LG 32LE5900 review

The LG 32LE5900 is a lovely looking TV. Thanks to its edge LED backlight, the screen itself is very thin, but there’s more to the design of this TV than its supermodel profile. The bezel and stand both have a dark glossy finish, but hidden within the glossy bezel is an array of touch sensitive buttons that only show themselves when you brush your finger along them – very swish!

Even the remote control is well designed – there’s an illumination button on the top right that will light up all the major controls for when you’re watching TV with the lights off.

LG hasn’t skimped on connections either, with four HDMI ports. You also get component, composite and a single RGB SCART. There’s a D-SUB port for hooking up a PC too, and the LG will happily deliver a 1,920 x 1,080 image over both D-SUB and HDMI from a computer.

There’s an Ethernet port for connecting to your home network and the internet. Strangely though, we could not convince the LG to stream XviD content over the network, despite the fact that the TV had no problem streaming it from a USB storage device. There’s an optional wireless networking module in case you don’t have an Ethernet switch near the TV.

With the TV plugged into your network, you’ll be able to access LG’s NetCast, which lets you access various online media services directly on the TV. The YouTube client was particularly good, with content scaled to full screen looking sharp and well resolved. Likewise, when playing back XviD encoded SD video from USB the upscaling is very good indeed.

The LG 32LE5900 has both analogue and Freeview HD tuners and there’s an eight day EPG for the latter. There’s no preview window in the EPG, but the whole thing is semi-transparent, and you can at least get an idea of what’s going on with the selected channel.

After the superb scaling of YouTube and XviD media it comes as no surprise that the TV handles standard definition broadcast content beautifully. Even low bit-rate Freeview channels are well rendered on this TV, with excellent handling of MPEG noise. There’s also very little resolution loss with objects moving across the screen.

High definition performance doesn’t disappoint either. The Dark City Blu-ray was handled with aplomb – blacks are deep and there are still masses of detail in the shadows. Meanwhile the LG is just as adept at high intensity scenes, with the Casino Royale chase looking bright, bleached and hot, without ever looking washed out.

The LED goodness really comes into its own when watching Coraline on Blu-ray, with colours unbelievably vibrant and blacks as deep as the ocean. Even the Firefly Blu-ray box set looks good on this TV, despite the fact that the HD remastering of the series isn’t completely successful.

It’s not all a bed of roses with this TV, though. For one, the sound from the built-in speakers is pretty poor, even by general flat screen TV standards. And then there’s the price – at £482 this 32in is more expensive than some 40in sets. That said, if we had a maximum budget of £500, this is the TV that we’d spend our money on.