Review If you’re looking for a new telly, but are working to a tight budget, you’ve probably noticed that many of LG’s recent sets seem to offer impressive value for money.

LG's 42LH3000: surprisingly few compromises

Take this 42LH3000 as an example. It has a list price of around £550, but you can pick it up online for as little as £470. The question is, what sort of compromises has LG had to make to deliver this set at such a low price?

Although the 42LH3000 might have a rock-bottom asking price, this doesn’t show through on its design and styling. Finished in glossy piano black, LG has added some pleasing gentle curves to the front bezel and a slick chrome bar across the bottom of the TV to help it stand out from the crowd.

That said, at around 90mm deep, it’s far from the slimmest set around. While this isn’t really all that noticeable when it’s sitting on the supplied stand, the 42LH3000 may look a tad chunky if you choose to mount it on a wall.

Plenty of ports, despite the low price

Around the back, the cost cutting is evident. Most of today’s LCDs have at least four HDMI ports, but the 3000 makes do with three. You do get two RGB Scart sockets, component-video connectors, a VGA port and a composite-video socket.

Unfortunately, the rear-mounted USB port turns out to be for service use only, so you don’t get the media playback features found on LG’s slightly higher end 42LH4000.

Control freak: don't worry if you lose the remote

As with most of today’s TVs, the initial set up is a pretty painless process. The various menus are nicely presented with slick graphical icons, and tuning in the Freeview and analogue channels takes mere minutes.

However, the 3000 only has a standard hybrid tuner, so you’ll need to buy a separate set-top box if you want to receive Freeview HD channels. At least the Freeview electronic programme guide (EPG) is cleanly laid out and quick to navigate around. Although channel changes aren’t exactly lightning fast, they're but not sufficiently slow to become a problem, either.

In fact, the only real issue we had with the Freeview side of things is that the Info and Guide buttons have been plonked at the bottom of the remote and so are a bit awkward to reach when you’re channel surfing.

Of course, none of this would matter if the picture quality wasn’t much cop, but the 42LH3000 turns out to be no slouch in this department. Naturally, given the panel’s 1080p full HD native resolution it’s most impressive when dealing with HD sources.

Extra connectors

No Country for Old Men on Blu-ray looked impressively crisp and sharp, and although black levels aren’t the best I’ve seen, they’re nowhere near as washed out as they are on many lesser budget sets.

You'll need to tweak it to get the best picture

The default picture presets are over egged, though, so you’ll need to tweak them a bit. However, this is easy as the 3000 has built in test pictures to help you calibrate stuff like contrast, brightness and sharpness. Once you’ve toned down the preset, you’ll find the set delivers surprisingly natural colours and realistic flesh tones for the price.

The UI is straightforward and easy to navigate

Despite the lack of 100Hz processing, I was also pleasantly surprised to find that it suffers surprisingly little from motion blur.

However, like many budget modes, the 3000’s biggest weaknesses can be seen when it’s dealing with less pristine signals. For example, although the set’s XD picture engine tries its best when working on standard-definition content, it doesn’t sharpen and smooth out pictures in as slick a fashion as even mid-range models from the likes of Panasonic and Sony. As a result, Freeview channels can sometimes look a little bit soft and smeary.

Why are the most useful keys plonked at the bottom, LG?

On the plus side, the 3000’s speakers are surprisingly punchy. They’re capable of kicking out a loud racket and the bass response is deeper than that of most flat-panel sets I’ve heard recently. The Clear Voice II feature, which boosts vocal frequencies to make dialogue sound a bit louder, also worked extremely well and is handy when you’re watching TV at night with the sound turned down low because others in the house are asleep.

Thankfully, when it comes to power the 3000 avoids being the Hummer of the TV world. In standby mode the set draws just 0.8W and when running it sucked about 124W with the standard picture preset selected. This dropped to around 43W when running the Eco mode at its highest setting, although this does dim the picture considerably.

Verdict

The 42LH3000 is far from perfect. It takes a bit of tweaking to get the best pictures, it could do with an additional HDMI port, and its performance with standard definition signals is merely average. However, for the money, it punches above its weight, especially as HD content looks so good, the design is so attractive and the sound quality so beefy. ®

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