The JVC LT-42 R10 BU TV is a 42-inch, Full HD, LCD TV. On the market since spring 2009, the device currently sells for around 730 GBP online.

Florian Friedrich, tested on December 9, 2009

Excellent colors.
Surprisingly good sound.
Low power-consumption.
Accurate 24p reproduction.

Low contrast.
Sparing feature-set.
Poor motion depiction.
Cryptic remote-control labeling.

For just over 700 pounds, this 42-incher offers an attractive picture but no more than your money’s worth of features — don’t expect multimedia here. What’s more, its contrast and motion-clarity show some weaknesses. Still, the LT-42 R 10 BU is energy-efficient and bright, and has a decent set of speakers.

Most important connections:

3x 1x

Multimedia

Let’s put it briefly: There is none! But multimedia isn’t necessarily something you’d expect in this price class.

Design and Other Features

The most important connections are on board, but you’ll search in vain for extras such as VGA or front connections panel.

The practical, four-legged stand has a swivel joint to allow you to rotate the TV to face the viewers. A pedestal as versatile as this isn’t yet standard, despite its obvious advantages — especially for LCDs, which continue to depend strongly on viewing angle. Versatile positioning can therefore be a great help. The slender, glossy frame also impresses — this JVC looks timeless.

The remote control is particularly confusing below the navigation cross.

In terms of the feature set, too, the Japanese company has kept its focus on the essentials, making do without fancy USB sockets or digital tuners. But you can, for example, adjust the screen’s overall brightness manually, or allow the TV to adjust it automatically in one of two ways — to suit either the ambient illumination (“Eco Sensor”) or the picture content (“Dynamic Backlight”). Both settings reduce the power consumption — a factor that’s becoming increasingly important nowadays. Opinions are divided, however, on the design of the remote control — we were particularly put off by the cryptic labeling in the lower half of the handset.

Operation

The JVC’s operation is a double-edged sword: On the one hand, the user guide is clear and detailed, and the menu is manageable. On the other hand, the menu’s text is way too small and the remote control is too hard to understand. Nevertheless, the operation is more than comfortable in everyday use.

Picture Quality of Standard Signals

The JVC’s CIE chart reveals deviations in the color balance and gamut.

There are no presets such as “Movie” or “Cinema”. The most appropriate preset here is “Soft”, although the name doesn’t really correspond to the effects: In fact, the picture looks over-sharpened (fringing is visible), and almost no detail can be recognized in dark areas of the picture. You only get a balanced picture once you switch off the noise filter and contrast enhancer (“Picture Management”) and reduce the sharpness setting to its minimum value. With these changes in place, colors look natural, and there’s a decent level of detail. But the JVC cannot display a truly decent tuner picture because of its poor differentiation of brown areas of the picture — wood grains, for example, look too reddish and show insufficient differentiation. Also, the picture noise on weaker channels is too coarse for our liking.

We were impressed, on the other hand, with the JVC’s bright screen, which can put out up to 350 candelas per square meter. Signals arriving via Scart result in a detail-rich image, with only a few particularly challenging scenes showing de-interlacing errors.

Picture Quality of High-Definition Signals

The LT-42 R 10 BU does a decent job of HDTV signals. Still, there are a few small errors — the stripes on the seaplane in Chapter 4 of the Blu-ray “Casino Royale”, for example, flicker noticeably. Apart from that, there’s little to complain about in the HD playback — 24p signals play back at the correct frame rate, but it’s worth pointing about that you can hardly see the “movie look” because of the TV’s average motion clarity.

We also noticed small irregularities in the color measurements: Saturated cyan, for example, contains too little green, and the color temperature wavers between 6,300 and 7,000 Kelvin. Despite this, pictures still look natural in practice — both in black-and-white movies such as “Casablanca” and in richly colored releases such as “Casino Royale”. But one definite thorn in the JVC’s side is its low contrast ratio. The automatic lamp adjustment based on the picture’s contents works effectively, producing a dynamic contrast of 3,600:1, but the picture-depth just doesn’t materialize. Unfortunately, dark details in dark scenes tend to get swallowed up by the violet-blue residual illumination. Apart from this weakness, however, the JVC presents a very respectable HDTV picture.

Sound Quality

Here, we enjoyed a pleasant surprise, which is rarely the case with built-in speakers in flat-panel TVs: At moderate volume levels, the bass sounds solid, thanks to optional, automatic loudness-adjustment — it’s only at higher levels that it starts to distort.

Picture Mode: Soft

Contrast: Middle value

Brightness: Ca. 7.5 cm

Sharpness: Minimum

Colour: Ca. 4.3 cm

Hue: Middle value

Colour Temp.: Warm

DigiPure: Off

Colour Management: On

Picture Management: Off

Smart Picture: Off

MPEG Noise Reduction: Off

Digital Noise Reduction: Off

Dynamic Backlight: On

* These settings apply to realistic playback of HDTV/Blu-ray material through the HDMI interface in a darkened environment. Manufacturing and HDMI playback device deviations may necessitate slight adjustment.