LG 42LH7020

The first thing you notice about the new LG 42LH7020 TV is how thin it is: measuring just 4 cm from front to back, it gets right up against your wall.

Build quality and design

Although that undoubtedly makes this TV more attractive, it also has some negative consequences for the hardware.  LG's engineers clearly struggled to make room for all of the inputs on the side of the TV, and only the slot for TV decoding cards is there.  The four HDMI ports and USB input are all at the back instead, which makes connecting them up particularly difficult, with the USB the hardest to use.  If you want to wall-mount this TV, then the USB port is entirely impractical, unless you want to leave an extension cable in place the whole time.

The 1080p Full HD panel has been treated with an anti-reflective matte finish that is particularly effective.  Behind that, there are traditional neon tubes, rather than LEDs, taking care of the backlighting; only the most upmarket TVs have moved over to the latter so far.

Using it with a PC doesn't pose any problems whatsoever, with a perfect display of our 1920 x 1080 pixel desktop over HDMI.  We measured the input lag at 33 ms, an entirely satisfactory value for a TV. 

The majority of our test results revealed a TV that is a long way from rivaling today's star models.  The contrast ratio is held back at 830:1, mostly by blacks that don't get below 0.25 cd/m², which leaves them six times brighter than the best TVs.  Unfortunately, it's a recurring trend for both LG and Phillips.  On the other hand, the viewing angles couldn't be better.  Only the bare minimum amount of light is lost around the edges of the screen, and the colours hardly change at all when you move away from the screen's centre-line.

We did, however, notice some light clouding in two places.  The brightness rose to 0.35 cd/m² and 0.38 cd/m² as opposed to 0.25 cd/m² in the middle of the screen.  It was only using a special test card with an entirely black frame that allowed us to spot this defect, and it won't necessarily be visible in a film.

Ghosting is kept to a minimum thanks to the 100 Hz technology, and the results are almost as good as on some TVs at 200 Hz.  The use of TruMotion produces incredibly fluid movements, even for the very fastest objects.  If you don't like filters like this, then you can of course turn it off.

When we tried some practical tests, watching a few films confirmed what our lab results had already told us: this is a TV with reasonable colours, slightly weak contrast, wide viewing angles and virtually no ghosting.  SD sources that are upscaled look a blithe blurry, but the quality is about average for a HD TV.  For the time being, all the TVs we've seen seem to use the same algorithm for this task.

Sound Quality

The 42LH7020 is yet another TV that produces a vague sound that's lacking in bass and depth.  The problem is almost certainly caused by the speakers that face the wall behind the screen, rather than the viewer.  A frame this thin can't leave much room for bass sounds to resonate, either.

Energy Consumption

The energy consumption of 140 W while switched on makes this television about average for an LCD.  While on standby, this figure falls to 0.2 W.

A serious multimedia player

LG has included a multimedia player in this TV that supports plenty of formats: MP3, JPEG, DivX, XviD (in both SD and HD) and AVCHD files in MKV and TS containers.  All of that comes with subtitles that you can synchronise.  You want even more?  Well, the USB port is compatible with FAT32 drives, and so can access drives that contain partitions of more than 32 GB, as well as drives formatted as NTFS, though we didn't try this last feature out.  There are still one or two constraints though: while VOB files are supported, you can't change their aspect ratio or choose an audio track.  That means anamorphic titles--99% of DVDs for instance--are in the wrong ratio and you can't avoid the default audio track.  Other examples include the absence of support for VC1 files and the limitation of 4 GB per file on FAT32 drives, although this last point is due to the FAT32 specification itself and not LG's multimedia software.  If you have large HD video, then you're better off sticking to an NTFS external hard drive.

When we tried it out, we noticed some very light jerkiness that appeared when watching 24p video over USB.  The problem didn't occur everywhere, but it happened often enough for us to note it.  Although that means we finish on a negative note, this excellent multimedia player is worthy of joining those found on Samsung's televisions on the podium.