47LW5700 vs 44UND7000

I recently got the chance to check out two 3D LED TVs at a friend’s house and had enough time to do a small review.  The two models he had were the LG 47LW5700 and the Samsung UN44D7000.  He mostly does gaming on the LG and watches movies on the Samsung but this review will only cover the movie part.

Both TVs are 3D TVs and have a resolution of 1080p in both modes (2D, 3D) although the LG one is a passive type which means they require the use of polarized glasses (battery-free) while sending images to both eyes simultaneously when showing 3D images. The Samsung TV is an active type which shows its 3D images by the TV transmitting each image to the shutter glasses for each eye one at a time. This is done at a high rate of speed through the use of the battery-powered shutter glasses.

Now the remote for these two TVs are completely different.  LG uses a wand-like remote which has a only a few buttons with a motion sensor attached to the front. The Samsung uses the traditional remote with many buttons for each function. I highly preferred the LG remote. 

The glasses were quite interesting. The LG cinema 3D glasses didn’t look as nice as the Samsung shutter glasses, but after trying them on it was a different story.  The Cinema 3D glasses were very comfortable and didn’t have any like coming through from the top of the frames. The shutter glasses on the other hand were fairly heavy and uncomfortable. At times they felt like they were dangling from my head. The amount of movement restriction these glasses implement is quite annoying. 

Time was limited so the movie I chose to use was Tron, a highly demanding 3D title for blue-ray.  Both TVs had great, crisp 2D images. I was surprised to see such a difference in brightness between the two. The black levels seemed pretty mediocre but overall both did great. 

In 3D mode is where things started to differ. Even though LG’s  3D technology is the passive type, its resolution seemed more detailed. This might have been due to the crosstalk that kept occurring on the Samsung. Some of the images just didn’t seem that great.  LG is the winner for 3D.

LW5700, notice the clean crisp image

44UND7000, has some blurring and detail issues

I wish I had the chance to test out gaming on these two TVs but didn’t have enough time. My friend uses the LG for gaming and recommended it over the Samsung.  I might follow up with one in the future.