LG J10HD home cinema system

Most modern DVD systems can drive an LCD or plasma screen very well so, completely unfairly, we decided to hook this baby up to an ancient standard-definition Goodmans Video/TV combo. Picture quality on both this and a more modern screen were very good.

LG's J10HD: decent DVD playback, whatever TV you use

This system's forte seemed to be all about attack, so we gave it some thing a little more subtle to deal with. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, with its visual extremes of widescreen vistas and extreme close ups of craggy and sunburned faces, presents a real challenge. The film is flooded with natural light, which is much harder to present convincingly than a modern CGI image. The J10HD coped really well and even dealt with the slight sepia feel the film sometimes carries.

This film also has what used to be called a film score before Hollywood became obsessed with shoehorning whatever Avril Lavigne track happenes to be in the charts onto every soundtrack. Ennio Morricone's genius mix of orchestration, shouts and dusty guitars is a complex and integral part of the movie and the unit delivered it all with coherence and a good level of subtlety as well as some volume when needed.

The system also copes really well with the kind of effects-laden popcorn movies it was obviously built to drive. We tried a bit of the opening sequence to Revenge Of The Sith, perhaps one of the most complex screens in cinema history, and there was a good level of detail and definition right out to the edges of the picture.

The only problem: without a dedicated centre sound channel, the dialogue can become divorced from the screen at times, and this can be a little grating. You expect the words to come from the actor, not from three feet to his or her left.

The J10HD's CD playback was also better than we had anticipated. The system has some real power to it, but again has the range to show some subtlety too. We tried it with a bit of Full Moon Fever by Tom Petty. The trick here is that Tom has a really rich voice, but it also has a really menacing and sharp edge right at the end of each word. The J10HD picked this up with no problem and presented the rest of the music in a balanced and unforced fashion.

Summary

In the end, we couldn't help liking LG's J10HD. It does have some superfluous gimmicks and some technology we could have coped without, but playback is lively, fun and engaging.