It's been roughly 5 months since the LG 42LB7RF HDTV was first delivered to my place courtesy of the LG Blogger Review Program and the TV has been sitting pretty in the living room and entertaining me ever since.
The LG 42LB7RF comes packed with features like full HD picture quality, 1920x1080 resolution, 10000:1 contrast ratio, 2 HDMI 1080p input, PC Plug and Play setup, a 178 wide viewing angle, XD Engine, full HD Processing without Down-Scaling, Intelligent Eye Pro and many more.
The back and side panels allow you to connect all sorts of equipment to the LG 42LB7RF. You can connect up to 2 HDMI appliances. HDMI or High-Definition Multimedia Interface is a compact audio/video connector interface for transmitting uncompressed digital streams. A HDMI cable connects digital audio/video sources such as a set-top box, a Blu-ray Disc player, a personal computer, a video game console, or an AV receiver to a HD TV so that you can enjoy the full HD image quality from the source. For me, I connected the Playstation 3 (with a HDMI cable) to the TV which acts as my game console, my Bluray DVD player and also as a good tool for me to surf internet on the TV. Hooray to the PS3!
Besides the 2 HDMI inputs, there's also a RGB/Audio input, Audio/Video Inout, AV Output, Antenna Input, 2 Component inouts, Variable Audio Output, RS-232C Input, S-Video Input and Audio/Video Input.
The LG 42LB7RF doesn't only look good on the outside but it is performs very well as a HD TV. It's XD Engine tranfers low resolution analog image to higher resolution HD image. So watching a normal TV channel without any HD with the LG 42LB7RF actually makes the image much better than it actually looks but the quality still ain't full HD of course - you will still a HD source to view true HD quality image.
So in order to test how good the LG 42LB7RF is, I was eager to try out Channel 5's free HD channel but after fixing the the Channel 5 HD setup box and the antenna, I realised that I could not receive the Channel 5 HD signal. I found out later that the signal is not available in my location. Darn it.
Looks like I have to depend on the PS3's Bluray DVD player now. So in went a Bluray DVD of Spiderman 3. Wow! Spidey never looked this good. The quality is spectacular. The image is sharp with very high contrast. The foreground seems to have this pop-out effect which is really amazing. The black levels although not superior than some of LG's competitors, is still good enough to deliver details. I had to manually adjust the Picture's contrast, brightness, colour, sharpness, tint, and the XD Engine's Contrast, Colour and Noise Reduction to get the optimum performance out of the LG 42LB7RF. The TV does comes with four preset settings, Intelligent Eye, Dynamic, Standard and Mild, all of which should be good enough for the casual viewer.
Here's a video I took of Spiderman 3 played on the LG 42LB7RF.
The sound quality of the LG 42LB7RF is very good thanks to its SRS Trusurround XT surround system which delivers a realistic 3D listening experience and LG’s proprietary Dimple Speaker design which provides clear and powerful sound at any volume. I thought with the LG 42LB7RF, the sound I get is like I'm watching movies in the cinema and I definitely love my movies and shows on TV to be loud and clear. Sorry neighbours.
The LG 42LB7RF also makes a great display for playing games. Playing Fifa 2008 for example on the PS3 is really far more enjoyable when it is hooked to the LG 42LB7RF. The image quality is really, really good and it gives me an impression of watching a real live football game in the stadium. No wonder I'm hooked to playing Fifa 2008.
Overall, I think the LG 42LB7RF HDTV is a commendable effort by LG to produce a high quality and affordable HD TV. I would have preferred more HDMI slots and a deeper black level but I guess one can't ask for too much.
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