LG 650V Review – LG 50LB650V Smart 3D TV
Sitting on the TV Unit through the years at various Mr Exclusive pads has been a very faithful Samsung 32″ HD Ready TV with standard Freeview built in.
Recently with the move to a new top floor apartment and new Ikea furniture, the 32″ whilst fine in a bedroom environment, was no good for a decent size living room. It was like watching TV through a letterbox.
We didn’t want to go spend lots of money, which is where this LG 50LB650v first comes it. Originally seen advertised by Currys on TV at just £599. With the advent of 4k, 6k, 8k and further super resolutions still to come over the next 5-10 years. We didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a 4K TV now, nor did we want to spend lots of money on a 1080p set either.
The LG 50LB650v is incredibly priced, it was on offer at £599 but at time of writing, Currys currently have it for sale at £699. In my opinion, I’d pay that amount now, knowing how good the TV set really is.
At that price point this 2014 TV is classed as a High Entry or Mid TV. With it you get ‘Full HD’ 1080p, Passive 3D, Smart Features and Freeview HD. It has 3 USB Ports, 3 HDMI Ports with 1 being ARC Compatible, Optical Out, 1 Scart, 1 SVGA and the usual composite ins too.
The one thing missing from the physical package, would be the LG Magic Remote, you can almost forgive that though as you can purchase one and use it with this set. LG must have wanted to hit an RRP on this set to appeal to those that want a ‘value for money’ buy.
The bezel and stand are made out of metal and have a straight brushed look to them. Sitting on top of a Gloss Black Ikea BESTÅ BURS stand, this looks very smart.
The TV is held onto the stand and then only 4 screws are required for assembly. Of course this can be wall mounted, at just 14.3kg it can be put anywhere, (17.5KG with stand).
This TV has come under fire from people who use it to play games. What’s apparent to me is that they must have decided not to change any settings before attempting to run a fast action game. Artifacting and blur are not an issue once in Game mode or if you turn off TruMotion.
The picture is bright, colourful and surprisingly, the blacks are very much…well..black.
Remember I’m coming from a 5 year old LCD TV so in comparison, this LG looks incredible. Rest assured according to other reviews, it really does hold it’s own against the competitors.
Along with the usual picture modes, Vivid, Standard, Eco, Game, Sport you have Cinema, Expert 1 and Expert 2.
With cinema mode you have a true 24p mode for video formats that support it.
Expert 1 and 2 allow you more control over vibrancy, hue, colours, tones, dynamic contrast, black levels not in the other presets.
I followed this video on YouTube for one of the Expert presets and have to say, the colours in a dark room look very realistic. httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmhcMy9vbUU
Most of the things we watch on TV is still in standard definition so it was important to us to have a TV that was bearable to watch, some of the Sony and Samsungs had blocking and artifacts so visible, it’d be horrible to sit and watch them all the time. Great news, the LG handles a standard def picture very well indeed. At the distance we watch it from you can’t see any roughness going on, the closer you get the more you see what’s happening but nowhere near to the extent we’ve seen some.
I opted for a Passive 3D set because I don’t get on with Active Shutter Glasses. I can see the flicker, it hurts my eyes and gives me a headache really quickly.
The TV elite out there swear by Active technology though and of course you get the full screen resolution to each eye, where as with passive it’s about half..BUT.. and it’s a big one…
We watched Ice Age 4: Continental Drift in 3D and it was amazing. Super crisp, very clear and enjoyed it very much.
We then went on to watch Edge of Tomorrow (Live Die Repeat) in 3D. Again very impressive, you do get some motion judder for fast moving items but I believe this to be down to the passive format, as this set has a fantastic 500hz picture rate.
In 2D Expert mode or Cinema Mode, in full 1080p I couldn’t fault it.
The one downside to this TV and it’s a gripe with all the modern sets to be honest, is the TruMotion function. It’s designed to smooth, de-blur and de-judder the images on the screen. However on fast paced action it does cause artefacts and when watching normal TV it gives everybody’s movements on screen a very weird lucid, rubbery action. This is known as the ‘Soap Opera’ effect and it’s awful.
To combat this depending on what is being watched, it’s either all turned completely off, or manually set very low so that you don’t get the ‘Soap Opera’ effect and any weird artefacts on the screen.
When turning the TV on, it will take you straight to your last input but the Smart functionality, settings etc (The TV Operating System) takes a minute to load up which can be a bit of a niggle if you want to go from a HDMI connection to another straight away.
WebOS as it is called from LG once loaded, works very well. It’s faster than other TVs we tried out and comes pre-installed with iPlayer, Netflix, YouTube, Demand5, Facebook etc. Instead of us having to put the Playstation on for iPlayer we can now access it with just 2 button presses on the remote, it is very convenient.
If you are after a very well priced, equipped and capable Full HD 3D Smart TV, I can honestly 100% recommend this to anybody.
Go and check one out in the flesh, you might just like it.
