LG 42LG70

Summary: This was my first LCD 1080p TV. Got it on sale through a local vendor. My wife and I have been very impressed with the picture quality while watching with a DVD player hooked up with HDMI. When we upgraded to Blu-ray, the wow factor just got bigger. We have owned this set now for two years and still enjoy it as we did when we first bought it.

Summary: We have had this set for 2 months and are quite pleased. We've hooked up our DVD player, DirecTV box and Roku box to its HDMI ports and our Wii to a composite port. Our DVD player is a standard JVC machine (NOT Blu-ray) with an HDMI output port; the pictures are gorgeous (now we wonder what Blu-ray will look like on it). Roku HD streams look good as well (a credit also to our ISP).

The included remote handles our JVC and our old Sanyo VCR (forgot about that; we hardly use it now), but I could not code our new DirecTV HD-capable box into it. On the other hand, the DirecTV remote had the code for the LG as well as the DVD player and VCR. We use the standard DirecTV package; no HD yet (maybe next year!). The pictures still look great, with beautiful eye-popping colors and very good blacks for an LCD. Of course, with standard-def, the farther you are from the set the better your view. BTW, you might want to throw out those viewing-distance guides. I sit 13 feet from this 42" set and the viewing experience is perfect; in fact, for the first 3 weeks I was almost overwhelmed by the size of the set (actually, my wife made me measure it to make sure we hadn't been given a 47-incher by mistake; we hadn't).

The built-in sound is good, with an auto-leveler for commercials so you don't get blown away. We still prefer ours hooked up to a surround-sound system. Even a cheapie (think Wal-mart) will work, and there's just no way two well-designed front speakers will replicate 5 (or 7) speakers and a subwoofer. We also live next to the busiest 4-lane highway in our town, with our front door open through most of the summer, so we want lots of volume to drown out the semis. When we use the set's speakers, we find that we have to pump up the volume, sometimes to 70%.

We bought our TV at a local store that price-matched an online store; it was a deal at $1300 then, and if you can really find it at $1000-1200, SNAP IT UP. You will NOT be disappointed. Sets with comparable viewing quality are still well above that.