Like its 32-inch sibling, LG's 42LT75 carries Freeview Playback: our digital terrestrial service's long overdue answer to Sky's sublime Sky+ digital recording system. But for around £830, does the new functionality add anything truly significant to the Freeview proposition, or is it just a gimmick?
Strengths
First things first: its combination of a sultry gloss-black finish and seriously delectable curves make the 42LT75 a real sight.
Its innards are even more interesting. Tucked away inside the set's slender LCD frame, alongside two digital tuners, an analogue tuner and all the usual LCD picture-making 'stuff', is a 160GB HDD drive. This really is surprisingly substantial for what is and should be sufficient to store around 60 hours of digital recordings or between 45 and 90 hours of analogue recordings.
Why the different maximum recording times? In the digital tuner's case, the 42LT75 records the digital feed directly, while with analogue sources it has to convert the analogue feed to digital before recording. During this process, the TV helpfully lets you choose between one of two different quality standards: High and Normal, depending on whether you most value picture quality or saving memory with a particular recording.
Freeview Playback brings a few features to the table that are more substantial than you might imagine. The star of the show, without doubt, is Series Link. This feature allows you to set the TV to record a whole series automatically. While it's dependent on broadcasters providing the necessary information, apparently around 90 per cent of Freeview channel providers are already onboard.
You also get the facility to link split recordings, such as when a film is broken by a news broadcast. Plus, the TV allows you to record one digital channel while watching another, and you can pause live TV and 'chase' live playback.
What makes all this even more pleasing on the 42LT75 is how profoundly easy all the various recording features are to access. Realising that the 42LT75 is likely to appeal to relatively un-technical people -- after all, tech-heads will doubtless already have at least Sky+ and probably a Sky HD box by now -- LG has clearly put enormous effort into designing the set's operating system. The result is that it shouldn't take long at all before even the most technophobic of users will be making and manipulating digital recordings as if they've done it all their lives.
The last bit of good news about the 42LT75 is, thankfully, its picture quality. Previous LG LCD TVs have really struggled showing standard definition sources, but here, the brand really seems to have got its act together. Pictures from the digital tuner look clean, reasonably sharp, richly coloured and naturally toned -- among the best we've seen on an LCD TV, in fact.
We can only imagine that in working so hard on the Freeview Playback element of the 42LT75, LG also finally got round to tweaking its image processing to optimise it for the UK's digital broadcasting service. Plus, it should be said, the set's HD pictures aren't bad either.
Weaknesses
Some people may be disappointed to discover that the 42LT75 is not a 'Full HD' screen. We'd argue that this isn't necessarily the negative it might first appear, since the set's lower 720p resolution is potentially more in tune with the standard definition of the Freeview service the TV is so interested in.
One definite genuine weakness, though, is the way the set's pictures lose contrast and colour if watched from much of an angle at all. This is a common failing of LCD technology, but we've seen recent sets from other brands deliver much wider realistic viewing angles than is possible with the 42LT75.
Our other concern is that the digital signal appears to lose strength as it passes from the TV's first digital tuner to the second one. It's entirely possible that if you live in an area of borderline digital reception, you might get a solid picture on the first tuner, but suffer break up or even total signal loss on the second tuner. We'd advise you to be sure your digital reception is good before splashing out on a 42LT75.
Conclusion
LG's 42LT75 certainly won't be for everyone. Anyone with or wanting Sky, for instance, would be better with a Sky+ box and a different telly. But for the millions of households out there yet to 'go digital' in any way, shape or form, the 42LT75 really is a great -- and surprisingly affordable -- way to upgrade ahead of the great analogue switch off.
Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday
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User reviews3
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joshpow 22 July 2011
Good: Nothing
Bad: The operating system, the hard-drive, the remote, and more
Comment: This was the worst £1000 I ever spent. The above reviewer must be deluded to have given it 4/5. The hard-drive fails to record, recorded programmes are incomplete, the operating system is full of bugs and bad design issues, the remote only works if you are absolutely 'square-on' to the sensor when you press the buttons, and on my set, the VGA input has no red signal. There's more, but I just can't be bothered to be honest. I've had the entire innards replaced and gone through 2 hard-drives, had the software updated, and the problems still persist, suggesting that these are DESIGN faults and not down to my specific hardware. I contacted LG who simply said "There's a fault with your set. Please contact our service centre where, for a charge, we will repair it". No s**t, Sherlock!
Save your money and sanity and don't buy this TV! I'll be steering well clear of LG in the future, so bad are the experiences I've had with this pile of junk....
ImAlwaysRight 29 April 2010
Good: Picture quality, sound is loud and clear, design, abilty to record tv.
Bad: N/A
Comment: This is a great tv, it was the first HDTV I have owned and it is as awesome now as it was then, from its ease of use to its brilliant picture this Tv is very good.
mercuryfreddie 1 March 2008
Good: Twin tuner
Bad: hard disc recorder
Comment: I bought this tv to replace my 40" samsung lcd which I was more than happy with, I replaced as the new LG had twin tuners and most of all a hard drive recorder built in, this of course means less clutter.
I am getting major earache from my dear wife as she finds the recorder so frustrating, You can record one channel while watching the other only it's not quite that straightforward, e.g you set the recorder to record your program then decide to play on the nintendo wii, you turn on to the AV channel to play your game then turn off the tv, of course you have set your program to record so there is no problem yes? WRONG!! what you find is unless you remember to turn back to the tv channel you miss your recording.
Next, you have a program set to record, and you are watching another channel a message will appear a recording is due to start do you want to change channels, if you choose no and stay on the channel you are watching the programme will not record, So therefore you have to choose yes and miss what you are watching while the tv changes channel to record the programme and then you can go back to what you were watching.
Now if that was'nt bad enough what happens when you are watching an already recorded programme and the recorder needs to start recording a programme? My wife finds this the most frustrating problem the only way it will record again is to change channel, unfortunately by changing channel it cuts off what you were watching from the recorded programmes, when you go back to this recorded programme and start it playing it of course begins playing where it stopped before changing programmes, WRONG, you have to start at the beggining of the programme and fast forward it back to the place it cut off.
We may of course find this more frustrating as we have had a tivo recorder for the last 8 years and I have found nothing to match it, we have had sky + which is great except for customer service but still not as good as tivo, a stand alone hard disk recorder which was great for editing recorded programmes, but still not a patch on tivo, I am finding it very frustrating that technology 8 years old is still more advanced than up todate technology.
Hopefully there will be some software to sort these problems but if not you could find it a very irritating buy
Brian
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