LG 26LC2R - 26" Widescreen HD Ready LCD TV

If you're in the market for an affordable, but great quality LCD HDTV, then you should definitely consider this set from LG. For an LCD of this size, you will not be able to find superior quality product for the same price as this LG.

For £[...] (at the time of this review), you get an outstanding deal with this LCD. When viewing an SDTV signal such as you get from Freeview, this LCD manages to upscale the signal to 720p HDTV at a very reasonable quality. You obviously get some loss of quality in the picture due to the upscaling, but this is no worse than any other HDTV I have seen before. LG provide a technology called XD image processing, which attempts to improve an SDTV signal by removing noise from the image, and dynamically altering the brightness and contrast of the image it's displaying. For the most part the XD image processing improves the quality of SD images, but it can be turned off should you prefer the picture without it.

This LCD is also equally capable when displaying HDTV pictures. It displays HDTV signals very well, with very few artifacting errors that often tend to plague LCD HDTVs in this price range. The colour rendering is generally excellent, but there are occasional problems with images that contain very black areas, where the rendering of the black levels are not accurate. This is common with nearly all current-generation LCD displays however, and is not very noticeable.

I've been using this display with an Xbox 360 connected via a VGA cable to the VGA/RGB port on the back of the display. The native resolution of the 26LC2R is 1366x768 pixels, so you need to set the resolution of the Xbox 360 to 1360x768 for as close a match as possible. You can manually set the resolution the LCD displays HDTV signals at, which allows you to display it at the slightly lower resolution of 1360x768, which provides the best match for the Xbox 360.

If you're a big gamer on the Xbox 360, then this LCD is ideal. When I was looking at purchasing this display, I had been considering a 26"/27" Samsung LCD HDTV. However after seeing displays from both manufacturers up close, the LG seemed to be a far superior display when it comes to image quality.

The LG 26LC2R also has a wider variety of connection options, which means it should be relatively "future proof", when it comes to connecting newer devices. For your money you will get: VGA socket and stereo jack for HDTV from a PC/360, an HDMI socket which is useful for HDCP enabled devices (Bluray/HD-DVD players, PlayStation3, etc), 2 SCART sockets, a set of HD component sockets, a set of RCA/s-video sockets, as well as set of RCA sockets on the left side of the display. The line up of connection is options is outstanding for this price level.

The quality of the built in speakers is also very impressive. I was expecting the speakers to sound very tinny, and to lack any bass, as is the case with most buitl in speakers. Thankfully this is not the case with this LG LCD. There were several options for different equaliser settings for audio output, which provide a very reasonable quality of sound. There is also a seperate set of left + right RCA connectors on the back of the display, for connecting the display to your own amplifier or stereo. You also have the option of disabling the built in speakers, and just using the external connectors, which is quite handy for the audiophiles out there. One thing to note is the lack of a headphone jack, but this can be remedied by making use of the auxilary speaker output and converting it to a suitable connector for your headphones.

To sum up, this display is outstanding value for money. If you want to get yourself on the HDTV bandwagon, this display is ideal. When compared to sets of a similar size, you cannot beat the quality and features offered up by LG with this display. As a big gamer, I would recommend this to anyone looking for a cheap HDTV. You won't be disappointed!

Bought this recently as a replacement for a 21" CRT so we were pretty impressed with the picture. Not a single pixel fault either. Hooked up to a Topfield PVR and cheap DVD player, the picture is excellent as is the sound. With a SCART connection it's good the way Freeview channels adjust automatically for widescreen, 4:3 etc (no fat people waddling around as when a 4:3 picture is spread over the 16:9 screen). Our only problem was a bit of 'flesh creep' on slow panning, eg a close up of a face where they nod or shake their head slowly. It was disconcerting to see the tip of Maggie Gyllenhaal's nose get left behind when she shook her head in Secretary. Good SCARTs helped as did turning off the LG's 'XD' image preprocessing. What little has remained of this flesh creep we've tracked down to Freeview's compression and narrow bandwidth. You see it even when playing something (recorded earlier) at quarter speed, so it's definitely not the TV's fault - it doesn't do it with DVDs or analogue TV, only Freeview. So we're delighted to have joined the flat widescreen world. Putting a power meter on it, the LG uses around 120W whilst on (less than the manual says; cost around 1p/hr) and 16W in standby (much more than the 2W we were told; cost around GBP12pa).

This is a great 26" TV, with good picture, good sound, HD-ready and a very reasonable price tag. Installation is simple and the auto-tune work fine. A small criticism is that if you want to change the default picture and sound setings, for example to adjust the brilliance or contrast or the sound profile, it takes a bit of digging to discover where you should look; there's a multi-language manual the size of a phone directory, but it skims over that.

Note that it doesn't have a digital tuner, but as yet we are still all analogue in our region, so that is a positive.

We're very pleased with its performance and would recommend it to anyone.