Unless you’re an aficionado of The Wedding Channel, the real attraction of the built-in Freesat tuner is the ability to receive BBC HD – currently, the main free-to-air HD channel here in the UK – along with the intermittent outbursts of HD programming from ITV HD. The irony, really, is that switching between HD and SD programmes on the 42LF7700 makes the SD stuff look quite poor.

Freesat offers an HD advantage that Freeview has yet to deliver

To be fair, the standard-definition image quality is pretty good, although the image tends to have a rather airbrushed quality that lacks sharpness. However, it’s a shame that the 42LF7700 doesn’t have an upscaling option, as the lack of sharpness in SD programmes is quite noticeable on such a large screen.

The 100Hz refresh does help with sports programming, though. We checked out some tennis and found that the streaky movement of the ball became noticeably more defined, allowing you to clearly follow the trajectory of the ball as it was pounded back and forth across the net.

The moment you switch over to BBC HD, everything seems to snap into focus – colours are bolder and the increased level of detail is immediately obvious. Alex Kingston’s frizzy hairdo in HD really is a sight to behold. The real test was to fire up some high-definition Blu-Ray and HD DVD films. The results here were extremely good – colours were bright and vivid, but not over-saturated, with Spiderman swinging smoothly between buildings.

However, the darker hues of Batman Begins revealed a minor weakness, as solid areas of shadow weren’t quite as crisp and black as they could have been. This wasn’t a critical flaw by any means, but it was unexpected from a TV with a claimed contrast ratio of 80,000:1. So there’s still scope for a little fine-tuning by LG’s engineers.

Main back panel connectivity

Additional interfacing appears on the side

Audio quality was good too. The twin 10W speakers did initially lack bass when playing our iTunes library through the Mac Mini, but a little experimentation with the remote control revealed some useful audio options, including a ‘music’ preset that boosts both bass and higher frequencies.