LG 42SL9000

After our test of the LG SL8000 last month, it's time to look at the next model up, the SL9000.  The two televisions are virtually identical, apart from two small details:

• The backlighting in the SL900 relies on LEDs around the sides of the screen (Edge-LED) rather than fluorescent tubes.

• TruMotion on the SL8000 is at 200 Hz, but 100 Hz here.

Build Quality and Design: A decent multimedia player at last!

You'll find all the ports you'll need to connect the latest hardware like a HD console or Blu-ray player, as well as older equipment like VCRs or SD consoles.  The only thing that's missing is the SD card reader, which has been replaced by a USB port which allows the SL9000 to access a wide range of multimedia formats including AVC HD, SD and HD DivX and SRT subtitles; VC1 is the only format it can't handle.  You can also access content from a networked device connected to the DLNA-compatible Ethernet port, but fewer formats are available this way.

The Full HD 1080p display is finished with a glossy layer that suffers badly from reflections, and you'll need to be careful about where in the room you put it, or be able to easily control the light.  Fortunately, though, it doesn't suffer from the same problem as the surface of the SL8000, which produced a reflection of the image on screen a few millimetres in front of the display.  Despite the frame around the screen's description as 'borderless', it's about average compared to other TVs, measuring 3.5 cm around the edges and more than 4 cm at the bottom.

The settings menu is clear and well laid-out.  Disappointingly, it's occasionally a little slow.

The remote control is easy to use--and, better still, is backlit, meaning it's easy to use in the dark.

Image Quality: Factory Settings: No change
This section does not count towares the final score

As is often the case, the factory settings don't produce very good results.  The backlighting and dynamic contrast don't do too much to  adveresely affect the gamma curve, though.  It's mostly the colours that go astray, with a deltaE above 10 and a colour temperature of 10641 K.

Image Quality: Cinema Mode: A quality image all-round

To improve performance, you need to switch to Cinema mode, where we didn't need to make any further adjustments, apart from setting the backlighting to 68 to produce whites with a brightness of 200 cd/m², the standard we always use when testing TVs.

The quality of HD video is excellent, despite a small lack of sharpness and contrast.  The latter doesn't climb above 850:1 because blacks remain too light at 0.24 cd/m².  It's a bad habit we've seen before on LG TVs, but it does have the advantage of producing viewing angles that are much wider than other LCD TVs.  It's nowhere near as good as a plasma TV in this regard, but you can still see the image clearly up to 45° either side of the centre line.

Colours are excellent in Cinema mode

Upscaling of SD sources is about as good as on other televisions--which is to say, not very good at all, with plenty of detail lost along the way.  For watching a DVD, a better choice would be a dedicated player which will do the upscaling for you and provide a 1080p signal directly: the final result is of a much higher quality.

The colours, which are very poor using the default settings, are excellent when in Cinema mode, with a deltaE of just 3.4.

Finally, the 100 Hz TruMotion system produces fluid movements without introducing too many problems: we only spotted some very light ghosting on scrolling text, but nothing alarming.

Sound Quality: We expected better

This is one of the 42SL9000's weaknesses.  At just 2.9 cm thick, there isn't enough room for the speakers to produce a quality sound.  Instead, the audio is aggressive and lacking in depth.

Energy Consumption

Although it might use more power on standby than some of its competitors, the SL9000 still only uses 0.3 W, which will hardly make a huge dint in your electricity bill.  When it's switched on, it uses 118 W, which makes it a perfectly average LCD TV.