) variants available. We would expect overall image quality to be largely the same across the range.

The 50LF652V has an understated design, with thin, dark silver bezels and a single centre stand. It’s not particularly awe-inspiring but you shouldn’t have any problem fitting into your living room, and its central stand means it’ll sit happily on any sound base you choose to pair with it.

It has plenty of inputs, too. There are three HDMI ports on the side along, with three USB2 ports and a Common Interface slot. At the rear you get the Freeview HD antenna input, SCART, component and composite connectors, an optical audio S/PDIF port and a 3.5mm audio output. Network connectivity comes from built-in Wi-Fi and an RJ45 connector.

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LG’s WebOS smart TV software still ranks among our favourite smart TV operating systems in terms of layout, although there are still a couple of catch-up services missing on its new WebOS 2 interface. Out of the box you get BBC iPlayer, YouTube, Wuaki.tv, Netflix, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies & TV, NowTV (exclusive to LG at the moment) and Demand5 (soon to be My5). However, All4 and ITV Player are both missing, which is a little irritating but not a complete deal breaker, as this can be easily remedied by buying a £30 Chromecast and project pretty much every media app you can think of.

The overall WebOS 2.0 experience is as good as ever; the interface is bright and colourful and free of bugs, and there are plenty of extra features including Miracast and Intel WiDi for wirelessly projecting content from other devices to the TV. Our only complaint is that the settings menus doesn’t behave quite as nicely as the rest of the operating system. It’s slow and rather clunky, which makes adjustments a bit of a chore. That said, once you have the TV set up to your liking you probably won’t need to spend too much time in those menus.

The EPG could also be better. For instance, there’s a Freeview HD tuner, but LG doesn’t use the Freeview Play catch-up system, which means you can’t select previously-aired programmes from the EPG and open them directly in the relevant app. It’s also not clear how the ‘recommended programmes’ which appear in the Live Menu sidebar are selected, as it seemed to be very keen for us to watch Take Me Out and Birds of a Feather on a weekday afternoon.

We’re big fans of how the TV handles external inputs. Whenever an external source switches on, the TV suggests that you might want to switch over to that source, which is much easier than hunting around in the menus for it. In addition, the source list only shows sources that are actually switched on, which helps keep the interface nice and tidy.

While its user interface is colourful and easy to use, we had reservations about the TV’s overall image quality. The first and most striking problem is its mismanagement of motion judder reduction. We’ve never had problems with LG’s TruMotion settings before, and enabling TruMotion did indeed eliminate all jerky motions from our test footage, including the docking scene from Interstellar. However, it ended up creating horrible artefacts instead, which caused the moving objects in question to lose their definition and occasionally meld with the background.

We managed to improve things by using TruMotion’s manual settings, but even this wasn’t perfect. The only decent workaround was turning on Noise Reduction to High, which seemed to get rid of most of the artefacting. This still comes at the expense of finer details, though, such as freckles and dirt on characters’ faces, but it’s an acceptable compromise.

Elsewhere, broadcast TV channels looked good for the most part. SD content has its drawbacks, but this is the case with most large TVs. HD TV naturally performed better, but we found the MPEG noise reduction and general noise reduction made next to no difference to the quality of the image.

Blacks were dark and inky, but when the LF652V doesn’t come with multiple backlighting zones, you don’t get those same deep, dark colours when other bits of brighter content appears on screen. Nonetheless, contrast was still very reasonable at 1075:1, and in Standard colour mode, the 50LF652V covered 85% of the sRGB colour gamut, which isn’t brilliant but about par for the course at this price range.

The Game image preset is easy to access from the image settings, and the TV will remember which external sources you have selected Game for. Without Game activated, the TV has sky-high input lag of 98ms, which makes gaming nearly impossible. With Game mode switched on, it tumbled to 47ms. This isn’t fast enough for mouse-driven games and online first-person shooters but it should satisfy more casual gamers.

Its 10W speakers were rather underwhelming, though. They’re capable of filling a room, but they lack bass presence and midrange performance is only middling. Switching to the Movie sound mode made a marked improvement, giving speech and music more impact, but we’d recommend factoring in a soundbar for a better audio experience when watching films.

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The LG 50LF652V isn’t perfect, and its image enhancement and de-judder quibbles are minor annoyances. However, as is so often the case with TVs at this price, it’s still a reasonably decent set for the money. Not one for cinephiles, but it’s more than acceptable as an everyday TV for broadcast television and the occasional streamed film.