This week, my preferred ring tone is an excerpt from Pink Floyd’s album “Animals”, a track called “Sheep”. Consequently, the sound of bleating lambs alerted me that somehow, some Telstra electrons had impossibly got through the maze of Karri forest and black holes to send me a mobile phone call.
“G’day, Johnno here”, the voice at the other end said. “To which the obvious retort was, “Which Johnno is that then?”. This was replied with the equally obvious “How many bloody Johnno’s do ya know? Johnno from the courier company in Manji. We’ve gotta a TV ‘ere for ya”.
“Manji” by the way is my local town, Manjimup 32Kms away. Every place name around here is abbreviated, so Pemberton becomes “Pemby”, Bridgetown is “Bridgie” and therefore, Manjimup is “Manji”. I live in Quinninup, (ergo “Quinni”) a small locality set in the middle of the Karri forests in the far south west of Western Australia where there is no shop, TV and internet are by satellite and the post is delivered three times a week to a small office open for 2 hours every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
And couriers definitely do not come here; you have to go to them. 32Km away. In Manji.
Now I was sort of expecting a TV delivery, as the nice folk at LG said as it was impractical for me to be at the launch of their new whizzbang range in Sydney a few weeks back due to distance primarily, they would send me one to play with. So, I jumped in the car and drove the Manji.
Sadly, the boot of a Monaro, as big as it is, was no way going to accommodate the box this TV came in, nor, 4 hours later, did the back of Jacqui’s Suzuki Grand Vitara 4WD. Not to mention the LG Soundbar in a separate box.
A third trip necessitated using the trailer we had purchased some time back, but only used a couple of times, and even then, it was touch and go. This thing is HUGE!
To be accurate, the TV they had sent me is a model SUPER UHD SM9450 65” beast, but the box added another 10cm all around easily. As you can see from the photo, once unpacked – itself a mammoth exercise needing lots of free space, although the packaging is very cleverly designed to make it as easy as possible, being a simple “lift off” affair once the retaining straps and staples are removed – the SUPER UHD SM9450 65” absolutely dwarfs our existing Phillips 42” model!
Now ordinarily, I would do a review of a piece of equipment such as this in around 500 to 1000 words and in one go. Frankly though, I think the remote control for this TV has more processing power than the entire CSIRO and more dashboard options than an F18 fighter jet, so will be doing this review in a few parts as I reveal all of the secrets it holds.
And so far, I can say, there are more than a few party tricks up its sleeve. But the first hurdle I have to overcome is simply, as mentioned, we have no free-to-air TV here, all transmissions being via a VAST satellite set-top box.
One thing is that there is no manual per se on this specific TV in the box – not the one I got anyway. There are small 4 or 6 page ones with details for unpacking, a cursory coverage of the remote control and how to bolt this behemoth to a wall, but no strictly operations manual.
To download such a thing from the website is not a straightforward PDF either, itself being a full on Zipped micro-website to be installed on a PC. So be prepared for a bit of a learning curve, whether you have free to air or not.
The startup auto install guide on the TV itself is pretty good, but if there is any deviation from the norm, I think you may need to get this app.
As I did.
Stay tuned. If you’ll pardon the pun. I’ll do some research and then bring you part 2 shortly!
Film, Video & Virtual reality 