LG 50PZ950T

After spending a few weeks looking at LCD televisions, it's time for us to return to testing a plasma TV today.  Although the technology may have waned in popularity over recent years, it still offers better value for money than LCD.  The new PZ950 from LG, known as the PZ950T in the UK is no exception: it offers a fifty-inch display for around a thousand pounds, and still boasts the firm's high-end technology, including support for active 3D.

Build Quality and Design

LG hasn't reworked the design of its top-of-the-range plasma TVs for two years now, using the same exterior design today as it did back in 2010.  Like with the PX950, a pane of glass covers the entire front of the screen, with a border of five centimetres around the outside.  It looks good, despite the shiny finish on the glass.

Inputs come in the form of four HDMI 1.4 inputs, two of which are on the side, as well as SCART, VGA and composite and component video ports.  There are also two USB 2.0 ports on the side for accessing multimedia files on external devices formatted using NTFS or FAT32.  During our tests, the built-in media player could handle most file formats, only struggling with MT2, M2TS and subtitle tracks contained inside container formats.  Subtitle files in the SRT format worked without a problem though.

The PX950N's Ethernet port allows it to act as a gateway to your DLNA network, and it also comes with a WiFi adaptor.  Users can access the NetCast portal and its video-on-demand services and content from YouTube and Picasa.

To give users an overview, LG has created a homescreen covering all of the connected services, the current video source and a shortcut to the settings.  That's a lot to fit on one screen and doesn't necessarily make things much easier.

You get two remotes: the first is pretty traditional and sports backlit buttons, while the second is smaller, with only seven buttons, and works like a Wii-mote.

Ghosting and Input Lag

Responsiveness
Light Background	Dark Background	Average

Like other plasma TVs, the LG PZ950 has a very responsive display.  With an average ghosting time of 8.5 ms, it's certainly close to the top of the table.  However, we can't recommend it for hardcore gamers because its input lag is too high.  At 66 ms, or four whole frames, behind the video source, it could leave you just a step behind your enemies.

Image Quality: 2D

The default setting for the LG PZ950 is the energy-saving mode.  Plasma screens don't usually have much brightness, but this plumbs new depths, sending whites down as dark as 95 cd/m², which really isn't enough for day-to-day usage.  Colour reproduction is a total disaster, with deltaE at 8, and greyscale shades looking blue because the colour temperature is 10250 K instead of 6500 K.  The gamma is totally uneven, with blacks looking too pale and whites looking too dark.


As is often the case, things improve when you switch to a 'cinema mode', known by LG as 'THX'.  In THX mode, colours looked much more natural, something our equipment confirmed, registering a deltaE of just 2.2 with blue remaining the biggest problem—but that's far from problematic given that the human eye is less good at picking out that particular colour.  Overall, LG's new TV represents a steady improvement on the earlier PX950, which had a deltaE of 3.5.


Colour handling might well have got better, but it's a shame we can't say the same for contrast.  LG's last attempt at a high-end plasma had an irritating tendency to wash out blacks and dark greys, but its successor does even worse.  We measured black levels of 0.11 cd/m²; most of the PZ950's competitors get this figure below 0.07 cd/m².   Here, blacks ending up looking grey.  Worse still, like all plasmas, whites aren't much brighter.  At a maximum brightness of 110 cd/m², the contrast ratio is only 970:1.

We would normally suggest you get around this sort of problem by watching films in a brightly-lit room, to help the blacks look darker, but given how low the brightness is overall, that's not an option.

To top it off, the PZ950 also showed itself susceptible to screen burn, meaning we can't recommend you use it with a PC.  However, we didn't have time to let it bed in, so it's possible that the severity will decrease over time.

If you've got movies on DVD, you're better off leaving the upscaling to an external device like a recent console or Blu-ray player, as the PZ950 can't do an accurate enough job, leaving the picture looking slightly blurred.  However, if you like motion interpolation filters, you might be disappointed to know that the 'TruMotion' option has disappeared.

Clouding

As is usually the case with plasma screens, the display is perfectly even from corner to corner whatever's on show, so there isn't the faintest trace of clouding.

Image Quality: 3D

There's been no change in LG's implementation of passive 3D since our last review.  Although the quality is good, some rival plasmas can do better.  The PZ950 suffers from crosstalk, interference between the signals intended for the left and right eye, and it's worse here than on plasmas from Panasonic.  Indeed, over the course of 2011, even some LCD TVs have caught up.  It seems clear that LG hasn't been investing much time in active 3D technology, preferring instead to focus on the passive 3D systems used on most of its other TVs.

Here's what we saw through the glasses (LG 50PZ950 above, Panasonic TX-50VT30 below):



You get two pairs of 3D glasses that you can recharge via a USB port when you buy the TV.  At 43 g, they're light enough to be comfortable to wear, though they're a little tight if you want to wear them on top of ordinary glasses.

Extra pairs cost around £75 each.

Audio Quality

The PZ950's strong point doesn't lie in its speakers, which are just about acceptable for everyday television viewing.  However, the total absence of bass can be a problem for films, where a Home Cinema kit or a sound bar can do a better job.

Energy Consumption

With a plasma display inside, we weren't at all surprised to discover that the PZ950 used more power than an equivalently-sized LCD.  It isn't, however, the most greedy plasma we've seen either.  We measured consumption of 240 W while switched on, but the standby mode almost entirely wiped that out, reducing consumption to less than 1 W.