PRODUCT REVIEW: LG DU-42PY10X INTEGRATED PLASMA TELEVISION
LG’s DU-42PY10X plasma television showed up too late for my CableCARD evaluation, but deserves attention all the same. It’s a high-resolution (1024x768 pixels) plasma display with built-in digital TV tuners for terrestrial (ATSC) and cable (CableCARD) reception.
Figure 1 – Front view of DU-42PY10X.
LG has also provided the Gemstar / TV Guide electronic program guide (EPG)
service, which (in theory) will provide detailed program listings for
all available cable and off-air TV channels. However, you will have to
make sure you have chosen the correct cable program lineup in order for
this feature to work.
With this TV and a CableCARD from your local cable company, you can watch a variety of off-air and cable channels using nothing more than a couple of coaxial cable connections. There’s even a Firewire (IEEE1394) port for connection to an external digital recorder, in case you wish to time-shift TV programs.
OUT OF THE BOX
The review unit came with the stand attached. There are two speakers attached to either side, and they are rated at 15 watts per channel. For general purpose TV viewing, they will do the job.
But LG has also provided three optical digital audio outputs for a full-blown home theater audio system if you want to go that way instead. There are also extra inputs for video sources, including composite and S-video, a pair of YPbPr component inputs, a 15-pin RGB connection for personal computers, and a High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) port for one-cable connection of digital video and audio from DVD players and set-top receivers.
The pair of IEEE1394 interfaces will work with any compliant devices, including MiniDV camcorders and D-VHS recorders. The connector complement is rounded out with a RS-232C interface, a 1/8” mini-lug remote control output, two RF inputs for antenna and cable, and that all-important CableCARD slot.
REMOTE, MENUS, AND SETUP
The supplied remote control is one of those long ‘bat’ types that won’t win any awards for ingeniously small packaging, but is quite ergonomic and easy to navigate. It can be programmed to control five additional components in your system, clearly indicated with a small monochrome LCD display at the top of the remote.
While the keypad buttons provide direct access to the 1394 ports, they do not allow direct access to any other input. You can step through composite and S-video inputs with the TV/Video button, or cycle through the Component, RGB, and HDMI inputs with another button.
Additional buttons activate closed captions, program information (if available), cycle between seven different aspect ratios, and activate a timer mechanism. The TV Guide feature has its own dedicated button, which brings up a set of menus and a detailed program listing for all reception modes – analog off-air and cable, and digital off-air and cable.
The main menu is fairly simple. There are adjustments for video, audio, and labeling of all inputs. In the video menu, you can choose between one of five different picture presets (Daylight, Normal, Night Time, Movie, and Video Game) or simply turn them off and make up your own picture settings.
If you can access the Expert menu, you can adjust a lot more parameters including RGB gain and offset. None of these adjustments are available in the standard menu – all you can do is cycle between one of three color temperature adjustments. In the audio menu, LG provides a setting called “EZ SOUNDRITE” which uses simulated surround sound to give you Normal, Stadium, Theater, and Music modes.
Additional menus provide access to a low-power display mode which cuts light output by about half, plus three plasma life-extending options – picture orbiting, inverse mode, and an all-white screen to clear out a residual image. I don’t recommend using any of them unless you are a heavy computer/video game player or use this TV to show static computer images and photos.
CHANNEL SCANS AND TV GUIDE
A guided setup and demo show you how to get the set connected and perform channel scans. If a CableCARD is going to be used, it must be plugged in before a channel scan is performed so that the TV can detect it.
The CableCARD installs vertically on the rear panel. But the slot is not as easy to feel on this TV as on other’s I have tested, so care must be taken to make sure the CableCARD is sliding easily on its tracks before you ‘home’ it into position. Otherwise, you risk damaging the card slot pins.
Figure 2a – The CableCARD must be inserted carefully into its slot…
Figure 2b - …and slid home to lock in place.
The RF inputs on this TV are clearly marked CABLE and ANTENNA. You will
need to make sure you have sufficient signal level from your cable connection
to this TV. Digital cable (and off-air signals, too) work only when their
carrier-to-noise (C/N) ratio is sufficiently high enough. Otherwise, the
picture and audio may lock up from time to time, prompting an on-screen
display telling you to contact your cable company with “error number 161-10”.
None of my contacts at Comcast knew what that LG error number stood for exactly, but I surmised that it had to do with low signal levels. So if your cable feed goes through a bunch of splitters as it travels through your house, it might be best to have your cable provider check to see if the level at the input to the DU-42PY10X (or any CableCARD TV, for that matter) is adequate. If not, a good quality broadband RF amplifier would be a good thing to add where the cable feed enters your house.
The channel scan menu will search for (in sequence) analog off-air, digital off-air, analog cable, and digital cable signals. With the CableCARD in place and activated, you don’t really need to do a digital cable channel scan, so you can quickly exit that part of the process once other channels are loaded into memory.
Figure 3 – The TV Guide interface will ask for 24 hours to load program
information.
The TV Guide feature takes a bit longer to set up. You have to enter your
zip code and tell the TV how you have the two RF inputs configured. A
subsequent on-screen prompt tells you to turn off the TV for 24 hours
so that it can load program guide information for all available channels.
In my case, the program guide data was not displayed even after 24 hours.
Instead, the TV Guide menu asked me to choose from one of six different Comcast Cable program line-ups for my area. The customer service rep at Comcast couldn’t tell me for certain which one to use (with a cable set-top box, that process is handled automatically) so I guessed and entered a digital cable lineup. The channel numbers plotted correctly, but after another 24 hours I still didn’t have any program guide information.
Figure 4 – After 24 hours, I still couldn’t get any off-air or cable listings.
As I moved through the available cable and off-air channels, the channel
grid followed my selections exactly. It just couldn’t tell me anything
about the program I was watching at the time. Whether this was due to
a software problem or not, I couldn’t say for sure.
The off-air digital (ATSC) receiver in the DU-42PY10X uses 4th-generation chipsets.
However, I could not see a substantial difference between its ATSC performance and that of a vintage-2003 LG LST3100A set-top receiver. In a test using an outside UHF Yagi antenna, both the TV and STB received exactly the same number of DTV stations, missing a few strong signals that were off to the sides of the antenna.
I did see a slight improvement with indoor signals and a Silver Sensor UHF antenna placed behind the DU-42PY10X, which was able to pull in three more DTV channels than the LST3100A. The improvement in reception wasn’t as dramatic as I had expected, but I’ll take it!
CALIBRATION
The DU-42PY10X plasma TV is the first LG product I’ve tested that uses their new XD picture enhancement technology. You can see the results right off the bat; this plasma TV has far deeper blacks and more contrast than any LG plasma display I’ve tested in the past.
Out of the box, there doesn’t appear to be much you can do to calibrate the DU-42PY10X other than play with the usual ‘big 5’ picture adjustments and three factory color temperature presets. Actually, the middle preset (marked appropriately, ‘MIDDLE’) gets you close to the desired D6500 ‘ballpark’.
Unfortunately, the grayscale measurements using this setting wander from a low of D5000 at 20 IRE up to D6710 at 100 IRE. Not terrible, but I was able to do much better once I got the service codes and did some fiddlin’ on my own in the Expert menu.
After calibration for best grayscale (contrast set to about 70% and brightness at 60%), I fine-tuned the RGB controls to produce a tighter grayscale that ranged from D6150 to D6650, with only a spike to D6950 at 20 IRE.
I mentioned the super-low black levels on this plasma TV earlier. With the XD picture control on, they dropped to .17 nits (.05 ft-L) and I measured average contrast at 596:1 with peak contrast clocked in at 772:1. Switching the XD control off raised black levels to a still-respectable .35 nits (.1 ft-L), which is on a par with the best plasma monitors available today.
Like all plasma monitors and TVs, the DU-42PY10X has an automatic picture level circuit to guard against image burn-in and premature aging. As a result, a full white screen produced a reading of 72 nits (21 ft-L), but a small area white test pattern from my AccuPel HDG2000 resulted in a reading of 298 nits (87.4 ft-L).
The only knock on image quality is a moderate amount of false contour artifacts at low picture levels. You won’t see them with brightly lit images, but they are apparent with movies or in scenes with deep shadows.
IMAGE QUALITY TESTS
For my tests, composite, S-video, and component 480i test patterns came from Video Essentials, while a handful of test DVDs and movies provided 480p sources. For HDTV tests, I scanned through off-air signals and cable channels such as Discovery HD, HBO HD, and INHD. I also hooked up a Humax HFA100 terrestrial (ATSC) set-top receiver to the TV’s HDMI input to give that a whirl.
As a rule, I have never been a big fan of non-square pixel matrices in plasma monitors. The 1024x768 non-square pixel array in the DU-42PY10X is a difficult number for scaling video and as a result, you will notice some images never really look as sharp as they could be. I found this to be especially true when viewing analog cable, composite and S-video, and component 480i video.
By switching to 480p inputs, picture quality improved tremendously, although plenty of noise was evident in dark scenes of movies like Men In Black and Pirates of the Caribbean. False contours (abrupt change in luminance at low levels) were also clearly seen with these movies and some 1080i movies from HBO and Cinemax.
The Silicon Optix test DVD showed that, while composite video decoding is quite good on the DU-42PY10X, it has trouble cleanly de-interlacing 480i material and also is slow to pick up on the 2:3 cadence of film transferred to video. There also appeared to be a fair amount of ringing on lower-resolution video.
HDTV looked far better, even though the DU-42PY10X doesn’t have enough bandwidth to pass full 720p and 1080i, rolling off everything above 18 MHz. Switching to the RGB input doesn’t improve bandwidth at all. But there is some much more detail in HD images that it makes this TV really shine.
Live HD programs, such as a Pretenders concert, boxing matches, and a concours d’elegance auto show (all viewed on INHD) provided the best image quality with saturated colors, plenty of picture detail, and rich blacks. On the other hand, HD transfers like Saving Private Ryan, The Ring, and X-Men II were not as impressive due to the noise and false contour problems mentioned earlier.
Using the HDMI input should have improved matters, but it actually degraded picture quality. All of the video I viewed through this input was overly pixilated and grainy, as if the sharpness control was turned up all the way. Even the best HD content I could find looked better through the bandwidth-limited component video inputs.
If you want to make this TV the centerpiece of your theater, use a quality outboard video scaler with composite, S-video, and component 480i sources for best picture quality, noise reduction, de-interlacing, and motion adaptive correction.
(NOTE: If you want to use a computer with this display, be
advised that the highest resolution it can support is 1024x768 with a
picture refresh rate of 60, 72, or 75 Hz. You must go into the menu and
set up the RGB input for a computer, then experiment with the output resolution
of your PC video card to see what will work best.)
LG DU-42PY10X
42” INTEGRATED DIGITAL PLASMA HDTV
MSRP: $5,499.99
Dimensions (panel):
48" W x 24.8" H x 3.8" D (without stand)
47.8" W x 27.2" H x 10.7" D (with stand)
Weight (panel):
67.2 pounds (without stand)
88.5 pounds (with stand)
Available from:
LG Electronics USA Inc.
1000 Sylvan Avenue
Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632
800-243-0000
www.lgusa.com