Review: LG 50PZ950 3D Plasma HDTV

Bottom Line

The 50PZ950 may not unseat the vaunted Kuro, but it sure gives it a run for its money. I used the LG as my main display during its tenure at my house, no small compliment given my normal 102-inch projection screen affliction, and its punchy, bright, accurate image was a joy. Flat out, this is one of the best TVs going. 3D performance, while not as good as on some other TVs, is better than many. Add in a price that’s far below many LED LCDs (which mostly perform worse), and it comes highly recommended.

Test Bench

Color temperature (Expert1 mode/Warm color temperature preset before/after calibration):

20-IRE: 6,039K/6,509 K

30-IRE: 5,885 K/6,465 K

40-IRE: 6,123 K/6,548 K

50-IRE: 6,476 K/6,488 K

60-IRE: 6,259 K/6,554 K

70-IRE: 6,144 K/6,516 K

80-IRE: 6,137 K/6,476 K

90-IRE: 6,378 K/6,469 K

100-IRE: 6,406K/6,499 K

Primary Color Point Accuracy vs. SMPTE HD Standard

The LG 50PZ950’s Warm color temperature mode was the most accurate but still resulted in an image that averaged 295 kelvins off the D6500 standard. The extensive color temperature adjustments in the Expert1 mode allowed for fine-tuning of the grayscale to within an average of 3 kelvins off D6500. (Check out the Tech^2 blog elsewhere on this site for more info.)

Primary color points in the Standard color gamut mode measured slightly off the SMPTE HD standard. Green and red are very slightly oversaturated, while blue is very slightly bluish-green.

Black level was difficult to measure, as an undefeatable circuit turns the pixels off when a 0-IRE signal is displayed. This isn’t indicative of what you’d see when watching an actual image, so only a black pattern with something in it can be used to test the black level. Because this is different from how we usually measure TVs, the following numbers are only roughly comparable to those of other displays we’ve measured. Black level was approximately 0.011 ftL. A full-screen white image measured 11.42 ftL. But all plasmas intentionally limit their full-screen white light output, so I instead used a 100-IRE 25% window, on which the 50PZ950 measured 37.56 ftL. (This is more representative of what you see onscreen.) An approximate real-world contrast ratio is then around 3,400:1.

Overscan in the Just Scan mode lost one row of pixels at the bottom but was otherwise perfect. Some slight edge enhancement was present, but lowering the Horizontal Sharpness control to the point where it disappears actively softens the image enough to lose resolution.