LG 22LE3300 22-inch Widescreen HD Ready LED TV with Freeview

When asked to choose a small size TV for my Mother, I did plenty of research of 22 inch TV's and eventually chose this, despite being a little wary at the complete lack of customer or expert reviews on it yet - so here's at least one.

The 22LE3300's main selling point is it's LED backlighting, which definitely gives it whiter whites and blacker blacks than standard CCFL backlit alternatives, and makes for a very slim panel - about an inch thick. Any thinner and a Scart plug would pop through the front! Picture quality is excellent, with great contrast, colour definition and brightness. Viewing angles are also very good, both horizontal and vertical. Brightness and contrast do fade slightly when viewing from an angle, but nothing close to that of cheap TN panels. This is of course an HD TV, and its 1280x720 resolution is very crisp in a 22" frame.

Sound quality can often be a weak point in small screen, slim panels, but somehow LG have managed to give this especially svelte unit some half decent aural characteristics. Volume certainly goes loud enough to annoy any adjoining neighbours. Sound quality may not give a proper HiFi anything to worry about, but it's pleasant to listen to. Voices sound natural and there's none of the tinnyness usually associated with telly's of this screen size.

Features and functionality. I was firstly struck with how attractive the menus and interface are - this is a recently released model, and I think it shows in the software design. It's very much windows 7/OSX in its appearance; easy on the eye and extremely simple and intuitive to navigate. The buttons on the TV itself are all touch sensitive, and those on the tactile feeling remote are clear and pleasant to use. The Freeview tuner is good, picking up all channels, and flicking between them reasonably spritely. The on-screen programme guide is top notch, easily as clear and comfortable to use as that of a Sky digibox, and IMO is more attractive to view.

One particular feature of interest which doesn't seem to be on many, if any, of the 22" competition is the 22LE3300's USB connectivity. This allows you to play films, music or pictures from a memory stick by plugging it straight into the TV's side mounted USB slot. This is located in a recess about 2 inches back from the edge, so the memory stick won't distract by jutting out beyond the TV's frame. The TV automatically loads a file browser of the file/folder structure on the memory stick, and playback is a breeze. As yet I've only tested it with an xvid AVI file, but it worked flawlessly. JPEG images also displayed without a hitch.

Quality wise, this panel seems well built, with the only slight complaint being with its front bezel. This is finished in high-gloss plastic - it does look great out of the box, but does also show every little fingerprint. LG have, however, included a little cloth with which to polish the telly should the smears become off-putting. I've not owned the TV long enough to make a judgement on reliability, but I do have a 4 year old LG TFT computer monitor which has had a lot of use and has yet to put a foot wrong.

This is a reasonably good TV, definitely *above average* with respect to both picture and sound quality. It has a slim body, being only slightly more than 3cm thick from front to back. Although it is categorised as a '22inch' TV, the screen diagonal is in fact only 21.5 inches which is a slight disappointment. With cathode ray tubes, you can understand why they 'exaggerate' the screen dimensions, but with LCD/LED flatscreens, there should be no excuse.

The paper setup guide is short & to the point, and really only covers screwing in the stand, and making AV connections. For any of the other functions, you'll have to look at the digital manual, which is in PDF format and can be found on the accompanying CD or downloaded from LG's website. There is no paper manual included. That being said, everything is totally simple to operate, and you probably won't need to look at the manual anyway.

Picture quality is good, with excellent contrast, colour reproduction, and a fast response. The viewing angles are good, but not outstanding. I wouldn't want to watch from any further out than 30 degrees from the perpendicular. It is slightly better viewing from above, and slightly worse when viewing from below. If you are going to mount it high up on a wall, then you should make sure your wall mount can tilt the TV forwards towards you. Finally, in my opinion almost all flatscreen TVs struggle when it comes to accurately presenting skin tones, and whereas this TV is not perfect, it is one of the better ones I have seen in this price range. I think colour accuracy and skin tones do improve when you are watching high definition sources, but at the moment I can't be sure as I don't have access to HD broadcasts or Blu-ray.

As I said, sound is also unexpectedly good, with a balanced and accurate reproduction. It certainly couldn't shake your room with the base, but I decided I liked it more with the base turned up to 75% (from its original 50% setting). If you want better / louder / beefier sound, then you should really connect it up to your amplifier. Most of these TVs however will be used in bedrooms and kitchens, so for my purposes it is perfectly adequate as it is. One of the menu options is a function called 'Clear Voice II' which seems to accentuate the audio frequencies associated with speech, sometimes useful in action scenes with lots of other ambient noise. LG claims it improves your ability to understand what people are saying, and I think it does work.

There are no physical buttons on the side of the TV. There are however touch sensitive controls on the bottom right of the screen border which allow you to control every aspect of the TV's operation. They are unobtrusive and actually quite difficult to see, and the only reason you would end up using them is if you lost the remote control.

The remote control itself is easy to hold and has a logical layout. The select button has a slightly raised profile, as do the volume & program change buttons, which makes it easy to use the remote by touch alone. The remote has buttons for immediate access to all the important functions, but almost everything can be accessed using the menus as well. The on-screen menus and program information bar are very clear and well laid out. The EPG has two versions - one showing 'Now & Next', and the other showing a full list of programs for the whole week. If you want to record a program using the EPG, it seems that the TV can send a signal to your recording box via the HDMI cable. LG calls this function 'SimpLink', but it is just an industry standard method allowing various AV boxes to talk to each other. It will probably work with other non-LG devices, but I can't be sure.

There are a good array of connections at the back, with inputs including 2 x HDMI, Composite, Component, Scart, VGA (Computer monitor), USB, and obviously an aerial antenna socket. Outputs include headphone and digital optical audio out. There is a PCMCIA slot on the side, which I presume is for future use with a viewing card. Interestingly, the Scart signal is bi-directional, which means that you could connect the TV to a VCR / DVDR or Hard Drive recorder, and then record whatever happens to be displaying on the TV screen... Potentially useful if you only have a recording device which can't tune to Freeview channels. I've tried this and it does work.

The USB socket was a pleasant surprise. It plays movies, music & photos from any USB thumb drive you plug in. With movies, I was expecting it to play MPEG2 & DivX only, but actually it seems to play almost everything I threw at it. It plays codecs including MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, Motion JPEG, H.263, & H.264. It is able to cope with file containers (types) including AVI, DivX, VOB, MOV, TS, MKV, WMV, MOV, & FLV. The video playback is sharp and smooth, and better even than some dedicated media players I have seen! It occasionally experiences AV sync problems (the sound and picture out of synchronisation), but in my experience this was rare and usually only associated with fast rewinding or forwarding through a video file. If you watch at regular playback speed, I've not found it to get out of sync. Photo viewing and music were also good, and used the same simple screen navigation system as the videos - Ie. Folders at the top, Files in the middle, & Controls at the bottom. You can set it to play MP3 music from one folder whilst displaying a slideshow of photos from another folder.

Other miscellaneous functions: The TV does have both a sleep timer and a wake-up timer. It also has a basic on-screen manual. Finally, a nice touch is that you can turn off the TV screen whilst listening to music or the radio - just press the green power saving button on the remote control.

I can't think of anything else to comment on. Overall, a high quality product at a good price.

Very pleased with the LG22Le3300 22-inch Wide-screen HD ready TV with Freeview, I purchased 19" Samsung's in the past but both failed. The sound quality is much better than the Samsung also the viewing angle. I would recommend this TV to anyone wanting a good Kitchen or bedroom set, also being an LED set very slim.