En liten recension jag skrivit efter att ha haft 42PC1RR i 9 månader.
Ursäkta att på engelska och kanske med en del språkfel.
Jag skulle kunna skriva mer, som att time shift hakat upp sig,
eller att den ett par gånger har slängt bort alla mina sparade
inspelningar, men har tänkt skriva en recension så länge utan
att få det gjort att jag nu bara fattade tangentbordet och
skrev ned de första sakerna jag kom på.
kent
Review of LG 42PC1RR
I have had a LG 42PC1RR for about nine months now. It is my first
plasma and the reason I picked this model was mainly for the
integrated PVR. I don't want lots of cables and different remote
controls, I want a solution with it all integrated.
The hardware feels robust, and while I find the remote ugly, it has a
robust touch to it. I expected a little better picture, looks worse
than on my old tube TV, but others say a plasma can't do better than
this from analog input.
The biggest positive surprise was the time shift function. You can not
only pause live TV, but it will always record the last hour displayed,
and that means that if having the TV on in the background you can
always go back if you missed something. I use it a lot and would
not buy another set without it.
The TV has two analog tuners, a limited number of analog to digital
converters and a hard drive. This of course limit what you can do as
some hardware is shared between different functions. It is not easy to
understand what these hardware limits mean, but one thing is very
clear. The software put a lot more restrictions on what you can do
than the hardware does.
The real problem with this TV is the software. You hit lots of
limitations that clearly is not hardware related. The integration of
the live, time shift and recorded material is very annoying in effect
making them less integrated than if you had separate boxes and cables
in between.
Lets take some examples. This TV has "picture in picture", but while
watching a recording you can't in any way take a sneak peak of live
TV. You just get a dialog saying "to do this you have to exit the
PVR". You can watch recorded material while a new recording is in
progress, but you can't watch part of what you are recording. If you
are watching something in time shift and a scheduled recording is
starting, there is no way to save the content in the time shift for
later recording. It just throws away what is in the time shift.
Here is also an example why this integration is kind of worse than
having separate PVR. If you then exit the PVR playback to watch what
is on live TV, and you want to continue watch PVR playback, there is
no "resume". It has forgotten where you left of, you have to manually
go back and forward until you find the spot where you left.
There is also a major problem with the PVR integration. If you watch
live TV and a scheduled recording starts, the live TV switches
automatically to the channel you are to record. Why would I be
interested in what I'm recording while watching live TV? This might
sound like a small thing, but imagine you are to watch CSI live and
the commercials before it starts are running, you go to the kitchen
and comes back. You see the commercials still running, you think, but
the set has switched channel behind your back and you don't realize
until too late you are watching the wrong channel and you might have
missed the start of the CSI episode.
If you "zap" channels it also think you are especially interested in
what you are recording, and when you pass the channel you currently
record it goes into "picture in picture" mode with the channel you
record in the small window. To disable it you have to use one of
the hidden buttons on your remote. This might also sound like a
small thing but quickly gets very annoying.
Talking about the remote, this TV is not easy to operate. If you zap a
lot this is just not the TV for you. It is slow, very slow, when
switching channels, or even switching inputs. And no type-ahead, so
if you realize you selected the wrong channel or input select, you
have to wait a few seconds before the set reacts on your new
selection. And for input selects there is no sub menu, but a button
that switch between all of them, RGB1, RGB2, and so on, so to get into
the one you want you have to hit the button, wait, hit the button
again, wait....
Rewinding or moving forward watching recorded material or time shift
is also annoying. There is type-ahead in this case but it is not
working. If pushing the up-button multiple times, to get small advance,
you get into a loop of the last 2 seconds, and trying to go back with
the down-button to just go back a few seconds very rarely work at all.
I can go on and on, the teletext part doesn't work well. It seem to
take a lot longer to find the page I want than my old tube TV. And if
I enter teletext, select page number 601, go back watch live while
waiting, enter teletext again, it thinks I canceled the request and
has gone back to the default page 100.
So I type 601 again and this time wait. I get there, but the NEXT
button takes me to page 630 or something. Somehow it has failed to get
page 602. I type BACK button, and it doesn't mean "PREVIOUS", but it
means just BACK taking me to page 620 that happen to have been loaded
while I did operate. So I have to type 602 to get to the page after
601, very annoying.
And the PVR menus are a joke. I have 20-30 hours of recording time,
but only 8 slots for recording! So forget about using the PVR to do
recordings while away for more than a few days. But as there is no
backup battery a small power spike will erase all your scheduled
recordings anyway, so maybe this is deliberately.
The user interface for scheduling new recordings is very clumsy. You
specify time and duration. Means I have to do lots of head
calculations how long the shows are, as at least in Sweden the TV
guides specify start and end time. And as the input of new recordings
is not integrated into the scheduled list page, when the set complains
about overlap of recordings, you have to push several buttons on the
remote, put down the times on paper, go back and redo the input of the
new recoding and hope you got it all right.
The lack of type-ahead gets even more annoying when you go to the list
of recorded material. When you enter the page, the PVR starts
rendering a miniature of the first frame of the latest recording,
taking a few seconds, and while waiting you can't move the cursor, you
have to wait until it is done.
The screen format auto detection kind of reveals that the parts, TV,
PVR and maybe even the time shift, is actually separate units from the
software perspective, with no real integration. You will find yourself
using the hidden button to select format (letter box, different wide
formats) a lot, as in different "modes" the auto detection software
seems to be very different. There is not even the same list of format
options when selecting manually if in different modes, I have still
not really found the logic in what formats I can select when.
LG, can I get a software update to this nice hardware? Please?