50PA5500 information?

i am very happy with the purchase right now.since its only 600 dollar for 50 inch 1080p.

This should help answer some of you questions in this thread (PA6500 thread) : http://www.avsforum.com/t/1390332/lg-50pa6500-and-lg-60pa6500-plasmas
Edited by stereo55 - 7/4/12 at 11:40am

I just bought this TV. I haven't done any setup options at all. I ran Transformers and UP! through it and then watched some Hulu Plus and Direct TV HD. For the price tag (I paid $650) I'm extermely impressed. I didn't need 3d or any apps or anything like that, so it's perfect. It looks better than I imagined. I'll update once I play around with it some more.

I've had this set for almost a week. Almost done with running 100 hours of slides, but I have watched some TV and a couple Blu-Ray movies and I'm very impressed with it. It is my first plasma, so I'm a noob when it comes to them. It replaced a Samsung DLP and it is quite impressive to me how well it looks.

I'm thinking of getting the 60 inch version for my basement, but want to spend more time with this one first before making a final decision.

after 3 week of having the plasma. i did notice dithering when i go close to screen.anyway uts not noticeble from far like 1 feet.pic is amazing dor 600 dollar.

I notice dithering too when looking from a foot or two away, but like you said, it's not noticeable from viewing distance. The worst dithering I see is during blu-ray loading on my PS3, but during movie playback, I can't notice it all.

In the second day of owning this set, I noticed some slight IR after watching the news that had a constant image block on the screen. I couldn't see it with normal content, but viewing slides showed it.

After almost 90 hours of use, 90% of which was running slides, I can't see any IR anymore. Even after watching the same news for 30 minutes to an hour and then running slides immediately after, I can't see any IR. I hope this continues to be the case.

Really liking this set!

I have had a terrible experience with this TV. I ordered this TV form Dell, the price was right, and at first the TV seemed really great, the picture after turning off energy savings was awesome. I had just finished entering some of the tweaks available here and the ones that were on Amazon (Amazon has pulled this product for some reason), and was happy.

Foolishly, I thought I was good to go, and let the packing get thrown away. 9 days after first setting up the TV, and only moderate use, the TV died. The LED came on but nothing on the panel at all, no menus, nothing. Since I didn't have the box, I was hesitant to "just put it in a box" as Dell suggested for a return, fearing it would end up damaged, and Dell would blame me and refuse a refund or exchange. Dell said I could call LG for service, so I did, and set up a service call.

The service experience was bad. I had a non working TV in my living room, they would come out and say "I think it's the mother board, I'll have to order one." Wait a week, board shows up, they come out, doesn't fix the problem, etc. So they replaced all four boards inside the TV before concluding the panel was dead, and of course they had to order it. I called LG to seek some sort of compensation for having their product fail after 9 days, and being without a TV for almost 3 weeks while their service provider failed to fix the TV. The told me there was nothing they would do. They did not seem to care at all, even once I escalated to the managers. I had lost confidence that LG's service provider was even capable of fixing the TV.

So I called Dell, and they agreed to ship me a new TV, and I could use that packaging to return the broken one. We did that, and after over a month from when the first one failed, I finally had a working TV. Set it up, everything seemed good. Now I have a vertical line that is clearly visible on blue and red backgrounds. At first I thought it was just one input, but I have detected it on all inputs. Once you see it, very distracting with the red/blue content. Netflix splash screen is where I first noted it:



Either I have the worst luck ever, or LG has some quality problems with the 50PA5500 model. Despite the excellent picture, nice set of inputs, decent remote, good stand, I could not recommend the 50PA5500 product due to the quality problems I have expereinced. I have a dilemma in that I am not sure what to do, try and return the TV without original packaging or try for the third unit and hope it works for more than 2 weeks?

This was my first purchase of an LG product, and I feel badly burned on this one. I feel like I should avoid the LG brand. I know the service experience for any of the TV manufactures leaves something to be desired, but still, what possible excuse could they have?

What would you do?

I purchased the LG 50PA5500 last Sunday from Sears (closeout for $549.95) and have been trying various calibrations I've found online. The best color I've achieved thus far has come from a calibration published by Ty Pendlebury at CNET.

I'm confused by the following Color management System submenu from Pendlebury's calibration, which both begins and ends with the color red (the last color in the onscreen TV menu sequence is yellow and not a repeat of red).

Please excuse my ignorance, but can anyone tell me if this is a typo, or does one skip yellow and return to red and make the new entries for Red?

Thanks for any info which can be provided.


Red: [Saturation -5. Tint -29, Luminance 0]
Green: [Saturation -5. Tint 0, Luminance 0]
Blue: [Saturation -2. Tint -2, Luminance -9]
Cyan: [Saturation -3. Tint 2, Luminance 0]
Magenta: [Saturation 0. Tint 0, Luminance -2]
Red: [Saturation -10. Tint -27, Luminance 3]

I picked up a 50pa500 for $500 about three weeks ago. Now that I'm up to 100 hours of run time I've been messing with the controls. I tried the user shared calibrations that some of the guys posted in the pa6500 thread but I found them to be wrong for my display, particularly the sharpness adjustments of 22 instead of 10.

I tried to find calibration discs at Best Buy, Radio Shack, and everywhere that people say they should be but I've had no luck, so it looks like I'll be ordering a few someday soon. In the meantime I tried the THX calibration on the Incredibles DVD. It worked wonders for my previous Samsung 3079 CRT (it was a new TV when I finished with that calibration...) but did just about nothing for my LG.

I noticed that the very first correction chapter - Contrast - was useless. On my CRT I was able to get the display lit up enough with the contrast control to wash out the differences between the different gray squares. On the LG, even at full contrast the screen never got "white" enough to wash out those differences. I seemed to have a choice between dark grey and light, light grey, but never white. The Brightness test tells me to either turn down the brightness till the THX drop shadow just vanishes, or find the seventh darkest box on the top line, vanish it, and then bring it back a little. Those two settings are mutually exclusive. With the seventh darkest box barely visible, I not only lose the drop shadow, I can barely see the THX logo.

It was all downhill after that. I may just restore the factory settings and give up for the time being.

In spite of this, the clarity on this tv is breathtaking, and the cable over HDMI looks better than lifelike. Movies... with a standard 60 frame HDMI connection, Dark Knight looked astounding, after I had played with some of the picture settings. I discovered that my POS Sony STRDG910 (I have grown to loathe Sony electronics) doesn't pass the 24p signal that I'd heard such great things about, so I either have to play games by running direct from the Blu-ray (BDS480) to the TV and then running digital audio out from the TV to the receiver (and I'm sure I'll have A/V sync issues then), or get a new receiver.

Still, it would be nice to have a brighter picture. I don't have $250 to fork over to a calibration tech, so does anyone have any idea what I could do to wake this display up and get some more light output from it?

The price I do not want to say too much

We have a dlp, led-lcd, lcd, panny plasma and this lg and I am very happy with this tv! Lg chopped everything not needed and produced a top notch displays in this price range. As far as your contrast it sounds like the abl is kicking in so might try using windows to adjust white levels?
Anybody have any detailed explanations on the settings? And maybe some advice on how to adjust those settings for ps3 gaming

Can someone please tell me how to get the service menu or how to check hours of usage on this LG plasma? I've been searching on the internet for the past few days and had to register here to ask this simple question.

As for the TV, I've had it for a week now and I'm very pleased. The picture is great ( I have it on cinema setting, no adjustments ) the screen is reflective but so was my old CRT ( glass will be glass ). The sound is decent, but for a little more depth and bass - I'm gonna hook up some additional audio equipment and larger front speakers.

Overall - great TV so far. My first and only plasma so I might be biased

Edit!

So I found out that I have been staring into the menu that SHOULD have the "used time" information, but it has that line missing ( 4th line from the top... there is a gap, a blank line ). The question is, how do I get the line to appear? my software version is 03.17.12 if that has any relevance.
Edited by smoren - 4/28/13 at 1:03pm

First of Im swedish and I may have turned some things around since I haven't slept for 36 hours now and English is not my native language though I think of myself as really good at it. I however am going to help you the best I can since i have a LG 50PA5500-ZB TV right next to me.

I cannot help you with the Up-time on your TV but if you didn't find the service menu (Which i think you did.) you need to go to the menu by pressing "MENU" OR "Settings" and press the "red" button.

I cant really say if that is the case here but I'm guessing your TV is not the "smart TV-version" and therefor your Software version may be outdated.
The newest software is released 12/04/2012 (Software_File(Version_04.00.03).zip).

Before updating:
Check Menu/Settings (Non-Smart TV model)
Press MENU OR Settings key on remote
Press (Red) “Customer Support” key on remote
Select “Produce/Service Info.”
Check “Model/Type”

50PA5500-ZB : Full model name includes a suffix ex “-UA”.

Once on the LG website on the software TAB remember to:
Check View More and if the full model name of your TV is in [Applicable model list].
If it is, then as always:
• Do not unplug TV power cord while upgrading software.

Im even going to be nice and put the [Applicable model list] right here for you:


I really feel that this TV is the best buy I've ever done! It may have been really cheap (760.38$ | 2012-07-23) but its A LOT of TV for the money. Since I've never been in any need of service or help I would definitely rate the TV 4/5 easy. It gets -1 because of the sound which can be turned up quite high but the volume actually stop increasing after a while.
That's why i bought a Sony Blue-Ray 5.1 Home Theather system for the TV as well. Ohmy, It's beautiful!
(Just waiting for the PS4 to replace my PS3 later on! High expectations! )
I wish you good luck with the product!

BTW I registered here just to help you out man!

Thank you for your reply N0tiC

I am also not an English native speaker so don't worry about it.
When I get home from work, I will try to update the software.

I found the service menu, but I don't quite remember the exact model number. Will check when I get home.
this 50PA5500 plasma is not a smart TV or 3D or any of that ( frankly I don't care for or want that stuff at all )

I'm hoping that the software update will resolve the issue, I've got nothing else to try XD

Anyway, thank you again. Best of luck with your TV as well

As I said, Never ever experienced any problem so far

Just be sure that the TV IS THE EXACT model or it will propably be more issues than you already have (I don't want to be the cause of the destruction by updating the wrong model)

Cheers, N0tiC!

I read about some guy who screwed his tv by installing wrong firmware update. It was same model but different suffix and wasn't compatible in his country (I think?) so be careful.
I have a question regarding rs232 port on back. The manual says to use a crossed (reverse) cable. Is that the same as null modem?

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I wanted to put an update in on my experience with my LG 50PA5500.

In my earlier post I mentioned that my Sony DG910 didn't pass 24p signals, so I decided to flip some cables around. I previously had all my sources running to this receiver, with a single HDMI then going to input 1 on the LG. I now have all sources (Sony BDPS480, Cisco Explorer 8624HDC, AppleTV 3rd gen) running to the LG, with a single optical audio cable leading back to the receiver. This has cleaned up my system operation immensely, as I no longer have to pick up the tv remote to select the receiver vs tv tuner, and then the receiver remote to select my source. Now, the tv remote handles everything and I only need the Sony remote for the on/off and system volume. If I could run that off the LG remote I'd be thrilled.

The video quality has improved tremendously with this simple change. The tv passes a quality audio signal back to the receiver over optical, though I haven't had a chance to play with all the different decoders and see what kind of sound I'm actually getting. I know my receiver doesn't have TrueHD capability, so I may not even bother for right now. Since I have a simple 3.1 system running its not that important anyway. If I discover some rear channel speakers that offer great fidelity on a wireless connection I might check it out, but its not that important to me, picture quality is my big concern.

After five months of daily use, the screen still looks great. Today I discovered the c|net calibration for the 50PA6500 and decided to give it a try on this 5500, as they're evidently the same tv with different sku's. I was very impressed with the change, and look forward to this evening when I can really get into it with either a good Pixar movie or maybe one of the Marvel's. I did get a chance to try out my go-to scene - the bank robbery in Dark Knight - for a little bit before the sun came around the house, and it was sharply detailed, to the point where I actually noticed a tiny bit of camera shake on the initial fly-in scene before the two robbers do their zip-line stunt. I also checked out the first two chapters in The Avengers, and was even more impressed.

These seem to have risen in price since I bought mine, and there seems to be quite the demand for them. Despite c|net's claims that this is a compromised cheapie plasma for someone who disregards everything else just to say they have 1080p, I find it to be an excellent buy.

Anyone have any suggestions on things I could check or experiment with to get even more out of this, or perhaps someone has some questions they need answered?