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.
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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.
The 120-gigabyte (GB) hard-disk drive stores about 12 1/2 hours of HDTV content, or about 120 hours of regular TV. That’s decent capacity, but eventually it will fill up. Composite- and S-video outputs let you transfer standard video to a DVD recorder. There are also two FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE 1394 or i.Link) ports so you can dump HDTV programs to a D-VHS recorder for archiving, but we weren’t able to get this feature to work (see “tech notes”).
Of course, the two most critical inputs are for antenna and cable — you’ll need a suitable antenna for the former and a hard-wired cable feed for the latter. The most important outputs are the high-def video outputs to your TV or monitor, and there’s also an optical digital audio output that feeds the Dolby Digital signal carried on HDTV broadcasts to your A/V receiver for decoding (see “key features”).
McDonald’s has dropped its super-sized menu, but apparently word didn’t reach LG’s engineers. The recorder’s king-size remote control almost invites you to use two hands to operate it. On the plus side, the button layout is very spacious and easy to use. But the controls lack any backlighting, and none of them glow in the dark.
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PLUS
Excellent off-air reception of HDTV and standard TV. Excellent HDTV and standard-def recording. TV Guide On-Screen is easy to use. MINUS Records only 12 1/2 hours of high-def programming. You lose part of a buffered program if you pause twice. FireWire ports not very useful. |
Setting up the LG recorder was entirely painless. I installed a Terk TV32 digital TV antenna outside my house and connected it to the recorder’s antenna input. Then I ran cables from the LG’s component-video outputs to my Princeton HDTV monitor and its optical digital audio output to my receiver. Who knew that the future would be so simple? System setup was also pretty easy. I answered the TV Guide On-Screen menu questions, then EzScan found the broadcast channels in my area, and I was watching them a few minutes later. (If your cable provider also licenses TV Guide On-Screen, you could control your cable box through the LST-3410A by connecting them via the G-Link output using the supplied cable.)
The recorder displays digital TV signal strength, and that helped me orient the antenna to pull in the strongest signals. Overall, the reception quality of the LG’s tuner was very good. Of course, unlike regular TV, digital TV doesn’t vary in picture quality with signal strength — you either get a good picture or no usable picture at all.
Overnight, the recorder collected program information for the onscreen guide and stored it for my subsequent viewing. This free, ad-supported service makes it easy to navigate a wealth of schedule and program information for both over-the-air and cable channels. And it’s a snap to record a program — simply point to a title and click. Conveniently, while you’re using the guide, whatever’s on the current channel is shown in an inset box.
With just a little practice, the recorder’s many features are easy to use: still picture, frame-advance, jump to the start of a program, time-shifting, thumbnail browsing, bookmarking, and the kind of high-speed (300x) fast-forward and reverse scan that only a hard disk can provide. I also liked the ability to edit stored programs. For example, I could mark and save up to ten clips, each up to 10 seconds long, and discard the rest of the program.
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| LG's tuner/recorder can give you almost as much control over when and how you watch HDTV broadcasts of Law & Order: SVU as standard-def hard-disk recorders do for regular broadcasts. |
In general, the recorder’s operating software is both helpful and civil. For example, if you try to change channels while making a recording, a pop-up window helpfully suggests that you stop the recording and try again. Pausing live TV is the real crowd-pleaser, but be warned: if you pause a program and then start watching it again, then pause a second time while still watching the cached portion, the part you already watched is lost.
After I set up the box, it was time to savor the visuals. I watched some March Madness hoops being broadcast in 1080i (interlaced) format on CBS, and I must say that I haven’t found a better reason to buy into the high-def scene. The smoothness of the action, the vibrancy of the colors, and the sharp resolution were all outstanding. The picture quality of the slo-mo ball handling was almost professional.
Similarly, movies broadcast in high-def looked terrific, noticeably better than DVD quality. I wondered if the limiting factor on the quality of the picture I was seeing was the broadcast or my playback equipment. It really was that good. Even plebian standard-definition (480i) broadcasts looked good. It was easy to see why HDTV broadcasting hooks viewers so persuasively — at least when it’s well done.
Of course, the proof of any recorder lies in its storage quality. I wasn’t surprised to see that the LST-3410A’s HDTV recording quality was excellent — stored programs looked as good as their “live” versions. In its Best mode, the recorder is essentially an MPEG-2 “bit bucket,” dumping the digital bits received from the broadcast to the hard drive with no processing or further compression. In playback, the signal out to my monitor was superb. The downside, of course, is that the drive can hold only 12 1/2 hours of HDTV programming.
The recorder can also encode standard-def video on the fly so you can record analog sources. In fact, while you must use the Best mode to record digital broadcasts, analog broadcasts (or signals coming in though the analog A/V inputs) can be recorded at four quality levels: Best, High, Medium, or Basic. When I was recording from a high-quality analog source, the Best level looked terrific, with near-DVD quality. The High level was almost as good, but encoding artifacts began to show up. At the Medium and Basic levels, quality was obviously degraded, with smearing and faded colors. The picture had a grainy quality to it, and “blocking” artifacts were often visible, making the recording inferior to a high-quality VHS recording. One final point: unlike some hard-disk recorders, this one was fairly quiet mechanically.
Every few years, technology changes the way we look at and use things. We saw it when CD came along. DVD-Video did it, too, as did HDTV. Now the advent of high-definition hard-disk recorders like LG’s LST-3410A is changing the landscape again. They merge the best of both worlds — the visual fidelity of HDTV broadcasting with the convenience of hard-disk recording. Better than live HDTV, better than tape-based storage, a high-def hard-disk recorder is truly a marriage made in A/V heaven. After gazing at pristine HDTV programs and playing with the deck’s marvelous features, you’ll want to smile.
Tech Notes
Our lab tests were confined to examining the LST-3410A’s analog NTSC video-recording capabilities. Like most DVD recorders, it has four recording modes that set the upper limit for the bit rate of the encoded video. The two top modes, Best and High, were adequate for almost all non-copy-protected material you might want to dub, including signals from digital (DV) and analog camcorders. Resolution was at the DVD limit (540 lines), and encoding artifacts were minimal at the Best setting.
Unlike a typical DVD recorder, the LG deck maintained the same resolution even in the Medium and Basic modes, but there were an increasing number of visible artifacts, especially when the image was moving.
Record/playback audio performance was adequate if not stellar (noise levels were –64 dB, about 12 dB short of CD quality). The recorder is designed to accept compressed audio/video data via FireWire (IEEE 1394, i.Link) only from certain types of components, which didn’t include any of the MiniDV camcorders we had on hand. We tried a D-VHS recorder, but although the LG initially recognized it, after we tried to abort an unsuccessful dub to tape from the hard drive, the LG recorder would no longer recognize the D-VHS machine as a source.
— David Ranada