Powie's Blog

Well now that I’ve had this TV for a few days I’m ready to share my initial impressions. I’ll be back later to update as needed, and if you have any specific questions or comments please enter them below. And be nice, I’m not a professional writer, I hated English and writing, in school. I just love tech, and thought I would share my thoughts.

First I will start out by saying this is my second Smart TV, I reviewed the LG 55LM6700 in this post. Things could only get better right? I’m happy to say YES! While this TV is only 40″ it has a picture quality on par with the LG. It has some very minor bleeding when the screen is black, but no where near as bad as the LG, but still not as good as my Sony KDL-55HX820. One of the first things I did of course was check out the 3D, at first it had some severe flickering going on, not sure what was the cause, but it was horrible, so I stopped watching 3D for the evening, and just played around with other things on the TV. I went back last night and checked out the 3D again, and there was no flicker. I read online that other electronics such as WiFi devices can cause interference, but nothing has changed as far as that’s concerned. As with all 3D content, I noticed it’s better in a darkened room. The Samsung glasses are very light and comfortable, by far more comfortable than the 3D glasses that came with my Sony.  My only complaint is that I wish the lenses were a bit bigger and wrapped more around my eyes, making it easier to block out things that I can see out of the corner of my eyes. I do wish I had some more 3D Blu-Ray discs for checking out the 3D.. I really did like the Yabazam 3D app. While we can only view trailers for now, I believe they have full plans to be able to buy or rent 3D movies. I also still think CGI (Video Games) is far more suited towards 3D, but then again as I mentioned I don’t have much source content. They also include 4 pairs of 3D glasses, I do wish they were rechargeable. But it looks like they use common coin style batteries. I also wish they would have included some cloth cases for them to keep them dust free in between use. If anyone has a good source for some cheap ones, leave me a comment below.

The overall picture quality is pretty darn good out of the box, I’m no expert, and I’m sure my 46 year old eyes are not the best any more. I have plans to order the Disney Wow disc to calibrate all my TV’s at some point.

Samsung calls their Smart TV area “Smart Hub”, there is a big Cube colored button on the remote to launch Smart Hub. The first time I launched it – it downloaded some updates, I sure hope Samsung continues to improve this. On the main screen as you can see in the photo above the top row starting left to right is the current video of what is playing on the current input source, then we have Vudu, Hulu Plus, Netflix, MLB.TV, and Pandora. The top right seems to be a spot reserved for advertising apps. I do wish we could delete or at least move some of their “featured apps”. I don’t use any of them except Netflix and maybe will start using Pandora more, and it would be nice to put other app icons on the top row, as well as save memory it appears there’s about 808 Megabytes of memory.

The next row contains their App store, a Your Video section, Family Story, Fitness, Kids, and off screen but if you scroll to the right you have two choices Social Hub (Facebook, Twitter & Google Talk), and pulling up the rear Media Hub where you can buy or rent movies.

Now we get to the bottom row of icons, the first 3 you see in the photo above are Channel, Schedule Manager, and Source. The Channel being a channel manager where you can delete channels you don’t watch on over the air, or if you connect standard cable without a box. I do wish I could label some channels that the TV doesn’t pick up. The schedule manager will automatically turn the TV to a channel at a certain time. This will only do you good if you don’t use a cable box.  I do like the fact that they allow you to make custom named folder to move any of the bottom two rows of icons into. There’s also a web browser, but I will say upfront this is one area where having the LG Magic remote is nice, using a browser with the standard remote sucks. The Samsung pretty much like the one on my LG TV, which I believe is based on Opera. The browser has adobe Flash 10,1,105,7 installed. It was too painful to use without a mouse so that’s where I stopped.

So in summary I am generally impressed with their Smart Hub. As for the negatives, I cannot for the life of me log in to Google Talk, and Pandora sounds horrible. Their selection of apps is far superior to LG, I haven’t bought any yet, but they appear to have at least 100 or more. Now why I call this TV Mostly Smart, I do wish they had an email app, that put a little icon up on the screen when I had mail. You know just like my smart phone does. Another app I would love would be the Google Music app. Finally an app that records video and takes photos and optionally saves them to a USB drive. Because yes that little thing on top of the TV is a small camera. I setup a Skype account, I just don’t know anyone who uses it, but the test video looks pretty good. I have no idea the resolution of the camera.

Some final thoughts:

The remote control is fairly comfortable to use, though I would have preferred a slightly different layout with the arrow pad up where the numeric pad is, I swear these companies never product test remotes, as most people will use the arrow pads far more than numeric input. One nice touch is it’s lighted. The other thing I don’t like is the front of the remote is angled up 45 degrees, instead of just a 90 degree angle, thus you pretty much have to point the remote directly at the TV. It’s also a universal remote, though I haven’t tried that part yet.

The TV supports both USB & Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, I’ve not tried this out yet either. Speaking of BlueTooth it would be nice if these TV companies would start adding support for Bluetooth headsets, my stereo one will be here this week. The official Android remote App doesn’t work on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus. (I sent them a tweet about it, we’ll see if it gets updated) But I did find a replacement called SamyGo Remote which allows you to enter text easily, my main reason for installing it, oh and it does change the volume, and channel as well as some of the basic functions.

I kind of wish I had won a 55″ Samsung TV versus the LG one,  even though this one’s smaller in almost every way blows my LG away. As mentioned earlier I have plans to get the Disney Wow disc, so I’ll need to bring in my PS3 at that time to calibrate it, I’ll also check out how it looks for games at that time. If you want full specs on this TV you can get it here: Samsung 6580.

Overall I like the TV a lot, and would give it 8 out of 10 stars. Get me a Google Music app, and a good email app and it will go up a star!

Well as I mentioned earlier leave me any questions or comments below..

I was really excited to get this TV which I won from an LG Twitter sweepstakes, it would be my first “Smart TV”.  After taking it out of the box and setting it up, one of the first things I did was check out the 3D features. I was really impressed by how comfortable the Passive 3D glasses were, and was even impressed by how the 3D popped out of the screen on some content. But that’s about as impressed as I was going to get with this TV. The Passive 3D has a very slight grainy look to it, it’s not horrible, but it’s just not as crisp as my Sony KDL-55HX820 in 3D.

I could even deal with the grainy look, after a bit you get used to it, and as someone who loves playing video games on occasion, I would much prefer the passive glasses, versus Sony’s uncomfortable active glasses. If LG can just make my Smart TV actually live up the the “Smart” title, I would love this TV despite it’s minor picture quality issues.

I will say the 2D picture quality is “decent”, but not as nice as the Sony, and when there are very dark scenes, there is noticeable “bleeding/flashlighting” so areas of the screen that should be black have a dark grey look. The Sony has VERY little bleeding/flashlighting what ever you want to call it.

The next thing I did was check out the LG App store, expecting at least a few decent apps like the Google Play Store, and Apple’s app store. Wow was I disappointed, a few apps geared towards kids, and over all just crap for Apps.   There is not a single music streaming service such as Pandora, Spotify, Google Music etc. Yes there is a “Premium” music app which does nothing more than stream radio stations.  I guess I was expecting smart TV’s having the ability to do the simplest tasks like check my email, and put a tiny little icon on my screen letting me know I’ve got mail, you know like a Smart Phone. The LG 55LM6700 does come with a Facebook and Twitter app, and even an integrated one that allows watching TV while using FB & Twitter, but they are all too slow to be useful. Any way the entire app thing has been a huge disappointment.

One of my favorite apps is Netflix, I had been using my PlayStation 3 for years to stream movies and TV shows, so I was excited to see how well Netflix worked. I configured my account information, and logged in to the Netflix app only to find moving around the Menu and picking/browsing movies was EXTREMELY SLOW compared to my PS3 & my Sony KDL-55HX820, I mean it’s unbearably slow. The LG Netflix app does support Closed Captions, which the Sony TV does not. So I forget now what movie I picked to watch, but it made it about 1 hour and 10 minutes in before the app crashed, forcing me to reboot the TV and resume. Now I’ve had problems with my PS3 stopping in the middle of a movie on VERY rare occasions, as well as issues with Netflix not streaming a movie properly. So I log back in to Netflix on the LG TV and resume the movie.  After finishing that movie, I  slowly moved through the LG menu and pick another movie, and it does the same thing, after about an hour it just stopped, the sound continued while I was dropped out to the “home menu” – I was unable to resume the movie until I rebooted the TV. Now I have been able to watch TV shows fine, I think it’s because none of them are long, and the memory leak in the Netflix app doesn’t overflow.

So the next thing for me to check out was the LG TV supports this feature called MediaLink, which is basically just a nice interface for a DLNA server called Plex Media Server, after installing PMS on my computer (2.6Ghz core 2 duo with 4 gigs ram) – I installed a few channels like Hulu *free version*, ABC, NBC, etc. I head back out to where the TV is located, and try to stream some content, pretty much this was a complete failure, either I constantly got messages about not being able to play the media, or the media constantly buffered making watching anything impossible. I’ve been using PlayOn for years, and while the interface to the TV is not as pretty as MediaLink & PMS, it… just …. works!  I don’t know what to blame PMS or Medialink or both. At this point I post a comment on the official Plex Medialink forums, where an LG rep who posts there as well tells me it sounds like a power supply  problem, or my main board needs replaced. To me it sounds like crappy firmware.  I’ve been following the 55LM6700 forum over at AVSForums.com and people have had mainboard, and power supplies replaced, and their TV’s still reboot on their own. Which brings up the subject that yes I have had the TV simply reboot on its own right in the middle of watching something, it’s only done it a few times, but it’s still annoying.

Now some random issues:

It’s disappointing to see the poor Korean to English translations everywhere. Samsung, and Sony really take the time to make their menu’s and manuals translate over to English well. (I’ll be posting a review of my new Samsung 40″ 3D-TV in a week or so after I’ve had some more time with it. ) They also have a featured app called K-Pop or something that you can’t delete, it’s basically a bunch of Korean pop music bands from what I can tell, and pretty much worthless. There’s so many good streaming sources, and app possibilities that LG is REALLY LACKING, especially compared to my Samsung and Sony.

After the TV has been running for a while, the remote refuses to do anything, I can’t open any menus, change the volume, and if I hold down the Power button the TV will shut off after about 10 seconds. Again to me this looks like a memory leak in the firmware.

If I connect my “Smart TV’ to the internet, why do I have to manually set the time? Isn’t that what internet time look up is for? So much for a Smart TV.

If I write LG support an email, shouldn’t they at least try to help instead of immediately telling me to call? I was more hoping to hear that these are known issues, and would be fixed in a firmware update.

LG has a Magic Remote app for iPod/iPad etc, but no Android app.

And finally what pisses me off the most about LG is the fact that I tried to leave some well written reviews on the LG website, and 3 times they rejected my review because I didn’t give the TV 5 stars. Just compare the reviews on their site to say Amazon where they have several bad reviews.

I REALLY wanted to love this TV, but at this point I just can’t recommend it. I’ll update this post if LG releases a firmware that fixes the problems, sadly from what I hear and read on their Facebook wall, and online forums they suck at supporting their product after sale.

So at this point I give this TV 4 of 10 stars. A firmware update could bring this TV up to at least a 7.