Review The one-box home cinema system business reached saturation point some time ago, particularly at the cheaper end of the market. So companies who, like LG, target the mainstream have to work pretty hard to make their products stand out. LG has certainly put in some effort into the J10HD.

LG's J10HD: Chocolate-styled

For starters, this 2.1-channel, 300W total power set is styled on the company's popular Chocolate mobile phone. For the tecnhology buffs, there's a hard drive, touch-sensitive controls and a good set of connectivity options. So is the J10HD any good? Well, yes, but not for the reasons that LG might have intended.

Our initial impressions of the set were good. It's very easy to set up and feels more solid than we had anticipated. It gets the basics - like having enough speaker cable to get the speakers a decent distance apart - right, and that's so important. Problems encountered when the kit's being put in place for the first time are often never put right for the whole life of the machine, leaving you feeling you've been sold a pup.

We also liked the way the system is configured. The way all the power comes from the active sub-woofer, and the rugged nature of the cables and connectors, are all very reminiscent of the Bose approach - which is a big clue as to the kind of consumer LG is after.

The J10HD's dark coat and "ice white" lighting highlights aren't going to fit into everyone's home - think modern, minimalist flat, rather than barn conversion - but then it's not meant to. There's a little bit of a 1980s feel to its look, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the right context, the system looks good. There are also some nice touches, such as being able to dim the light coming from the displays.

Indeed, this unit has more than its fair share of gimmicks. The main one is the touch-sensitive circular control that sits on top of the main deck and from which all the menus and functions can be reached. You tap it with your finger, sliding in different directions to navigate around and dialling round to adjust the volume, tone and so on. This is fun initially and in keeping with the Blade Runner look of the product.

LG's J10HD: gimmick central

However, functionally it doesn't really add anything. The unit actually has a really good remote, which can control all its functions much faster than the touch-sensitive dial can. Why would you want to lean over the J10HD and not operate it from the comfort of a chair? Still, it would certainly be useful if you lost the remote.

The built-in hard drive is the unit's other main technology gambit and this does work pretty well. CD ripping is straightforward - just follow the on-screen menu, which has clear and intuitive icon-based navigation. Ripping on a computer is quicker, but not by so much as to make the task on the J10HD a chore.

Tracks are stored on the hard drive, you can then make playlists and choose from the usual array of random playback options.

The hard drive can also record from the on-board FM/AM tuner - which is easy to set up - and there's also a DVR-style, three-hour pause function for live radio. The hard drive isn't huge, just 80GB, so it perhaps won't suit the digital music junkie who's thinking of copying over the musical contents of a PC's hard drive. Nor anyone who wants to use the J10HD to rip DVDs too.

The J10HD actually comes into its own when doing the simple things, in short, playing CDs and DVDs. All the speakers are rear ported to add that extra bit of oomph and the satellites have two mid-range drivers when many systems have just one. The active sub-woofer has its speaker on the side to help fill the room with bass rather than blast it out directly at the audience.

The J10HD comes well-stocked with connections: s-video, composite-video, component-video and Scart for video. There's a switch to flick the output between the Scart and the composite port. It has auxilliary and optical audio inputs, and a USB port for copying content from the hard drive to a personal music player.

An HDMI connection is also provided, but this is located on the deck unit and not the sub-woofer, which is where most of the other ports are to be found. The J10HD goes to 1080i, tops - there's no 1080p 'full HD' here.

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.