The new 50PY2DR plasma HDTV from LG comes with a bright yellow insert explaining in all caps that the set’s CableCARD and TV Guide On Screen electronic program guide eliminate the need to rent an outboard box from your cable company. It even says that “some cable operators may try to persuade you to lease a set-top box,” but that you don’t need one unless you want to use pay-per-view or video-on-demand services and that operation and connection are simpler with CableCARD/TV Guide On Screen. All of that is arguably true for this and other late-model TVs boasting these innovations, but — as you’ll soon see — in going “outside the box” these sets still don’t deliver everything inside the typical cable box.

PLUS

•Records HDTV from cable or antenna. •Well-integrated hard-disk recorder. •Accurate color.

MINUS

•Can record only one program at a time. •TV Guide On Screen hard to organize.

Fast Facts

DIMENSIONS (WxHxD) 56 x 35 x 14.375 inches (with stand) WEIGHT 137.875 pounds PRICE $8,000 MANUFACTURER LG, lgusa.com, 800-243-0000

Key Features

•50-inch (diagonal) 16:9 screen •Native 1,366 x 768-pixel resolution •Built-in high-def, 160-gigabyte hard-disk recorder with TV Guide On Screen •side inputs composite/S-video with stereo audio •rear inputs 2 HDMI; 2 FireWire; VGA-style RGB, 2 component-video, and composite/S-video, all with stereo audio; 2 RF antenna/cable; 2 optical digital audio •rear outputs composite/S-video with stereo audio; optical digital audio

The LG is the first plasma HDTV with a built-in video hard-disk recorder (HDR). Combined with CableCARD and TV Guide On Screen, the set provides most of the features found in cable boxes, standalone HDRs, and external HDTV tuners. I wonder why the company didn’t throw in a slot-loading DVD player on the side just to complete the picture.

LG houses its feature-packed plasma in a glossy piano-black cabinet that exudes bachelor-pad class but reflects a lot of ambient light back at the viewer. A swivel stand is included, and an LED panel below the screen shows information such as current channel/input and HDR status. No front-panel buttons are visible, but a set of basic controls, including channel and volume, is stashed behind the right side of the frame. The shiny black remote control looks stylish but, unfortunately, attracts fingerprints from the moment you pick it up. Its worst ergonomic offense is hiding the (aspect) Ratio button, which changes the shape of the TV’s picture, behind a sliding door.

SETUP In a move that may confuse the uninitiated, LG put three distinct menu systems into this set: standard TV controls, hard-disk controls (labeled X Studio Pro for some reason), and TV Guide controls. The first set of menus was simple enough to use and offered a whopping six video presets plus a seventh, Custom mode that can remember different settings for each input. One very cool feature for enthusiasts divides the screen into quadrants, each of which modifies the picture according to one of the presets so you can compare and choose between them. There are also six display modes (five work with high-def) plus a 16-point adjustable zoom and three modes designed to prevent screen burn-in.

Part of your setup involves loading TV Guide On Screen, which is crucial for getting full use of the hard-disk recorder. The guide grabs program information from cable and off-air antenna sources (though not satellite) and compiles it into a grid so you can browse programs and schedule recordings. In addition to staples like keyword search, sorting by genre, and recording every episode of a show on a particular channel, TV Guide On Screen offers a few functions not found in any cable company onscreen guide. These include the ability to customize the position channels appear in, integrating cable and antenna channels on the same grid, and a preview window that can be set to change channels as you browse.

This kind of functionality is great, but when LG’s guide first retrieved its information from my Time Warner Cable New York City system, the channels came in randomly and had to be reordered one by one to match the guide in the cable box, a tedious task on a digital cable system with hundreds of channels. There’s no easy way to sort between off-air and cable channels aside from manually ordering them. In its favor, the guide did find all of the channels and displayed their program information correctly, whether I fed the signal from the cable box or straight from the wall, something previous versions of TV Guide On Screen I’ve tested have failed to do. It also found information for all the off-air digital stations in my area.

PICTURE QUALITY After futzing with the LG’s guide setup and adjusting its picture (see “in the lab” for more), I settled back to enjoy a DVD. Like most plasmas, the LG exhibited better performance when fed a digital signal, so I set my Denon DVD-3910 DVD player’s output to 720p and used its HDMI connection. The movie made from Elektra, the comic-book spinoff from Daredevil, outdid its big-screen predecessor within the first few minutes.

in the lab

Color temperature (Warm color temperature and Movie mode before/after calibration) Low window (20-IRE): 6,471/6,470 K High window (80-IRE): 8,035/6,562 K Brightness (100-IRE window before/after calibration): 63.3/35.2 ftL Before calibration, the LG 50PY2DR exhibited a relatively blue color temperature in its Warm setting, especially in brighter areas. Afterward, its color temperature was much improved, although there was still a significant shift toward green in the middle range of the grayscale. Grayscale tracking, therefore, was below average, varying by an average of 334 K from the standard of 6,500 K despite excellent results at the top and bottom ends of the scale, so observant watchers may notice a slight green tinge in mid-bright areas of the image. (Calibration needs to be performed by a qualified technician, so discuss it with your dealer before purchase, or call the Imaging Science Foundation at 561-997-9073.) Color decoding was very good for standard- and high-def inputs, showing a 5% red push and no error in green. Edge enhancement was negligible with sharpness set properly. As expected for a plasma TV, geometry and picture uniformity were excellent. Black-level retention was below-average for a plasma — the brightness of black varied noticeably on the PLUGE pattern from a Sencore signal generator. Overscan averaged about 5% to either side and 3% along the top and bottom. Minor dithering was visible below 20 IRE as crawling motes of color in the darkest areas. This is a common issue in plasma TVs. — D.K.

In dark scenes, like when Jennifer Garner’s Elektra assassinates a deserving victim, my initial impression of the depth of black was good — better than I’ve seen on many plasmas. But I also observed some video noise in dimmer areas of the picture. When Kirigi bows to his master, the wall behind him devolved into masses of indistinct motes, and it dropped too precipitously from a hint of shadow into darkness. Near-black areas are the LG’s biggest weakness, but the noise became less noticeable when I sat farther from the screen.

The LG came into its own when the movie brightened up, delivering punchy, well-saturated greens in the forest around Elektra’s rental house and vibrant reds, yellows, and oranges in the fruit she obsessively arranges on the countertop. The skin tones of her face in the outdoor light showed well-balanced color. Details in the images were crisp, and aside from the issues with darker areas, I’d rate the LG relatively high on the DVD picture-quality scale.

HDTV, naturally, looked even better. The LG exhibited every bit of ultrarealistic, three-dimensional detail when I tuned into an HDNet presentation of a classical concert. I could count the gray hairs on the cellist’s head, but when I paused the image I noticed that a couple of hairs were very slightly flickering. I checked my satellite box and, sure enough, it was set to 1080i-format output. Switching it to 720p eliminated the flicker. Unfortunately for CableCARD users, most HDTV channels use the 1080i format, and CableCARDs don’t give you the same option for selecting your output format.

RECORDING FEATURES Of course, what’s really special about this TV is its built-in hard drive, which enables the LG to mimic much of the functionality of cable boxes with built-in HDRs — but without the box or its monthly rental fees (although a CableCARD still merits a smaller monthly charge). LG integrated the HDR well into the television, although it’s missing some of the capabilities of many late-model cable HDR boxes.

The 160-gigabyte (GB) recorder can store up to 14 hours of HDTV and 62 hours of standard TV at the highest quality — both capacities are less than you’ll find in most high-def HDRs. I was able to schedule recordings via the TV Guide On Screen interface and record, pause, reverse, and fast-forward TV from any composite/S-video or RF input (including both the analog and digital/HD tuner and cable inputs). Recording quality in HD looked every bit as good as the original, as did standard-def recordings in their highest-quality mode.

That’s all well and good, but the LG set’s HDR suffers from one major limitation: it can only record one program at a time. It’s not really LG’s fault: multistream CableCARDs that enable two-tuner recording are not yet available. With the LG you can watch a second, nondigital program while you’re recording something else, but you can’t pause or record it.

Managing my recorded shows on the LG was a pleasure. The list is well-organized, and LG included a few options here that I’ve never seen on a HDR, such as the ability to retitle programs, to create “folders” to store shows (one for each family member, for example), and to generate thumbnails that show a scene from each recorded program. There are also some great batch-organization options that let you move or delete multiple shows at once. The hard disk can store and play digital photos and even music files, both of which I painlessly loaded from a pair of versatile flash-memory card slots on the TV’s side.

BOTTOM LINE The LG 50PY2DR’s main appeal will be to people looking to get maximum functionality out of a minimum of boxes. Though the HDR/TV Guide features work well overall, the lack of two-tuner recording may be a serious negative for some people. But if you can get over that, this innovative plasma does many things right and combines a host of products into one wall-hangable unit. Deep-pocketed, box-averse shoppers will find a lot to like.