LG 37LC46 Plasma HD TV Reviews

I was frankly bitterly disappointed at the terrible picture quality on this set. Everything I did with the settings only had the capacity to make it worse - mushy, blurry, fringed edges (the

embossed line look), etc. etc.

I WAS going to send it back but then as a last ditch rescue I tried buying an HDMI-upscaling DVD Recorder from Philips with Freeview and using THAT to upscale to 1080i and bingo -

the picture quality that I was expecting - well, close enough.

The set has awful deinterlacing which makes pictures flick back-and-forth in static areas between interlaced and deinterlaced. Fine detail such as windowblinds twitter uncontrollably

and unbearably. I don't suffer from epilepsy but it's almost enough to give me a fit. In cases like that I switch the DVDR to 720p which means the Philips is doing the deinterlacing

itself but with a slight compromise in resolution - but it's better than what you're stuck with with the LG.

It appears the problem with the 37LC46 is that its 'native' resolution is 480i - meaning that a standard UK television picture is not getting UPSCALED by the on-board video processor,

but DOWNSCALED - i.e. to a 'proto-NTSC' 525-line analogue equivalent picture (and at 60Hz too which makes movement look jerky). In fact, when I switch the Philips DVDR to 480i I

get exactly the same picture on the 37LC46 that it gives on its built-in DVB-T tuner or directly from SCART inputs, and indeed it goes back to 480i if I ever power-cycle the DVDR

because that's the 'resolution negotiation' that gets sent over the HDMI.

If that jargon confuses you, think of it this way - imagine you copy a fairly small JPG picture from a website. If you paste it into, say, Powerpoint, and make it bigger, you notice the

limited quality of the original image. However there are techniques in Paint/Photo packages that can sharpen them up and make them 'adequate'. What you would not want to do

though, is make that image SMALLER still than it was originally, grab it at the reduced resolution, and then try and enlarge it from that. You've already cut out what little quality was

already there and are now attempting to blow up and 'enhance' detail that simply just does not exist anymore. Plus if the reduced image was saved with high compression it adds mush

and fuzz to the already downgraded image, which can't be blown up and enhanced, no matter how hard you try. This, sadly though, is what this LG set does to incoming video images,

even from its own Freeview tuner. It beggars belief. This means attempting to watch SD (Standard Def) material on this set will actually give you LESS than SD, not even an attempt to

make the SD look 'HD-like' - or even equivalent to 'SD-like'.

I can't send it back because it's not 'faulty' as such, but if I'd known that I'd have to spend another £150 on another device to get it to show a decent picture, and that 480i was the

'native' resolution, I wouldn't have touched the 37LC46 with a barge pole. I feel rather cheated.