Fliss' 32 Inch TV
Posted on Mon 08 August 2011 by alex in geek
The weekend was both incredibly efficient and lazy in equal measures. We headed into town bright and early at 9:00 in a bid to miss the rather nasty traffic Cambridge inflicts on it's driving population. I would have cycled were it not I was picking up our new Smart TV for the library. It's an LG LV550T which replaces the ageing CRT with something a lot slimmer and fits nicely on the new shelves in the library. After some faffing with connectors and convincing it that it really was connected to the internet first impressions are pretty good. It's full 1080p with a built in HD tuner so we can finally receive BBC HD. Comparing the two BBC One channels you can certainly see the difference the high definition brings. It's still not enough to warrant upgrading my main TV though which I expect to keep until it finally dies.
The Smart TV stuff is pretty impressive. Aside from having built-in iPlayer (and ITV/4oD) it also offers a slew of "apps" including the ubiquitous YouTube. As a bonus it's DNLA enabled so it can stream stuff directly from our media server. Sadly it doesn't seem to be able to cope with all the audio codecs the PS3 can. About the only wrinkle was convincing it it was on the 'net. Despite having been given an IP address it was convinced it could access the "Gateway". It was still able to access the media server and download a firmware update through the ether so I suspected it was just some needless self-test the wizard went through. Once I plugged it in via a spare broadband router I had lying round it worked fine. I suspect it was trying to do something UPnPish to prove it was on a home network.