You might not be familiar with the audio/video products of LG Electronics or the company’s “Life’s Good” slogan. But the LG brand, a powerhouse in Korea and elsewhere, is making its entrance to the U.S. in a serious way. Some companies put a toe in the water with modest offerings — LG has unabashedly jumped in with high-end gear (the company’s mass-market gear is sold here under the Zenith brand). Perhaps no LG product is as exciting as the LST-3410A, combining an HDTV tuner and hard-disk recorder (HDR). That’s right. You can tune in to HDTV (an off-air broadcast or unscrambled digital cable), and thanks to its hard drive, you can record high-def, too. The LST-3410A also houses an analog NTSC tuner so you can record regular TV as well.

At first glance, you might mistake the recorder for a DVD player, but there’s no disc slot. The sleek front panel has only a sprinkling of buttons, and the display is visible only when the unit is powered up. The buttons open the door to the future of TV viewing, letting you watch HDTV with all the benefits of hard-disk buffering and storage.

Eat your hearts out, VCR users: if you’re watching Law & Order: SVU in high-def and the phone rings, with the LST-3410A you can pause the show and later pick up the broadcast where you left off even while the rest of the show is still being recorded. While playing back a recording from the hard drive, you can call up a progress bar to show your place in the program and drag the cursor to any place along the bar and skip to that playback point. Finally, a Smart Skip feature analyzes video scenes and playback cues to let you skip to the previous or next scene — or past commercials.