LG 50PK350

LG has done it again with a large plasma TV at an excellent price.  We thought that the LG 50PK790 represented great value for money when we reviewed it a few months ago, but LG has gone one better with another 50''--and this time it costs under £600!  There's no need to beat about the bush: for this price, LG has clearly stripped its costs back to a bare minimum.  Let's take a closer look and see if the penny pinching as had an effect on its overall performance.

Build Quality and Design

Unsurprisingly, the LG 50PK350 offers only the bare minimum--or even a little bit less than that--both in terms of the hardware provided and the features on offer.  The only noteworthy item is an ambient light detector, which although useful for the general public, isn't really of much interest for a Home Cinema. 

There are two HDMI ports, two SCART sockets, composite and component video ports and a VGA input, which is a rather basic selection.  It's a shame there's not an extra HDMI port: once you've connected your TV decoder and a Blu-ray player, there aren't any left.

There's also a USB port on the side for accessing multimedia content on an external storage device.  The good news is that it supports hard drives and memory sticks formatted using NTFS, and it could also handle the vast majority of the test files we threw at it.  Only M2TS and MTS files and subtitles encapsulated in container formats were beyond its reach.  Subtitles work fine if they're not in the same file as your video though.




The remote has a new design, but there's still no backlighing for using it with the lights turned off.

The menus look modern, with cute animated icons that make it easy to find your way around.  Although they could sometimes be a little bit more responsive, they're generally easy enough to use.  You can use them to adjust most of the settings, but not the brightness of the individual plasma cells, the equivalent of backlighting on an LCD TV.

Image Quality

By default, the 50PK350 is Standard mode, with brightness of 160 cd/m² using an average test card (35% white), but the picture is too saturated. We prefer the much more natural look produced by IFS Expert 1 mode, even if it is a little darker (135 cd/m²).  Overall, the picture lacks a little bit of punch in a brightly-lit room, suggesting that LG had Home Cinema buffs in mind for this TV.


This performance is directly linked to the use of plasma technology, which has a fixed amount of brightness to distribute across the whole surface of the screen.  This means that an entirely white test card won't be very bright, but a single white spot against a black background will be much more concentrated.  In real life, the contrast levels vary according to the picture on screen.  Comparing test cards that show 1% and 35% white, the contrast ratios were 2400:1 and 2200:1 respectively.  These findings are excellent, as were our readings for gamma and the evenness of the brightness across the whole surface of the screen.


Colours are reproduced accurately, and we measured a perfectly workable deltaE score of 3.1.  This figure measures the average discrepancy between the colours in the original source and those actually shown on screen, and we usually consider that any remaining imperfections are invisible to the naked eye when it falls below 3.0.

Unlike the LG 50PK790, the PK350 didn't have any problems with screen burn.  That said, the test unit we're reviewing here didn't seem to be brand new, so it's possible that the panel had already been worn in.

As ever with a plasma TV, the viewing angles are excellent, and the picture quality is absolutely identical even if you're lying on the floor.  On the other hand, you need to make sure you're at least three metres away from the screen, otherwise you'll be able to notice the flickering of the individual plasma cells, especially in darker parts of the frame.

In a reasonably well-lit room and with three metres between you and the PK350, a HD film will look great.  All that's missing is a system to correct for fast-moving objects, known by LG as Trumotion.  Upscaling SD content like DVDs is about avearage compared to the competition, so we suggest you leave the job either to a Blu-ray player or a latest generation games console.

Audio Quality

The speakers on the LG 50PK350 are good enough for day-to-day television viewing, but if you're watching a film, you'll notice the lack of bass.  A set of Home Cinema speakers or a sound bar is always a good investment.

Energy Consumption

Finally, plasma technology's Achilles' heel is still their high energy consumption.  On standby, the PK350 doesn't need much power (we only measured consumption of 0.1 W).  But once it's switched on, that figure climbs to 362 W, or twice the requirements of an equivalently-sized LCD TV.