The market for budget DVD players is expanding at an amazing pace, with new machines released every week. Not only are recognised budget manufacturers flooding the market with sub £200 machines, but brands such as Pioneer and Sony have now recognised the benefit of reaching greater numbers of customers by releasing cheaper players.

Korean manufacturers LG are a brand that have taken up a relatively strong position in the UK market largely by stealth. They have also done so with particularly broad range of products, from wooing crowds at shows with plasma screens, to funky portable TVs from Argos. They have achieved some interesting retailer tie-ins, including recently turning some heads by selling the sub-£200 3320 machine on the high street through WH Smith. The question therefore for the buyer considering the LG4950 is whether the player represents a high-end machine at a bargain price, or a budget competitor struggling in a cutthroat environment.

Moving around to the back of the machine, there is some evidence of the budget nature of the offering. A wire protrudes from the rear resembling the ties used to seal freezer bags or tie cheap cables given free with HiFi equipment. While the thought is nice, because it offers the ability to tidy the power cable by bundling and tying, the execution is cheap in the extreme and looks both tacky and flimsy. Not all is lost though, because the construction of the rest of the rear connectivity is excellent, the back panel is plainly laid out and the connectors are gold plated - highly welcome at this price point.

The rest of the socketry is exactly what you would expect from this type of machine, and would not necessarily divide it from any of its competitors. A twin SCART is matched to a switch to choose between PAL, NTSC or automatic picture formats. A second throw switch chooses between composite or S-Video, and pleasingly there is both a co-axial and an optical digital output for greater choice.

From the minute a disc is inserted into the LG4950, many owners of earlier machines will probably be impressed by the quietness of operation. The drive quality is good, and therefore drive noise is restricted solely to occasions of menu-surfing. Once in a regular playing motion from a disc, the mechanism is practically silent. Not only is operation silent, but it is also satisfyingly quick. Waiting between menu selections and layer changes are now almost imperceptible. The introductory screen holds a pleasant LG logo, and the menus are also extremely nicely designed and easy to use. The player also drops to a screensaver after a certain time of inactivity, and then even shuts down to standby if left even further. Some users might find this annoying, but I found it to be a pleasant safeguard from leaving the disc spinning all night.

With such a feature-packed list, it is a great surprise when it becomes apparent that the LG range do not play the lower quality VCD (Video CD) format discs so popular on the Asian and Far East markets. Fortunately this is something which can be overcome by a relatively simple user hack along the same lines as the multiregion facility. This hack is detailed on the excellent LG fan site run by IT Troll. The hack was easily entered onto the 4950 (although editting hex via the handset might be a little nervewracking for the less experienced users) and playback of VCD's, was a trouble-free affair afterwards. Why this feature was locked away like this I have no idea. On good VCD's, the picture quality is remarkably good.

The remote control is a disappointing affair, little different to the many equally poor remotes for other such machines at this price point. The colour is instantly uninspiring - a return to the bland beige that is has taken computer manufacturers decades to escape. The buttons are extremely small and unresponsive, with the 'select' button in a particularly unintuitive position. When in use, the remote attempts to combine the 'search' and 'skip' functions into a single pair of buttons. While this helps to keep the number of buttons lower, the operation is fiddly. The user must press once and hold to fast forward, and subsequent press-and-holds increase the speed of search. However, a quick press of the button skips to the next chapter. While the search function apparently steps up to as fast as 100x, it was practically impossible to check this because as the speed builds, it is far too easy to press the button too quickly and end up skipping the chapter by accident.

The player was tested first over the S-video connection, and the results were distinctly underwhelming. It was difficult to get contrast levels at a satisfactory level, and colours were muted. The overbright colours of TV show Friends became washed out, while black levels looked distinctly grey. Adjustment of colour and contrast levels tended to oversaturate the picture altogether, or sacrifice detail to obtain acceptable darkness. There was also very visible banding where large areas of similar colours came together - almost as if the picture was being formed from a more limited palette of colours than normally available. For example, on the challenging disc Crimson Tide scenes of the gunmetal grey submarines slicing through deep blue waters showed defined rings on their nose and conning towers, where the colours should have been smoothly graduated. Moving on to some reference quality discs, things looked a little better. The glorious detail of Toy Story 2 was pleasingly rendered in a nice anamorphic image. It appeared that the LG was happier with very good quality discs as its source, but struggled more where quality dropped below the highest levels.

Across the RGB SCART, things improved considerably. The colours became quite a lot stronger, although not on par with some of the truly excellent budget models, or some machines available at only slightly higher prices. The image was still tinged with a slight level of blandness, but this could largely be controlled with picture adjustment. The RGB image also dealt better with pixellation and banding, both of which were far less common, and certainly less obvious when they did occur. Detail levels were better, and the image was excellent in comparison to other budget models.

In conclusion then, as long as you are equipped to use the RGB SCART output of this player, the picture performs very well for a budget player. Colours are not as good as they could be, but detail levels are excellent.

Spinning the excellent T2 Special Edition, both the Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks were delivered with punch and verve. Even the extremely taxing specially-designed THX sequence wraps the viewer with tinkling shards of metal in a thoroughly enjoying show. The excellent audio performance also translates to CDs, and anyone wishing to use the LG as a CD player would not be disappointed unless they would expect to pay more than its purchase price for a dedicated CD deck.

Sound quality issued from MP3 discs was largely dependant on the quality of the sampling used, but generally the sound was a little flat and compressed. While this may be a drawback of the format, rather than the player itself, I would not recommend MP3s for extended listening, but perhaps for background music. The menu system makes it easy to navigate folders and pick MP3 tracks (although unfortunately titles are still truncated) but it has a truly annoying feature where it appears you can navigate the disc while a track is playing, but if you pause on a track title for too long, it starts playing…Most frustrating.

Wanting to test the audio quality of the LG further, I tried to insert the Sting "Brand New Day" DTS music CD to get an idea of how the good stereo reproduction translated into multi-channel music presentation. However, it was immediately obvious that something was strangely awry. Taking a feed through a co-axial digital feed, the amplifier switched not to DTS but Pro-Logic. This is very unusual, because it suggests that a stereo signal is being produced by the player and passed through for the amp to decode, but this cannot be the case from a pure (ie unprocessed) code, because one of the problems with these CD's is that an unadulterated bitstream must be passed to a DTS decoder - no stereo option is available on the disc. My only conclusion is that the LG is getting confused with the signal being passed, and performing some form of processing on it before passing it on for amplification. I contacted LG in relation to this, but after a significant wait, they were unable to come up with a solution other than returning the player for them to "set up the DVD to your specifications". Failing this, it is clearly not possible to recommend the LG to anyone already owning, or expecting to get involved with the excellent DTS CDs which are now on the market in other territories.

The LG4950 has a Dolby Digital decoder built in, but the usefulness of this feature is becoming more and more questionable. While this was a handy transitional option for those with Dolby Pro-Logic amplifiers and six-channel inputs, these were relatively few and far between. With Dolby Digital amps and sound systems being the standard for even the most budget-minded buyer these days, it is only in the smallest handful of circumstances that the decoder on the LG will be doing anything other than gathering electronic dust. It would seem a far better move to cut this feature, and pass the saving onto the customer to make the player even more competitive in the budget market. I did not have the appropriate cables to utilise the onboard decoder, but there is no reason to suspect that it would not function with the excellence that the rest of the audio demonstrated. The internal menus of the player include useful options to test the speaker positions and levels.

The LG4950 is easily hackable, delivers an excellent audio performance for the price band and supplies an RGB signal through the SCART. On top of the beautiful design, these features should be more than ample to ensure that you give this player detailed consideration if you are in the market. If you are on a particularly tight budget, then the LG4750 is technically the same player, in a slightly less attractive case for approximately £50 less. However, buyers must also keep in mind that better picture quality might lie with other competing players, depending on the form of picture connection you intend to use. Add on top the apparently questionable technical support from LG Electronics, and it is apparent that there are still questions outstanding. Answer these to your satisfaction with an audition, and the LG could prove to be a good budget buy for the visually conscious.

Dan Bates

	Build	Picture	Sound	Features	Speed	Value	Overall
	9	7	9	9	9	8	7