LCD TV Reviews

Black: 0.001
White: 29.8
Full-On/Full-Off Contrast Ratio: 29,800:1

All of the measurements here were taken through an HDMI input with the set adjusted for the most accurate picture in a darkened room.

As with most TVs, most of the 47LH90’s picture-mode presets exhibited a gray scale that was too blue. Even the THX Cinema mode was significantly biased toward blue, which is evident in the Before Calibration color-tracking chart.

Fortunately, the 47LH90 provides a 10-point gray-scale calibration option. With this, a trained technician can adjust the gray scale at 10 different brightness levels. It also offers a two-point calibration option, which lets a tech calibrate the gray scale at low and high brightness only. Of course, the 10-point option takes longer, but it yields a very accurate gray scale across the brightness range as you can see in the After Calibration color-tracking chart.

The LEDs didn’t seem to shut off completely when displaying a full black field—the Minolta LS-100 light meter read 0.001 foot-lamberts, and the screen didn’t disappear completely black in the studio’s black-hole testing room. Still, the Minolta CS-200 colorimeter couldn’t read the black field’s luminance during calibration, so I had to crank the backlight just for that reading.

At the other end of the brightness range, the 47LH90 can produce enough light for just about any environment. In a dark room such as our studio, I don’t like a peak-white level above 30 ft-L. In this case, I had to turn the backlight down, but there’s plenty of headroom to turn it up in a room with ambient light.

In the Standard color-gamut mode, the primary and secondary colors were very close to where they should be, as you can see in the CIE chart above. In Wide mode, most of the colors were oversaturated at least a little, so I left this setting at Standard.—SW