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The first thing you’ll say when you see the LG 47LB2RF is “cripes, that’s a bit Darth Vader”. The reason you’ll say this is because it’s finished in exactly the same glossy black finish as Luke’s dad was, post volcano incident. Which is nice, because it’s a cool colour. And when your friends come over to see your new TV they won’t be able to say anything bad about it for fear of it using the power of ‘the force’ to strangle them.
The set is mounted on a stylish stand that claims it is a “convenient swivel system”. It’s right, too — it is very convenient and it will certainly help if you need to change the angle slightly and you don’t have ‘the force’ available to help you move things.
Unlike Darth, this machine has the luxury of two HDMI inputs — rumour has it Darth only had the one. It also has two Scart inputs, component in, PC in via D-Sub and two lots of composite and S-Video in — one lot at the back, one lot at the side. So, connectivity is very good indeed.
The single most exciting thing about this television is its support of what has become known as ‘Full HD’ — if you are lucky enough to have either an HD DVD or Blu-ray player that supports 1080p, this is almost certainly going to interest you.
There seem to be plenty of other toys, too. There’s the XD system that LG claims will boost the picture quality of non-HD sources — no doubt by using the force. It also features Picture in Picture, which is great if you absolutely must watch two things at once. The other fantastic thing about PiP is that if you can get something in the PiP window that also supports PiP then you can watch three things at once, albeit with the last one being the size of a box of matches.
You can get your hands on an LG 47LB2RF for about £2,200, which for such a large and well-specified TV isn’t bad. The only disappointment is the lack of a built-in Freeview receiver. Come on LG, this is the digital age and LCD and plasma screens really don’t do justice to analogue. Sort it out! -IM
