(rewritten) Great sound, moderate picture (LG CE-29Q10)

Member Name: leeag

Product:	LG CE-29Q10
Date:	02/11/01 (1256 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: clean, classy design, excellent sound, fairly good value for money

Disadvantages: poor tube geometry, hard to remove battery cover on remote

Summary: very good, one significant flaw...

I have something of a love/hate relationship with this set.

Costing £500 it compares well to a similarly spec'd sony TV I was renting from Boxclever.

The tube technology is known as the "Flatron" and is essentially LG's copy of the FD Trinitron.

(The Flatron is currently better known on the desktop since Flatron PC monitors have proven themselves to be of very high quality yet do not have the annoying damping wires of Sony monitors)

The TV comes in an unsubstantial box that provides insufficient protection or support for its 50kg weight. The transit packaging will arrive broken such is the care the average delivery company shows (as it did for me), but hopefully the TV will still be intact (although for me it was not, back it went and along came a replacement!).

With the TV you get a nice (self assembly) cabinet which, having silver coloured side panels and two smoked glass doors really set the TV off nicely.

The TV is easy to use and set up, consisting of a series of simple to use menus, although the instruction manual could be better written, being a sometimes almost comical translation of Korean to English!

2 Scart sockets are provided (1 full, 1 half) in addition to a SVHS socket and video/audio line in and headphone sockets

The remote control (made from plastic but at least with a nice brushed silver finish) is rather large. The lower half of the control is a pull down cover which hides the extended teletext functions and VCR controls (the remote will also control most LG VCRs), but you have to pull the cover completely off to insert the batteries and this is very difficult when the unit is new!

The TV itself has a very clean, minimalist design with a set of silver spaced buttons on the front alongside the power button (Menu, Ok, Vol +/-, Ch +/-) and red "on" LED. The LED thankfully dims when the
TV is on, going brighter when in standby.

The sound quality is exceptionally good. The amount of bass that it can produce, for mere internal speakers, is stunning. News 24's drum beats sound fantastic as do Movie and Music programmes. A 5 band graphic equaliser is provided and 4 presets are already programmed (Speech, Movie, Music, Flat). The TV also has the ubiquitous spatial sound feature (known as DASS by LG) which is intended to produce a wider sound stage. In use, DASS is very effective and markedly increases the output of bass frequencies. LG has done an excellent design job on the TVs sound system, although there is no external sound output apart from the headphone socket.

A "digital eye" function auto adjusts contrast/colour to suit room lighting levels. This would work well if it adjusted the colour sensibily, but sadly it does not leading to a saturated colour display. Thankfully you can turn this option off!

Overall the picture quality is pretty good, but obviously not as good as an FD Trinitron. However, unless you compare them side by side (like you can at my local Comet store!) you're unlikely to be able to fault it much.

Sadly I've found one flaw which means that I can't give 5/5 - poor tube geometry - horizontal lines at the top and bottom of the screen are higher at the left/right than in the middle. Leading to a curved effect that really shows up when watching anything transmitted in wide screen.

I've complained to LG and they had the set in for repair, but could not put it right, they replaced it but the replacement was even worse (so they gave me back my existing set!). I've had a look at other examples in Comet and they do the same. It seems as though LG has a quality problem with it's flatron tubes. I'm still in discussions with LG over this!

So, unless you're really really fussy about tube geometery (like I am!) this is a great set
and well worth the money. The sound quality of the TV is impressive but the picture quality a little less so.

NB. This model has now been discontinued. Current replacement 29 inch models are CE-29Q46ET and RE-29FA33PX.

Summary: