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Most LCD TVs provide a narrow viewing sweet spot for optimal contrast and color saturation. That’s because the transmissive layers of the screen make front and center the best seat in the house. To guard against this common shortcoming, the 47LG60 uses Super-IPS screen technology. This approach manages to maintain picture quality even at extremely wide viewing angles. That said, the picture’s black level did increase slightly (reducing contrast) as viewing angles increased.

SD video performance was excellent overall. Details in my classic DVD videos showed clearly, with natural-looking colors (using the Cinema picture preset). The TV’s detection of 24p-sourced video material (most films and digital cinema) was fast, ensuring good detail with few distracting artifacts. LG’s TruMotion 120-Hz display technology also added smoothness to the camera work of film-sourced material. When set to its maximum level, the TruMotion feature made it easy to pick out fine details in a scene. The overall effect, however, gave material more of a video look, with its relatively fast frame rate (as opposed to material shot on film or recorded digitally at 24 fps). HQV Benchmark DVD test results were also good, though the TV did display a few jagged edges while playing the benchmark’s classic waving-flag scene—defects I didn’t see in its predecessor, the 47LBX.

Handling of 1080i and 1080p HD material was superb. Fine detail was preserved, while distracting artifacts were effectively eliminated. The TV’s motion performance was also excellent, and my challenging 1080i clips were as blur-free as I’ve ever seen on an LCD. I use a scene from the 1080i broadcast of Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (Vader’s “birth”) to check for jagged-edge suppression. The 47LG60 performed beautifully, with the scene’s many diagonal lines and curved surfaces cleanly represented. I also saw no signs of banding in color gradients (posterization).

My check for potential 120-Hz display corruption using a challenging scene from the Blu-ray version of the movie Babel uncovered only minor visual glitches when the 47LG60′s TruMotion feature was set to its highest levels. The Sony Bravia KDL-52XBR4 introduced significant corruption into this scene when its 120-Hz frame-interpolation feature was set to maximum. The 47LG60 also joins the select few HDTVs I’ve tested that have aced the HD HQV Benchmark test with a perfect score. Other sets on this short list are the Pioneer Elite KURO PRO-150FD and the Sharp Aquos LC-32GP3U-R.