The Official LG xxPK550 Owner's Discussion Thread [no price talk] - Page 14

I've just noticed that the PK 5x, 7x and 9x series are not Energy Star complaint.
I thought that all this year's plasma are (at least Panasonic and Samsung).
The review for the 50PK950 states the average calibrated power consumption at 225W, which does not look bad for a 50" set.
So I wonder how it compares to the similar sized Samsungs(C550/C590) and Panasonics(G20/G25) which are Energy Star certified.

energy star apparently doesn't mean too much:
http://content.usatoday.com/communit...y-star-label/1

anyone know if the 50pk950 will be offered in canada? I was at futureshop yesterday looking at the 60pk750...very nice.

I'd rather not go down to the US to pick it up, so if anyone has any info that'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Anyone know how firmware updates (if they happen) will be applied to the 550? Will they be downloadable to a USB flash drive?

Yeah, I've seen that. That's why I am interested in
actual measurments.

I read a review of the PK950 at another site and they mentioned that the IR was very pronounced, on par with LG's prior years' models. Can any 550 owners tell us their IR experience?

Just keep in mind that IR vanishes. I was gaming for 3 years on a 720p LG plasma for long hours and never had any burn in. I must have not paid attention or at least stopped paying attention to IR. I just enjoyed my TV.

Even though you can pick up a lot of great info from good people on these boards, It's also a place where you can "learn to be unhappy" with your TV. I just don't get all that influenced by the glare, IR, flickering and etc. talking points. Plasma is the best, and that is all that matters! Now if I see a 1/2" long scratch on my screen or border, then all hell will break loose...lol!

Welp. I guess I have a choice to make then. I use tv mainly for gaming, I don't want to lose 72hz mode, but I may have to look at a G20 :/

My 60pk550 arrived today from Amazon, and preliminarily it seems fantastic, and much better than the Vizio VF550M that it will be replacing. The colors are gorgeous, and it has none of the motion issues that i could not help but notice with the Vizio 120 hz LCD. I'm going to dial back the Picture Wizard settings a bit while it's new to break it in.

Pilot Shipping were really nice, and helped me set it up and they verified that it turned on.

Can anyone post some suggested settings? There are a lot of options, and i hate to mess anything up. I didn't see them in Chad B's post; heck, it even seemed to refer to a panasonic...

Overall, styling is great and very slim. Looking forward to post-break in.

You didn't have appreciate an honest answer? They are so rare these days!

Before buy a panny, I suggest you to have a close look to some panny's problems threads. When, last year, after some months it was discovered that the THX profile of the G10 had a wrong calibration, after a lot of calls panasonic said it will be fixed soon. After 8-9 months, all the G10 panasonic owners were still waiting for that fix, and I don't know if now the finally got it or not. And that is only one example. Read the thread about the rising blacks, and you will find others.

Last year, in my Country, it was discovered a problem on the LG PG series. It was about the internal tuner, only in Italy and only on some regions (we are doing the switch-off from analog to DVB-T). Well.. even that the PG series was out of production at that time, in a couple of months we received a new firmware release that fixed that problem. It is all written on a specific and really well done thread, on an italian famous forum.

By my experience, I feel much better with LG than panasonic, speaking about service support and company trustworthiness. On the LG web site I never read all that marketing BS that you find on other sites, with that "millions:1" native contrast, "infinite black" feature which is totally useless, the "super resolution", which was discovered to be a normal edge enhancement, present on all HDVT, and so on.

Walt,
the Pannys have the same motion resolution of the LG of the same years. They get 1080 lines only if you use their IFC option, but then you see the "soap" effect, and usually no one is using it for that reason. You can know the motion resolution by reading the HDTVTest.co.uk reviews. Unfortunately they have not reviewed LG plasma since 2008, but just read the pannys review. Motion resolution is indicated in the tech. table, in the middle-end of all the reviews

Less than 1 year ago I have also read 2 reviews from another web site, 1 LG 2009 and 1 panny (G10 or V10). They have done also a special test about the 600 Hz function (sub-fields), that is important for motion-blur. The LG was clearly the winner. I still have the 2 final pics of that test of both, the LG and the panny, where they showed the differences.

FWIW, Katzmeier sez Nooooo:

"According to LG's Web site, its plasmas use "600Hz subfield driving," which sounds like the 600Hz subfield drive used by Panasonic on its plasma TV, but the two didn't give the same results in our test. The LG delivered between 800 lines and 900 lines of resolution, which is similar to what we saw on the Samsung plasma but less than on the Panasonic TV--which resolved the full 1080 lines. However, LG's number is still very good, and, as usual, we suspect that even the most blur-sensitive viewers won't notice a difference with regular program material. "

That's from the 2009 Cnet review of the 50PS80.

http://reviews.cnet.com/flat-panel-t...l?tag=txt;page

AFAIK no one has measured motion res for the 2010 LGs, either the 1080p60 or more interestingly the new 1080p24 test apparently on Spears/Munsil (which I don't have). But again FWIW my direct comparison (posted earlier) of Panasonic 50S14 and LG 50PK550 suggested that the Panny does indeed have better motion res with 30/60 fps material. (The 60Hz-only Panny does not qualify for the 1080p24 motion res test).

From the Panasonic TX-P42G20 Review - By Vincent Teoh • Monday, 8 March 2010, 10:35 pm GMT - HDTVtest.co.uk (link)



IFC=Image Frame Creation

NB. film mode deinterlacing failed all the cadences in all resolutions.



From the specific 600 Hz test done from another E.U. web site (I forgot the name) the past year, on the LG 50PS8000 and panny G10:

LG 50PS8000:




Panasonic G10:

Well the attractive price point of the pk550 is still drawing me back to it. I want to upgrade my 40" lcd to a bigger size (50" seems like a nice size, but I wouldn't mind a bigger set either).
Now that everyone was complaining about the reflections I kind of discarded it as not for me. But then again a similar sized lcd will cost me almost twice as much. So I made some pictures of my room at 2pm (although the sun wasn't shining today, so it could be a lot brighter in the room), now most of my viewing will be done in the evening 8pm+, but I do like to watch the news in the morning/watch the occasional tvshow in the afternoon.
Do you think I would be happy with the set (taking the price in consideration), or is it really a no-go for my room.

Oh and for what it is worth I also have a 27inch imac in my room with quite a reflective screen but it doesn't really bother me that much when the curtains are closed on a sunny day.

And how is the sound from the build in speakers? Especially the clarity of voices?

Last year I bought a Panasonic TCP50U1 that doesn't have the AR coating, I told myself "I mostly watch TV at night" but every once in a while you want to watch TV during the day (Weekends, holidays, etc).

I had blinds on my windows and they would let light come in, that made it very annoying to the point where I couldn't take it anymore.

My solution was buying blackout curtains, that solved the problem.

I think you will be annoyed, it seems that your curtains pass a lot of light.

edit:
there are things like this that go on top of your already installed curtains:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Roc-Lon-Bl...-White/2432275

I believe I will stick with the PK550. I don't really want to give money to panasonic when they're not willing to make things right with their users. If they actually did something to fix that black level problem, they would be the gold standard overnight. Until then, no money from meeeee!!!!!
L G
L G
L G
L G
*chants*

I think what I'll do, is make 3 fictitious emails a day and email LG about the input lag, and hopefully, over like 6 months. 600 people will have complained about the input lag XD

I'm looking to buy this TV but all I have is std cable..does anyone know if the pic quality is any good and clear or is it grainy? Also how is the IR on this TV...I noticed that the Samsungs are very good with IR.

Interesting pics ... It looks like either Cnet or hdtvtest.co.uk is wrong, or possibly there's significant variation in the models for the PAL countries as against the NTSC countries. Like Cnet I was only speaking of North American TVs. I know the
Panny G series last year were very different in Europe, their PDP units apparently had different properties; dunno about LG.

The answers, to me, is easy: CNET has not done that test with the IFC disabled I did not read that review, but from what you have reported I did not see the IFC mentioned on it.

Instead, I remember another review of the 2009 from an U.S. magazine (hometheatermag, or something like that), where the reviewer, at one point, was explain those things. The review, if I remember well, was about a panasonic plasma professional monitor (10.000 $$$). He said that a panasonic engineer has explained to him how the IFC was working togheter with the 600 Hz, and he got an headache

Its looking like my 60PK550 will be delivered tomorrow. I will have this placed in a temporary room that has alot of natural light. I will report any glare issues I find. I jumped the gun and bought a new TV before I have my basement carpeted. So once I have carpet I will be moveing it to the basement.

Ordered the 50PK550 today, any recommendations on the settings to use?

These plamas are sleek and sexy it looks like an led (thin) at first glance but the pq is really awesome, If you are wall mounting supply monoprice with the VESA compliant number (wxh) and they can assist in which mount is best for your TV.

Where would one find the VESA compliant number?

Hold on, are we talking about North American Cnet (Katzmeier), in 2009, testing 2009 North American Panasonic G10 series? Those TVs did not feature frame interpolation processing (IFC or whatever) at all; it couldn't have been left on.

I gather the European G10s and this year's North American VT25s do have the IFC option, here it's now called "Blur Reduction".

So far as I'm able to tell, in North America the Pannys last year, S G and V, really did test a good honest 1080 lines motion res at 60Hz with no tricks. V in addition aced the 1080p24 motion res test. (hdguru.com has a great article on this somewhere in his archives, he talks about high-end LCDs doing great with IFC-type processing on 1080p60 but showing weird artifacts on the 1080p24 test.)

Side note, if all this is right, I'm surprised I could see the difference so easily at Sears last Sunday morning. Cnet and others (especially Kuro owners) keep telling us how motion res doesn't count for much. This is just an unargued dogma. I'm starting to think the dogma is plain wrong. The LG PK550s have motion res at least as good as 8G Kuro, maybe even 9G Kuro which was slightly better.

Retrospectively I'm glad I didn't buy a 6020 this year (I thought about it & was tempted). For the going price I'd expect it to be darn near perfect and yet there are highly visible nits to pick. You'd easily be able to tell by looking that the motion isn't quite where it needs to be on a $4000 + set. The difference would show up infrequently in movies, quite often in sports broadcasts and pretty much all the time in video games.


Addendum: I'm called to mind of Katzmeier saying over and over in his reviews that motion resolution only matters for "test patterns" and you can't tell the difference "with normal program material". Nonsense, if anybody can walk into Sears and clearly see the motion difference on a ski jumper in a crappy store feed.

Did you have a look at the PDF user manual?

On the italian version, about VESA it is written:

50PK5** - 400*400 - M6
60PK5** - 600*400 - M8

same thing for the PK7** and PK9** series. I don't see any compliant number. You should check on the U.S. version.

Now that I've played with the TV a little bit more I've discovered some screen uniformity issues.
Coming from LCD, did not expect plasmas having this problem at all, but it looks like it is not true.
I've watched some dark footage yesterday in the dark environment and besides the grayish/glowing blacks
I've also noticed some horizontal bandings. After switching to a blank input and with the lights off,
the screen definitely shows distinct horizontal bandings - light gray/dark gray.
I'd say I can see around 5-6 distinct horizontal bands across the screen.
It is definitely not any kind of IR, as I did screen "color wash" and it removed all the IR that I had, but not the
bandings. Can someone verify it with their set?
I've never thought that plasmas in general could have LCD like uniformity issues.

Do you think you could take a picture of what is hapenning?
I would try to reproduce it on mine.

Surprisingly, it seems they actually do. Panasonic NA makes no mention of it in any of their published materials, but frame interpolation is clearly present in the Standard and Vivid picture modes (Custom, Game, and THX/Cinema do no feature it). Only the effect can be seen, the setting itself is controlled and hidden by the software. It seems they simply moved it into the general user menu's as "Blur Reduction" on the '10's. It's possible reviews did motion tests on the Standard mode as a lot of them do "Out of Box" measurements (which is what the panel defaults to ootb).

I'll try. My current point and shoot may not show it. I'll do my best.
But if you have it you would probably notice it.
It has to be a black screen with some small image on it
(so the TV will not completely dim the screen and leave in a normal pre-charged state).