LG 84LM960V review

While many are still upgrading their TVs to Full HD sets with a 1,920×1,080 resolution, Ultra HD TVs are now a commercial reality, although you’d have to be pretty wealthy to buy one. Ultra HD TVs have twice the maximum resolution of Full HD TVs, at 3,840×2,160, which means they can display greater detail and produce more realistic images. Due to the increased resolution, Ultra HD TVs are also known as 4K TVs, and we’ll use the terms interchangeably.

The LG 84LM960V is the first 4K TV we’ve seen, and its huge dimensions certainly make a make a strong impression, even though you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the LM960V and LG’s smaller sets from a distance. It looks very similar to other LG TVs and has the same remote controls. One is a regular TV remote control and the other is a “smart wand” that lets you navigate the Smart TV interface with a mouse pointer, much like Nintendo’s Wii controllers.

The LM960V has a good complement of ports, as you’d expect on an expensive TV, but you won’t find any 4K-specific inputs at the back of the set, as they haven’t been standardised yet. The latest HDMI 1.4a specification supports 4K signals, but only at a maximum frame rate of 24fps.

The TV has four HDMI ports, along with SCART, component, VGA and composite video inputs, digital optical and 3.5mm audio inputs, a headphone jack output, an Ethernet port, a Common Interface slot, three USB ports and both satellite and terrestrial aerials for television broadcasts. That should be more than enough ports to connect all your devices.

The on-screen interface should feel familiar to anyone who’s used a mainstream LG TV in recent years, as the 84LM960V shares the same icons, fonts and menu layouts as the rest of the range. However, LG hasn’t re-rendered them for the increased resolution and everything looks somewhat fuzzy as a result.

MESMERISING

LG’s Smart TV interface is here in its entirety, letting you access on-demand video from Netflix and LoveFilm or watch catch-up TV through BBC iPlayer. It’s not as comprehensive as other systems we’ve seen from the likes of Samsung, but there’s plenty of choice for film fans.

The advantages of the Ultra HD resolution are apparent as soon as you sit down in front of the 84LM960V. The sheer amount of detail visible when watching 4K footage makes it mesmerising. Landscape shots appear incredibly lifelike and close-ups provide more detail than we’ve ever seen before. Video looks incredibly realistic thanks to the increased resolution and increased colour space enjoyed by Ultra HD footage. LG’s TVs tend to have very vibrant colours, so we had to reduce the colour temperature slightly in order to get a more realistic image.

The 84LM960V has a local backlight dimming function that dynamically adjusts the level of the backlight and can produce deeper blacks than you would otherwise see, and it’s best to have it enabled. Without it the backlight has a tendency to bleed into darker scenes, creating cloudy grey colours where there should be deep blacks. The low setting was enough to negate much of this, although it introduces visible vertical bands of light when bright objects are shown against dark backgrounds. The effect is only mild at lower settings, but is much more obvious when turned up to higher levels.

Currently, Ultra HD content is not widely available, so LG provided us with a media server that looped through several Ultra HD time lapse videos. The footage was recorded at various times and locations. We also used the open-source animated film Sintel to test motion. We rendered the film from the original lossless image files at 4K resolution and played the resulting video through a powerful PC.

We couldn’t spot any major motion artefacts at Ultra HD resolution, even during Sintel’s fast-paced action sequences, just slight pixellation around fast-moving objects and panning shots. However, even these weren’t noticeable unless we were viewing them close up. However, we did notice some judder, and there’s no option to enable LG’s TruMotion smoothing when watching a 4K source.

Blu-ray footage also began to blur during scenes with fast motion. Increasing the image processing creates an overly-smooth effect, but go the other way and there’s too much judder.

Gaming at 4K can be even more breath-taking than watching films, as the sense of immersion is far greater thanks to the increased detail and mammoth screen size. However, you’ll need a powerful graphics card to appreciate it. We tested its gaming potential with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 to run Dirt Showdown at a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 and the maximum frame rate of 24fps. However, we saw an average frame rate of 14fps in Crysis 2 which is much too low for comfortable play. Both games were tested at Ultra graphics quality. When it comes to Ultra HD gaming, you should consider investing in a graphics card such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan or AMD Radeon HD 7990 in order to play games at a resolution of 3,840×2,160 and the highest graphics quality settings.

ULTRA HD UPSCALING

The LM960V upscales Full HD content to 4K resolutions, and it mostly does a great job of creating extra detail in Blu-ray films. Obviously, the upscaling doesn’t look as good as native 4K video, but they look crisper than on a 1080p set, without creating unwanted noise or picture artefacts. However, that’s about the limit of its abilities, as standard definition footage simply can’t be scaled up so high without appearing soft and washed out.

Passive 3D playback is fully supported, and five pairs of glasses are included in the box, so you should be able to watch 3D footage as a family without having to buy more. Normally, 3D Blu-ray discs are only shown at half their resolution on passive 3D TVs, but they’re played at a Full HD resolution of 1,920×1,080 on the 84LM960V’s 4K panel, so you can enjoy 3D films at higher resolutions than regular Full HD TV sets. Happily, you can’t spot the horizontal line structure from the suggested viewing distance of six feet, and there are no crosstalk or image flicker concerns either.

Its size has meant LG has been able to fit four speakers into the 84LM960V. The 2.2 setup uses two drivers for mid-range and high-end frequencies and two separate woofers for bass. The 84LM960V’s sound quality is a step above most other TVs and ably filled our test room with sound.

CONCLUSION

Sadly, Ultra HD content is currently hard to come by and this looks unlikely to change in 2013. The vast amount of money needed to buy an Ultra HD TV makes the 84LM960V an expensive luxury right now. Its monstrous proportions will also make it difficult to fit in many living rooms. It is, however, a fantastic early tease at what to expect when Ultra HD becomes mainstream. We’re impressed, but we won’t be taking out a second mortgage to own one.