What Hi Fi Sound and Vision
19 JUL 2007
LG DR275
Yes, take another look at that price tag: here’s a DVD recorder that’ll only set you back £70. We’re used to home cinema prices dropping like Didier Drogba in the penalty area, but even we did a slight double take when we saw how little the LG costs.
The DR275, as you might expect at that sort of money, doesn’t boast hard-disk recording; it records to DVD-R/-RW or DVD+R+RW, and will also play CDs and CD-Rs encoded with MP3 files, as well as DVDs encoded with DivX video.
Of course, at this price we don’t expect a comprehensive specification, and so it proves. The LG’s tuner is analogue only, so you’ll be able to view and record a maximum of five channels.
Of course, that doesn’t exactly bode well for a future that involves a highly publicised analogue switch-off, which will eventually phase out analogue TV broadcasts in the UK. (Check out when your area will become an analogue-free zone, then decide whether you think it’s worth it.)
Build quality, by LG’s standards, is mediocre, though the buttons are reasonably responsive to commands. The menus aren’t in the same league as the slick interfaces boasted by the best rivals, and are at times quite confusing and irritating to use.
Poor tuner means poor recordings
In performance terms, the main problem with the DR275 is its tuner: off-air pictures are grainy and lacking solidity, while the colour balance is washed out and bland. This amount of picture noise, of course, finds its way onto recordings, so if you want an archive of pristine programmes, preserved for ever more, then you’ll want to purchase a better recorder than this.
DVD playback is better, though still nowhere near the performance offered by rivals costing just a little more. The picture is more solid and detailed than off-air broadcasts, however, and motion is handled reasonably smoothly.
Still, the LG suffers from a bland and uninvolving presentation: subtle details of shade and shadow are all but ignored, dark textures are uniform and undifferentiated, while colours never achieve the richness and naturalism of rivals.
Yes, credit to LG for producing a DVD recorder for so little, but its poor performance lets it down.