Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 42
 Annoying device don't bother buying it. August 29, 2010
Glenn
My first experience with LG, bought on recommendation of salesman wish I'd read reviews first.
Easy to set up but thereafter things went rapidly down hill.
The manual is a complete joke and must relate to a totally different machine. I've read other peoples comments suggesting it was written by an idiot, I know what they've been through, absolutely nothing works in the way suggested, so you are completely in the dark and have to find out how to operate it by trial and error.
Then there is the subtitle problem, (it will drive you mad) can't turn it off, although you can get rid of it if you are watching a recording.
My machine developed problems after a few weeks. The first was that it would record a programme as requested, however it would not play it back, unless you were prepared to watch it in the preview panel. Trying to watch it on full screen lead to it freezing the screen after a few seconds and then jamming up. The only solution was to turn it off and start again.
The device was returned to the shop and repaired under warranty! still didn't cure the problem.
After the repair was carried out it then developed a mind of it's own whereby it would record a part of a programme, missing out 20 minutes at the beginning or the end, or not bothering at all or as previously described. Eventually I took it back to the supplier and opted for a replacement. (I opted for a Sony 505 - which also turned out to be a disaster! Again should have read the reviews).
In short it drove me round the bend and consequently wouldn't recommend it.
 Let down by user guide August 17, 2010
John Mo
This is a good DVD/HDD player and recorder let down by a poor user guide.
The user guide did not tell me that when doing inital set up via virgin V Box that I first needed to set up via an aerial.
 Could - should - have been so much better. August 10, 2010
Philip Allcock
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The good: Stylish looks, excellent features, good picture quality, when it works it's marvellous.
The bad: User interface was designed by a complete idiot, as was the manual; recording occasionally erratic; power-up takes an eternity; presentation of recorded shows is clumsy with not enough name characters visible and no ability to turn off the video preview function. And the subtitle issue!
Let's start with the user interface and manual. DVD drawer is on the left, so the button just above it must be eject? No, that's power - the eject button is the one on the FAR right of the machine, as far from the DVD drawer as you can possibly get. Duh! Worse, if you do press the power button by mistake, you then have to wait what feels like an absolute eternity for it to do a full hard disk check before it will let you put your DVD in. Ancient DVD player, power-up to eject, 2 seconds. This machine, I don't know, 1 minute? Longer? Very annoying.
Let's say you want to find out how to manually record something. So you go to the Recording section of the manual? Nope, it's not there, it's (only) under Quick Start. You want to know what combinations of playing and recording will work together? Forget it, why would anyone want to know that! The manual is just dire.
You go to the electronic programme guide and change the date. The programmes duly change, but it still shows the same date ie. today's. Not helpful. And why is the EPG so blocky? I've got a 42" screen capable of 1980 resolution and yet I can only view like 10 lines of text at once? And to cancel a recording you have to tell it to do a recording - and that only works if you can remember what mode (single/series) you originally told it to work in! Is there any function to warn you if you order overlapping recordings? Not that I can see. Whyever not?
And the EPG-recording doesn't always work. It seems least reliable if recording series - usually it still records, but does so without changing channel. Once it recorded 12 hours for no apparent reason. Most of the time it works, but that only makes it more annoying when just occasionally (so far) it doesn't. And one day it suddenly decided to switch to worst-quality recording mode. Why? Goodness knows, I hadn't touched the mode since I first bought it, but bang, suddenly I had a couple of lousy quality recordings, fortunately of something that didn't terribly matter. Worrying.
Why does it interrupt DVD playback when you start a timer-HDD recording? No reason I can see, as you can go straight back to watching the DVD. Just stupid interface design functionality. Why can't you put chapters in a HDD recording? Why can't recordings be shown in list mode as well as stupid-minivideo icons which only show 6 to a page? Why is the timeshifting function so insanely opaque and counter-intuitive that I still feel like I'm guessing any time I try and use it? Why is the TV sound so often out of sync with the video? (If I use the surround sound driven from the HDD recorder, then it's perfectly in sync with the picture, but the sound through the TV speakers isn't.) DVD dubbing - if a recording is not going to fit on a disk in the selected format WOULDN'T IT BE NICE TO WARN THE USER of this? Nah, let them do it and waste the disk. Why can't it do high speed dub of edited programmes? Or if it can't, why can't you rationalise the edited version into a contiguous file on the HDD so you can then do a high speed dub? Not rocket science, surely? Just a total lack of thought for useability at every stage.
I want to like this machine. When it works, it's a delightful mass of functionality in an elegant package for a very decent price. But its user interface is just insanely bad (my LG television is fine, though) and there are just enough glitches in its functionality to worry me. On the other hand, it'll be effectively obsolete in a couple of years when HD becomes the norm so I just have to hope it lasts that long!
Do not buy August 5, 2010
Ani-Mate
I bought this machine after reading various techie reviews saying that it was good basic model and value for money. Unfortunately, as someone else has mentioned, its faults keep themselves hidden until you've had it a few weeks. Mine decided to randomly record sub-titles (it always defaults to sub-titles when you attempt to watch TV through it and you have to turn them off), then it felt that it knew better than I did what I wanted to record, then it came to the conclusion that I was definitely deaf all the time not just some of the time so recorded subtitles for me on every programme. Finally it decided (presumably as it thinks I'm deaf) to start creating a terrible humming noise that gets progressively louder to the point that I can hear it when I'm upstairs - the only way to stop it is to turn the thing off for a while and let it calm down. It has been 'fixed' so many times that I am now insisting on a refund. Having looked on here and other user review sites I see that mine is not a 'Friday afternoon' machine and that this is actually occuring with a significant number of these machines - although I seem to have been lucky in getting one that has the entire repetoire of faults!
Hoping for better at the 2nd attempt June 18, 2010
S. Grant
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this DVD player on the basis of two things: firstly, it looked very smart, and secondly, my TV is an LG and has always worked perfectly and was very straightforward to set up and use.
This DVD player does look smart, but unfortunately it doesnt always work perfectly and isn't particularly straightforward to use. I had a catalogue of problems with mine, which led to me returning it to Amazon, and reading other reviews it seems that I'm not the only one to have problems with this particular model. It would freeze during playback, stop recording halfway through programmes I had set, and on one occasion I tried to play something back whilst it was still recording, and it froze and then delete the entire programme (which only had about 2 minutes left to run).
The replacement is - so far - a vast improvement, and I haven't suffered any of the same problems as yet. However, there's no getting away from the difficulties with operating the recorder. The remote control is fiddly and it's difficult to work out what all of the buttons do, whilst the only comprehensible part of the recording menu is "simple recording" - there are another three options which don't make any sense, and the instruction manual doesn't shed any light. The general set up menus can be quite difficult to interpret, although I am gradually getting the hang of them.
As long as it works, this isn't a bad DVD recorder for the price, although it does take some getting used to. But if I was making my purchase again I would probably spend a bit more for something easier to use and better quality.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 42
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