Very nice, QUIET, spacious refrigerator

As a caveat before this review, I've only had this fridge for a week now, so issues may arise down the road which require revision.

My wife and I have had 2 refrigerators in our house since we moved in, a standard white top freezer Kenmore which we bought ourselves about 4-5 years ago (and still works great) and a much older side-by-side Kenmore which came with the house and we use as the "beer fridge." Well, the beer fridge died recently, so we decided to get a nice new Stainless Steel fridge as our main fridge and relegate the top-freezer Kenmore to being the new beer fridge.

One of the things that always annoyed me about the top-freezer Kenmore was having to bend over to get things off the top shelf, which was even more of a hassle when those things were towards the back of the top shelf. I really didn't want to devote half of my fridge space to the freezer with a side-by-side model (because we really don't use a whole lot of freezer space, and we have a spare freezer anyway with the beer fridge) so I decided to go with a french-door model.

After a quick trip to the Consumer Reports website, I saw that this model's predecessor, the LFC25750 had received the highest ratings in the French door model category. I respect CR, but I'm not a slave to it, so I poked around the net to see if I could find any horror stories on LG fridges. Satisfied that LG wasn't the KIA (no offense, KIA drivers) of the appliance world, I decided to buy the updated version of the CR model, the LFC25760, in stainless steel.

Be warned: if you are replacing a standard top-freezer model, you are going to need significantly more space to house the LFC25760. It is huge. It was taller (68 3/8" without hinges), wider (35 3/4") and deeper (34 1/4" without handles) than our previous fridge by quite a bit. It also requires a 1" top and rear clearance for ventilation, so don't forget to factor that in. In my case, because I am planning to remodel my kitchen in the near future, I had no problem with cutting away some countertop and removing the cabinet above the fridge to make space. Be sure to measure your space before you buy! As it was, we still needed to remove the fridge's doors (with easy to follow instructions stuck right on the front of the fridge) to get it into the house through a standard-sized door. It was pretty easy for my wife and I to move it on a hand truck, so if you want to save the "white glove" installation charge, it's pretty easy to install yourself.

The fridge itself works great. It was at usable temperatures within 14 hours (maybe less, because we let it sit overnight) and was already making ice. The digital display inside the fridge lets you set the actual temps of the main fridge and freezer, so no "1-5" coldness setting to guess at. The standard settings have worked great for me so far (my drinks are just as cold as I like and my ice cream stays a perfect solid-but-still-soft --no freezer burn after being opened and put back!-- texture).

The space inside the fridge is just great. It has 4 adjustable, spill-proof, pull-out shelves, 2 spacious veggie crispers (each side can be opened with one door open), and one shorter full-width pull-out compartment on the bottom which can be kept slightly cooler than the rest of the fridge, for storing cold cuts, meats, etc. The doors have tons of room. The bottom shelf on each doors can hold 2 gallon bottles of milk (or two 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke, with room for a condiment or two as well). There are four other shelves on the doors, including the obligatory dairy shelf with tilt-up cover, an egg shelf (with a separate useless egg holder that you can just take out -- why would anyone remove the eggs from the carton, which has the expiration date on it, just to put them in another holder?), and a top shelf that I use for holding shredded cheese baggies.

The freezer is a nice bin, with one large divided (and removable for easy cleaning) compartment beneath a pull out full width wire basket which is nice for holding smaller items (like Steak-um boxes). The ice tray is on the left side of the pull-out wire shelf. Which brings me to my first annoyance -- if you leave the ice maker running, it will fill the tray so much that when you pull out the wire shelf, the ice will fall off the back of the shelf into the lower bin -- in our case ice was knocked off by the metal bar which senses when the tray is "full." This is easily solved by turning the icemaker off (there's a button) when the tray is filled to the edge. The icemaker lets you choose from 3 sizes of cubes, though I haven't deviated from the middle size yet (not a big ice user anyway).

My second annoyance is that the fridge doors are a bit harder to open and close than I'd like. You can't just push the door and let it shut itself. It requires a little push at the end to finish the job. The good news is that it has a "door open" alarm that will warn you when you don't shut it properly. The freezer door is very easy to open and close. I'm hoping that the fridge doors will loosen up a little with use, but they may be harder to open due to the "antibacterial seal" technology.

My last annoyance is the "stainless steel fingerprints" issue. This is coated stainless steel, which is supposed to provide some resistance to fingerprints -- don't believe it. It is pretty easy to clean, though, with a wet sponge and some dish soap. Also, being stainless steel, refrigerator magnets won't stick to the doors (though they will stick to the sides).

As far as looks though, stainless steel cannot be beaten. I was amazed at how this refrigerator "classed up" my somewhat dated kitchen. It is a real beauty -- it's probably a good thing that I can't deface it with magnets.

Some people may consider its lack of a water dispenser to be an annoyance as well. I don't, since my wife and I have bottled water delivered anyway and I never used the water dispenser from the Kenmore in the past.

Probably the best thing about this fridge is that despite its massive size, it is ten times quieter than my smaller Kenmore. I needed to check it a few times in the beginning to make sure it was working. It is REALLY that quiet. The only thing that makes noise is the ice maker, with the usual hum and crash when ice is dispensed.

Overall, I am very pleased with this fridge. It's gorgeous, has tons of well designed space, cools perfectly, and is whisper quiet. I cannot emphasize how convenient the french door design is. No more bending over for my most-used items. Most people access the fridge a lot more than the freezer, so it makes more sense to have the fridge at eye-level and the freezer at "bending over" level.

If you've got the space for this fridge, it really is a great buy. I paid $1,799.00 for it at AJ Madison, with free shipping. I'm also (hopefully) getting $250.00 in rebates for it (1 through LG, 2 through AJ M - one of which expired the day I bought it), which brings the price down to $1,549.00.