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Most people seem to think that 2010 will be the year of LCD/LED screen technology. But we’re not so sure.
In fact, we reckon plasma’s potential innate response time advantage when it comes to showing the latest generation of 3D images could see plasma enjoying something of a resurgence.
Not that the 50-inch LG ‘Infinia’ 50PK790 we’re looking at here is 3D-enabled, we hasten to add!
But it is a brand new plasma TV, and a feature-heavy one at that – despite its reasonably aggressive price point. So it should at the very least provide a good indication of how big a part LG is likely to play in our predicted plasma renaissance.
Within the PK790 range you can also find the larger 60-inch model, the 60PK790, while above the PK790 range on the plasma side of things are the 60-inch 60PK990 and 50-inch 50PK990, which add a black-boosting extra filter to proceedings.
Then there’s the 60PK590 and 50PK590 below the PK790 range, which aren’t as stylish and ditch the online functionality.
LG also has an extensive range of LCD TVs of all sizes, as well as the LE5900 and LE7900 edge LED series, and the extremely interesting-looking LX9900 and LE8900 direct LED sets with their extremely slender bezels.
For its money, the 50PK790 packs a serious feature punch.
This actually kicks off with its design, which is certainly one of the most attractive we’ve ever seen wrapped around a plasma TV.
The screen is strikingly slim, for a start, especially right at its extremities – so much so that it actually cuts into your fingers a bit when you’re lifting it into position either on a wall or on its very attractive, opulent-feeling desktop stand.
The bezel is very trim by large plasma standards, and the final style push comes from the screen’s single-layer finish.
In fact, it’s the way the glass panel lying across both the bezel and the screen is allowed to extend a small distance beyond the main bezel that chiefly accounts for the finger-jabbing sharpness when lifting the 50PK790 noted earlier.
Stylish looks
The 50PK790’s rear is nearly as attractive as its front, thanks to its healthy stock of sockets, which include four HDMIs, a USB port able to handle JPEGs, MP3s, and best of all, DivX HD files; an Ethernet port for future Freeview HD interactive uses, accessing files on a DLNA PC or LG’s new (to TVs at least) NetCast online system; built-in Bluetooth functionality for wireless connection to Bluetooth headsets, mobile phones and now, impressively, PCs; and optional Wi-Fi via a separately purchased USB dongle.
If you’re paying attention you should have noticed that we mentioned Freeview HD back there.
Freeview HD
The 50PK790 manages to be right up to date by being the first LG TV we’ve seen with a built-in Freeview HD tuner. Obviously this is only immediately of benefit to you if you’re lucky enough to live in an area served by the Freeview HD service.
But even if you’re one of the millions of people who aren’t already Freeview HD’ed up, it will be with you by 2012, so you might as well think ahead.
The other potentially most significant change here from anything LG delivered last year clearly comes with the Ethernet/Wi-Fi functionality, with the DLNA and online functionality enabling LG to keep up with the other big players in the TV world.
The new NetCast service clearly warrants more attention since it’s the first time LG has introduced such a service onto a TV. When you first access the service, you’re asked to pinpoint your location in the world, so that the service can provide you with local weather and time information once you get to the main NetCast ‘jumping off’ screen.
It has to be said, though, that this ‘jumping off’ screen isn’t exactly overloaded with content when we remember what Sony, Panasonic and Philips are offering with their online TV systems .
Internet apps
All you get are global weather reports from AccuWeather.com, the seemingly inevitable access to YouTube (though via a more friendly interface than that of most rival online TVs), and the Picasa web photo album service.
What’s more, during our tests both the YouTube and Picasa systems were unusable via our standard 2MB broadband download pipe; they kept generating network errors, despite our same broadband pipe proving perfectly adequate for, say, Panasonic’s VieraCast and Sony’s Bravia Internet Video services, as well as the BBC’s iPlayer system via Freesat.
We’re wary of being too harsh on such service disruptions so early in an online TV’s life, but even if they were working, the amount of content available could hardly be considered jaw-dropping. Here’s hoping more services – such as the already-promised Skype online video call platform – come online soon.
LG is – astutely – very big these days on getting endorsements from professional independent AV organisations. And so we find the 50PF790 sporting support from both THX – complete with two THX picture presets – and the Imaging Science Foundation, the latter of which can be called in to calibrate the screen professionally for you, storing night and day settings to two special preset slots.
Calibration
You can also use the ISF slots yourself to access an Expert menu, where you can find such impressive fine tuning touches as a full colour management system, complete with red, green and blue contrast, and brightness tweaks, plus colour and tint adjustments for all six primary colours.
These calibration features will undoubtedly catch the eye of any serious home cinema fan.
Other picture presets cater for Sport and Game content, with additional Vivid, User and ‘Auto Power Save’ options also available. The latter option works in tandem with such technologies as an ambient light level detection system to keep the TV running at its optimum efficiency. Though it’s probably best avoided if you value premium picture quality over fractionally improving your carbon footprint.
Fans of casual gaming, meanwhile, might be chuffed to find a selection of simple games tucked away on the 50PK790, including Sudoku, Whack a Mole and Invader. However, these games – included it seems, as a riposte to Samsung’s Content Library feature – really are basic in the extreme, and for the most part merely highlight some response issues with the remote control!
Motion smoothing
Wrapping up the 50PK790’s features are adjustments to the set’s gamma level, noise reduction circuits, dynamic contrast element, an excellent Picture Wizard that uses built-in test signals to help you calibrate images better yourself and, last but not least, 600Hz processing.
As with Panasonic’s current 600Hz plasmas, the 50PK790 doesn’t actually refresh the picture 600 times a second, but rather uses a ’sub-field drive’ to fire each pixel as many as 12 times for each frame of a 50Hz PAL signal.
This makes the 600Hz title rather dubious, but hopefully it can still result in more fluid motion and a generally richer image.
In some ways the 50PK790’s pictures represent a considerable leap forward from last year’s LG plasmas, and with HD at least are capable of looking really quite excellent.
The best of the good news finds the 50PK790’s black level response going much deeper than the slightly milky look of last year’s screens, at least once the TV has been calibrated correctly.
Dark scenes can look convincing, detailed and, well, dark.
Deep blacks
If the word ‘calibrated’ had you groaning with fear back there, don’t worry; the black level improvement has allowed THX to deliver a much superior THX Cinema setting than anything provided on last year’s LG plasmas. So just choose that when watching HD films if you want an easy life.
Actually, the much-improved black levels aren’t the only things that help the 50PK790 produce a better THX preset. For LG has also come on leaps and bounds with its colour response for this new plasma TV.
Colours look richer with a greater dynamic range, yet they also look more natural thanks to a marked reduction in the extent to which greens dominate dark scenes and oranges dominate reds and skin tones.
There’s more subtlety to be seen, too, in the way the 50PK790 renders fine blends, with practically no ugly colour striping around, and no blotching to skin tones during HD viewing.
As we find with many plasma TVs, colour accuracy diminishes when you switch to standard definition material, but again this doesn’t happen nearly as severely as it did on last year’s LG plasmas.
More good news finds the 50PK790 avoiding the motion blur so common with rival LCD technology, but also handling judder well thanks to its ‘600Hz’ system.
Motion judder
Even with LG’s anti-judder Film Mode in play, you don’t get the total, almost freakish fluidity that you can obtain from Panasonic’s top-stream plasmas, or Philips’ high-spec LCDs. But the minor amount of judder the 50PK790 leaves behind actually feels quite natural to our eyes – especially as the Film Mode processing doesn’t appear to generate anything particularly significant in terms of unwanted side effects.
The 50PK790 excels, too, at reproducing the clarity and sharpness of good quality HD feeds. In fact, it’s so forensic in its approach that it easily delivers the natural film grain when showing Blu-ray movies that’s so beloved of serious cinephiles.
Not that the 50PK790 is only an HD tool, though. Aside from the occasional colour tone issues noted earlier, it actually upscales standard definition pictures reasonably well provided they’re of a passable quality in the first place.
While the 50PK790’s pictures are capable of looking quite outstanding at their best, though, there are two main picture problems. The first finds that while black levels are a big step forward compared with last year’s LG models, they’re still less profound than those of some new Panasonic plasma models.
The most alarming issue, though, finds the 50PK790 still suffering with the same image retention problem noted on last year’s LG models. At its lowest level, this can find really bright image elements in dark scenes leaving momentary but clearly visible shadows behind.
Image retention
At its highest level, if you leave something bright and, especially, colourful – like a channel logo – in the same place on screen for as little as an hour, you will be able to see a shadowy relic of that logo apparent over even quite bright pictures for a considerable time after you have changed channel.
For instance, after watching Sky News for a couple of hours, we decided to fire up the excellent Borderlands on our Xbox 360, and were alarmed to see a clearly readable relic of the Sky News logo appearing in the blue skies above Pandora.
And while watching Casino Royale on Blu-ray, we were perturbed to suddenly see the letters S and T appearing in a patch of blue sky behind Bond as he hung off the back of a van during the film’s ‘Free running’ sequence.
We couldn’t even remember what we’d been watching that might have caused these residual letters, but the fact remains that they were there, and they were clearly and distractingly visible.
We should say that we didn’t experience any permanent ’screen burn’ during our tests, and we would expect the issue to diminish after the first 100 hours or so of use. But the problem was certainly enough to cause irritation on a few occasions – especially as other plasma manufacturers seem to have almost completely eliminated this old problem now.
Considering how slender it is, the 50PK790’s audio performance can be considered a reasonable success.
As we’d expect, bass is rather limited and compressed. But crucially the mid-range is open enough to leave action scenes sounding acceptably dynamic without overwhelming dialogue and audio detailing.
The speakers remained free of buzzing distortion at any kind of volume below painful, too.
Value
Although the 50PK790 doesn’t look particularly cheap against some of the sub-£1k 50-inch models LG has managed in the past, it does enough with its design, features and in many ways picture performance to make its £1,300 price look pretty reasonable.
Ease of use
Thanks to an exceptionally well-designed, graphics-heavy on-screen interface and thoughtfully organised remote control, day-to-day use of the 50PK790 is a breeze.
In an ideal world LG might have a) tried to make the menus smaller or more transparent to make it easier to tweak picture settings, and b) made the remote control a bit more responsive. However, overall the system is still an impressive exercise in how to handle large quantities of options and features without causing the technophobic to blow a gasket.
At first glance, LG appears to have a definite winner on its hands with the 50PK790.
It’s extremely easy on the eye, it’s got more than enough connections to satisfy even a very sophisticated, extensive AV system, it’s got lots of helpful features (including reams of multimedia support), and it produces what are for the most part seriously likeable pictures. All for a pretty reasonable price, too.
In fact, in the long term there’s likely to be very little to stop you buying and loving a 50PK790. The problem lies in the short term, where the 50PK790’s curious and outmoded susceptibility to plasma’s once-common but now largely eliminated image retention issue can cause some really pretty distracting image artefacts.
As noted in the main review, we couldn’t say for sure if there’s a worry about this retention becoming permanent if you kept a bright, colourful image element ‘frozen’ in the same place on the screen for a really prolonged time.
Our suspicion is that the image retention probably would always fade over time. But it’s a bit disappointing to even have to talk about this issue on a screen that’s so cutting edge in other ways.
We liked:
Given what a large presence the 50-inch 50PK790 will be in your room, it’s great to find it sporting a seriously pretty chassis design. It’s got more than enough connections to cope with a modern, ambitious home cinema system too, and aside from a currently rather limited online service, it’s on the money with its multimedia support too.
It’s brilliantly easy to use, too, and best of all, its pictures frequently look quite superb.
We disliked:
The TV’s rendition of dark scenes is certainly a step forward from previous LG TVs, but it still doesn’t deliver black colours that are quite as rich as those of some rival plasma brands. A much bigger concern, though, is the amount of image retention, at least during the first few dozen hours of use.
It will be nice if the NetCast online service bags a few extra services sooner rather than later, too.
Verdict:
It’s great to see LG still putting so much effort into the supposedly ‘unsexy’ plasma format, and achieving some extremely likeable results in the process. Provided you can put up with some image retention problems for what we presume will only be the first few days of the TV’s life, then the 50PK790 is well worth checking out.
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Review: LG 50PK790
� 2010 Toys and Gadget
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