A great example came while watching a live Premiership football match (Sky HD). The 47LG7000 revealed all the skin tone subtleties – without a trace of colour 'striping' – in pundit Andy Gray's increasingly weathered face. It's also an excellent screen with HD games sources. Hi-def Xbox 360 fare, like Prince of Persia, looks gorgeous.

Our Tech Labs found the screen capable of a perfect 6,500K colour temperature, achieved by individual RGB adjustment. Controls are buried in the Expert Control sub-menu. Colour accuracy like this is reliant on sharpness. Here again the set comes up trumps, using its Full HD resolution and LG's XD Engine system to reproduce HD images with pixel-point precision.

Nothing looks gritty or forced. The stunning textures in the Blu-ray transfer of the freeway fight in Transformers, for example, have seldom been reproduced better.

Improved black levels

Picture quality is also aided by the TV's wide viewing angle, and black levels that are probably amongst the best LG has ever managed.

That said, the claimed 50,000:1 contrast ratio does not give rise to black levels as good as those offered by the Samsung and Sony-led LCD competition, or most plasma panels – something borne out by our Tech Labs' real world contrast measurement of 862:1.

I detected the occasional brightness jump as the set's dynamic backlight system tried to keep up with sharp shifts in source-image contrast, and there's definitely a trace of grey clouding over the night skies during the opening scenes of Batman Begins.

Despite this, the LG's black levels are at least good enough to ensure that dark scenes have a cinematic sense of depth, and are natural enough not to be distracting.

Invisible speakers

I often worry about switching from HD to standard-definition material. I've had frequent issues with how TVs – LG ones in particular – handle the non-HD world (and it's a sizeable chunk of most peoples' televisual diet). But again the 47LG7000 bucks expectations, adding sharpness to standard definition images without colour noise side effects.

So there's nothing serious to get upset about regarding the 47LG7000's picture performance, and audio doesn't let the side down either. On the contrary, the Mr Mark Levinson-tuned 'invisible' speakers have far better dynamics than most rival flatscreen speaker systems,.

So impressive is the 47LG7000's AV performance that all my initial suspicions about it, based on the gimmicky Bluetooth 'headline' feature, have been well and truly put to bed. In fact, the 47LG7000 is so good it tucks in and reads a bedtime story to any such doubts.

In short, the LG 47LG7000 belongs on the TV performance A-list. It's time to bench your preconceptions.