LG DR275 review

Home cinema prices have dropped like Didier Drogba in a penalty area this year, but we still had to do a double take when we saw how little the DR275 DVD recorder costs.

So what witchcraft has LG employed to get the price this low? The ancient practice of cutting out features, sadly. That there’s no hard-drive is forgivable at price, but the lack of a digital tuner restricts you to just five channels.

Noisy picture

Even worse, you may not want to watch even these channels on the DR275. Off-air pictures are grainy and lacking solidity, while the colour is washed out and bland. This amount of picture noise, of course, finds its way onto recordings.

DVD playback is better, though still nowhere near the performance offered by rivals costing just a little more.

Shoddy build

Build quality is also a little shoddy for LG, while menus are unintuitive are occasionally downright irritating to use.

In its favour the DR275 does play a good range of formats, including MP3s, DVDs encoded with DivX, CDs and CD-Rs as well as recording to DVD+R/+RW and DVD-R/-RW.

But all in all our advice remains to open your wallet a little wider for one of the better budget options like Samsung’s DVD-R150 or Panasonic’s DMR-ES15.