LG 72LM9500 Review

Features

Starting with the most essential features, this is a 72-inch IPS LCD display with LED backlighting running at a resolution of 1920x1080. It’s 3D ready and it’s got smart TV features, similar to other LG TVs. 

Connectivity-wise, there are USB ports at the rear of the TV. They’re placed quite high up, which means a small corded USB hard drive hangs in mid-air. It would’ve been better if these ports were placed lower, considering the size of the TV. There are three USB ports on the rear and four HDMI ports to use for different sources. There’s also a D-Sub port and an optical connector. The other end of the TV has the physical controls. 

Free sample 3D content channel, accessible over the web

There’s no sign of a Composite connector, but there is an RCA connector for those who would still want to use traditional cable TV connections. For internet connectivity, there’s a LAN port which is particularly handy if you want to stream high-definition content over the network. You also have the option to connect a Wi-Fi adapter or a USB keyboard and mouse to the TV for easier use.

Smart TV features

Apart from the size and 3D capability, the Smart TV feature is a major draw. Pressing the Home button throws up the entire dashboard of Smart TV features on the TV. Important content categories are positioned in boxes, one after another. For example, there’s a section that shows a preview of the current video source, followed by premium content, which is basically apps and web services such as Facebook, Youtube, Google Maps and a bunch of other such services. If you connect a compatible LG camera and microphone, you can even use Skype on the TV. Clearly, there is lots of potential. 

The smart TV dashboard

The next box contains 3D content that is streamed over the Internet, but we weren’t particularly impressed by the content. It looked in almost all cases, like 2D-to-3D content with very little or close to no 3D effect. The next category is for LG apps designed for the TV. They are a mix of simple information and some of them even have audio and video content in them. All of this is tied together using a single account that you can register via the TV’s interface or using a web browser.

Speaking of web browsers, the TV has its own web browser that's pretty fast and accurate when it comes to rendering pages. However, we feel that LG could have done a better job with the keyboard. Typing continues to be a pain and we recommend buying a wireless keyboard if you intend to use the TV for long hours browsing. Don’t expect to be doing productive tasks on it though. You’re much better off on a tablet, if you were to consider multitasking between windows and apps.

A complete web browser, with Flash support

LG provides some 2.1GB of space for installing apps on the TV. Of course, most of the apps are minute so there’s ample space for tons of apps. These apps are categorised in the listing as Game, Entertainment, Life, Education, News. 

The last major box on the dashboard is the Smart Share screen, which is where you can play media from remote devices, USB drives and other local network resources such as NAS devices. Of course, there’s DLNA support and other proprietary protocols to make things more streamlined.