11 out of 11 people found this review helpful.
Lots of problems, but little competition in its niche.
Date of Review: Oct 14, 2007
The Bottom Line: If you don't need the exact features of this product, look for something else. Otherwise, wait for a firmware update or wait for better products in this niche.
I bought this unit about the 4th of July. It is now mid-October. This was my first tuner capable of digital reception. It's now ten days past its 90-day labor warranty.
Here in Northern Colorado, there aren't many off-air digital stations to choose from. So, it was quite noticeable when, about six weeks ago, we suddenly stopped receiving Channel 11 (KDEV 33 (11), RTN, Denver/Cheyenne). Paradoxically, the LG787T's tuner reports "No Signal", while showing a very strong signal on the signal bar. [We assumed that this station was having technical difficulty.]
I have just obtained a new tuner capable of digital reception. Channel 11 works fine. So, the LG787T may have a firmware defect, or Channel 11 is out-of-spec, or both. Tech support tells me there isn't a firmware upgrade available. But he did invite me to send the unit back, along with $69, so they can look into the problem. No thanks.
The user interface is klunky. For example, there are touch-sensitive channel up/down buttons on the front panel. But, there's no way to change the input source from the front panel. There are too many other ergonomic peculiarities to list them all.
This unit doesn't sync it's clock from PBS. Normally, that wouldn't be too bad, except my unit also loses almost 1 minute per week. So, I have to manually reset the clock each week to be sure I don't miss the beginning of programmed recordings.
I have no complaints about the image-quality of recorded 4.7GB DVD's, in 1- or 2-hour mode. When recording from a good off-air ATSC source, the final DVD-quality is very good. [Not HD quality, of course, but still very good.]
The DVD's produced by this recorder are incompatible with some of my DVD players and readers. [Finalized DVD-R's and DVD-RW's read fine on my old Plextor PX-712, but they hang my Sony DRU-810A.]
There weren't many products in this niche. [Settop converter with digital recording of analog and digital broadcasts].
