LG 47LA790W review

There’s plenty of scope to fine-tune the picture, as Cinema mode’s Expert Control menu includes an individual colour management system that lets you adjust the saturation, tint and luminance of all the main colours, as well as options for changing the colour gamut and white balance, gamma, dynamic contrast settings. Just be aware that most of these settings aren’t available in the Standard picture mode.

The LA790W also improves on LG’s excellent TruMotion frame interpolation feature. A detailed User mode includes an extra option to adjust blur as well as judder. We found that the default Smooth preset did a fantastic job of eliminating any jerky movements during fast camera pans, but it did look a bit unnatural at times, particularly during more sedate scenes. However, we liked that we could use the settings to get the effect we wanted, although we found that increasing the de-juddering too much started to introduce a lot of tearing.

3D AND AUDIO

The TV handled 3D content very well, too. It comes with six pairs of passive glasses, so even large families are well-catered for here. The glasses don’t affect brightness too much, so colours remained rich and vibrant throughout our reference footage of Avatar and the 47LA790W’s contrast levels remained highly detailed.

We were pleased with how far back the picture extended into the screen, but if you want a stronger 3D effect then you can change the depth of field and the 3D perspective using its 3D menu settings. We preferred to leave them on its default settings, as increasing them too much tended to introduce some distracting crosstalk at the very edge of the screen. This was particularly noticeable when we weren’t looking at the TV straight on, so we wouldn’t recommend it if you have a large gathering all watching at the same time.

The integrated speakers were also impressive. With plenty of volume and bass present, they’ll handle films as well as TV, although for the true home cinema experience a dedicated soundbar or set of surround sound speakers are a worthy upgrade.

CONCLUSION

The LG 47LA790W is a great 47in TV with lots of features. Its biggest problem is that the LG 42LA690V range is almost as good and the 47in version of that range (47LA690V) is £250 cheaper.