Review: LG 55LA8600 LCD TV

Network connectivity

The TV was very strong on the modern multimedia connectivity.

Miracast works with most recent premium Android phones to allow you to mirror their video playback – indeed, all screen contents – to the TV. Unfortunately this worked optimally with mirroring static screens.

Video and even still photos suffered from reduced resolution and compression effects (smeared colour gradients, for example) and marked stutters during video pans when used with LG’s premium Android phone.

In its favour, Miracast works via WiFi Direct, so you don’t need your home network (nor do you load up an existing one’s bandwidth capacity) to use it.

But if you do have a decent WiFi facility, then for significantly higher quality wireless video playback or photo display from an Android phone it was better just to use the DLNA share facility (whatever it’s called on the particular phone – Smart Share in the case of LG).

Your phone videos and photos can’t look any better, even if you use an MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link) cable instead to connect directly to the TV.

The 3D streaming facility was disappointing, at least in my office, but I can’t bring myself to blame LG for it.

It offers a dozen family-friendly Disney flicks in 3D, from Wreck it Ralph through to John Carter. They are expensive ($6.59 or $7.69 each) and in my setting the picture quality was, well horrible.

I’ve got about 6Mbps via ADSL2+ (that’s about the video bitrate of a well done DVD). The trailers I tested were pretty soft, but colourful and nicely deep in their 3D and so quite watchable … until any kind of moderate movement occupied a large part of the screen. Then they became awfully blocky.

It reminded me a bit of what YouTube used to be like four years ago.

When we’re all on 25Mbps links I suspect this will be a viable way of watching, and indeed might be the case already for those with access to such fat internet connections.

The free iOS/Android app not only controls the TV, but can act as a second screen, showing what’s on the TV (free-to-air broadcasts only).

Skype: something else you'll want a decent amount of bandwidth for.

Picture quality

As a regular 3D TV, the 55LA8600 was excellent. The blacks were deep, the colours bold and accurate, and the thin border around the image often made it seem as though the picture were simply floating in space.

There was a little subtle inconsistency in the blacks in extremely dark pictures when watched in a dark room, but that was about it for performance limitations (having tweaked the ‘Sharpness’ control way down).

LG doesn’t actually say whether the TV is backlit or edge lit. The thin panel suggests the latter, but the performance suggests the former.

Using a test pattern with bright white circles on a black background resulted in an even glow around the dots, suggestive of the use of an array of LED backlights, but it could possibly be an extremely well-engineered edge LED system.

Either way, the important thing was the results, which was that the TV allows fairly accurate differential lighting of different parts of the screen, which is important for the dark scenes in many movies.

The 3D was up to LG’s usual extremely high standards with objects appearing properly rounded and the depth of the image popping nicely.

Banishing 3D ghosts almost guarantees a high level of 3D performance. But the reduced vertical resolution in this mode meant that just occasionally there was a perceptible loss in detail, and some slightly jagged diagonals.

Dual Play and audio performance

The flip side of this is that LG can pull some interesting tricks. The TV comes with a ‘Dual Play’ gaming mode and two pairs of glasses to match.

If you’re playing a dual player game on the Xbox 360 or PS3 (or whatever) which has split player views, one at the top and one at the bottom, this mode stretches both of these views to the full screen height, but displays each to only one of the two eyes.

Or that’s what it would do if you were wearing 3D glasses.

But one of the Dual Play glasses only allows the left eye view to be seen by both eyes, while the other pair does the reverse. The net result is that each player sees their view, and only their view, occupying the whole screen (albeit, vertically stretched).

The TV has a 2.1 channel speaker system. As is the case with many modern panel TVs, the wonder isn’t that the sound produced is great, but that it isn’t all that horrible. It was quite serviceable for watching the TV news and daytime TV.

If you’re going to enjoy a HD movie, I’d strongly recommend that you connect just about any sound system for an improvement in quality.

If you have a home theatre receiver you can use optical digital audio out, or even the Audio Return Channel of a HDMI cable on recent models.

Conclusion

With the 55LA8600, LG has maintained its position in the front rank of quality LCD LED televisions. 

Overall
Features
Value for money
Performance
Ease of Use
Reader Rating0 Votes
Excellent performance with 3D; Extremely good 2D picture performance; Excellent Magic Motion remote makes control intuitive; Lots of network features;
Some loss of detail watching 3D content; Some re-organisation of smart features could aid usability;
4.6