OTHER TECH

The 120-gigabyte (GB) hard-disk drive stores about 12 1/2 hours of HDTV content, or about 120 hours of regular TV. That's decent capacity, but eventually it will fill up. Composite- and S-video outputs let you transfer standard video to a DVD recorder. There are also two FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE 1394 or i.Link) ports so you can dump HDTV programs to a D-VHS recorder for archiving, but we weren't able to get this feature to work (see "tech notes").

Of course, the two most critical inputs are for antenna and cable - you'll need a suitable antenna for the former and a hard-wired cable feed for the latter. The most important outputs are the high-def video outputs to your TV or monitor, and there's also an optical digital audio output that feeds the Dolby Digital signal carried on HDTV broadcasts to your A/V receiver for decoding (see "key features").

McDonald's has dropped its super-sized menu, but apparently word didn't reach LG's engineers. The recorder's king-size remote control almost invites you to use two hands to operate it. On the plus side, the button layout is very spacious and easy to use. But the controls lack any backlighting, and none of them glow in the dark.

Setting up the LG recorder was entirely painless. I installed a Terk TV32 digital TV antenna outside my house and connected it to the recorder's antenna input. Then I ran cables from the LG's component-video outputs to my Princeton HDTV monitor and its optical digital audio output to my receiver. Who knew that the future would be so simple? System setup was also pretty easy. I answered the TV Guide On-Screen menu questions, then EzScan found the broadcast channels in my area, and I was watching them a few minutes later. (If your cable provider also licenses TV Guide On-Screen, you could control your cable box through the LST-3410A by connecting them via the G-Link output using the supplied cable.)

The recorder displays digital TV signal strength, and that helped me orient the antenna to pull in the strongest signals. Overall, the reception quality of the LG's tuner was very good. Of course, unlike regular TV, digital TV doesn't vary in picture quality with signal strength - you either get a good picture or no usable picture at all.

Overnight, the recorder collected program information for the onscreen guide and stored it for my subsequent viewing. This free, ad-supported service makes it easy to navigate a wealth of schedule and program information for both over-the-air and cable channels. And it's a snap to record a program - simply point to a title and click. Conveniently, while you're using the guide, whatever's on the current channel is shown in an inset box.

With just a little practice, the recorder's many features are easy to use: still picture, frame-advance, jump to the start of a program, time-shifting, thumbnail browsing, bookmarking, and the kind of high-speed (300x) fast-forward and reverse scan that only a hard disk can provide. I also liked the ability to edit stored programs. For example, I could mark and save up to ten clips, each up to 10 seconds long, and discard the rest of the program.