DAVID KATZMAIER
TEST REPORT
DIMENSIONS
(WxHxD) 56 x 35 x 14
3
⁄
8
inches (with stand)
WEIGHT
137
7
⁄
8
pounds
PRICE
$8,000
MANUFACTURER
LG, www.lgusa.com,
800-243-0000
fast facts
•
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
key features
®
ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM JULY/AUGUST 2005
LG
50-inch Plasma HDTV with
Hard-disk Recorder
T
he new 50PY2DR plasma
HDTV from LG comes with a
bright yellow insert explaining
in all caps that the set’s Cable-
CARD and TV Guide On Screen
electronic program guide elimi-
nate 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 opera-
tion and connection are simpler with Cable-
CARD/TV Guide On Screen. All of that is
arguably true for this and other late-mod-
el 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.
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 won-
der why the company didn’t throw in a slot-
loading DVD player on the side just to com-
plete the picture.
LG houses its feature-packed plasma in
a glossy piano-black cabinet that exudes
bachelor-pad class but reflects a lot of ambi-
ent 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 ergo-
nomic 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 enthusi-
asts 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 get-
ting full use of the hard-disk recorder. The
guide grabs program information from cable
and off-air antenna sources (though not sat-
ellite) 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 epi-
sode 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 custom-
ize the position channels appear in, integrat-
ing 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 infor-
mation from my Time Warner Cable New
York City system, the channels came in ran-
domly and had to be reordered one by one
to match the guide in the cable box, a te-
dious 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, some-
thing previous versions of TV Guide On
Screen I’ve tested have failed to do. It also
PH
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OS B
Y T
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soundandvisionmag.com
