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One of the things that surprised us most about this year’s CES was the emphasis placed on design. For many, many years TVs were just huge black boxes that sat in the corner of the room. But these days, people want a talking point, and something that has its own style.
LG hasn’t always been at the forefront of good design, but this year it seems to have taken a leaf out of another well-known Korean company and gone mad with the design budget. It also seems to have understood the importance of an attractive off switch, with a bunch of remarkable power buttons.
Its new range of TVs and home cinema hardware is visually exciting, and the company has also been hard at work in the R&D labs coming up with new ideas to make our lives a little better. The company is adding wireless capabilities to some of its new models and they have LED backlights and specialist tuned audio systems on the way too. -Ian Morris
The red-eye
The red-eye off switch seems to be a staple of the new LG range. Not just in TVs, but in its home cinema equipment too. Of course, it might turn out to be quite annoying to use, but it sure looks good at trade shows.
DVD player/home cinema
Here’s the LG LHT899, a DVD player with upscaling to 1080p, touchscreen controls and a ‘vacuum-loading DVD slot’, which sounds much more exciting that we suspect it is in reality. This system is also tuned by audio expert Mark Levinson, something LG is very proud of.
Wireless Media Center
Wireless is still threatening to be a big deal in home cinema, and LG has TVs with both built-in wireless capabilities and streaming media centres. We have no idea when these will actually become available. Here’s the media centre.
LED backlight
Other companies have LED backlights coming soon, and Samsung already has one on the market. This technology is a good way to improve the contrast ratio of LCD TVs and it appears LG is keen to get in on the action too.
