This was perhaps one of the most attractive looking displays we received. Its finished in a glossy black fibre that has embedded red highlights that give certain parts of the bezel an almost red-wine like colour. The rear is plastic too, but finished well and nothing looks cheap. This display has retractable speakers that can be set to retract when it’s powered off or they can be left extruded permanently. The motor assembly for the speakers is very silent and we played around with this gimmicky addition for a few minutes. And it turns out this isn’t another useless add-on; the larger speakers are pretty powerful too, although to be honest they are nowhere close to even a cursory speaker system. Even the remote unit looks attractive with a matte-finish; it works flawlessly too. Unfortunately the stand is not very stable and we could actually tilt the display 10 degrees forward and backward with the stand affixed; LG needs to work on the stand before we deem this acceptable – for now its definitely not.

In terms of performance the 42-LG80FR is a scorcher. It did well across the board with Display Mate with good rendition of colours and a good contrast ratio. Throughout our movie tests we had no colour aberrations or any sort of problems. It does excellently well with 1080p content and even displays lower resolution stuff well. Text rendition is clear, crisp and with great detail making reading even long documents a pleasure. If you want to use your display as a monitor or even to read the odd e-book this display should be at the top of your priority list. It’s a superb all rounder and at a price of Rs 74,000 its reasonably affordable. This display was our (joint) Digit Best Performance winner and comes highly recommended for anyone shopping for a 42-inch LCD display.