LG 50 PC 56

.../> How good is the LG 50PC56 for watching? This depends entirely on what you feed into it. If you have Virgin Cable then it's very poor. I've had an engineer come out to see why the built in Freeview which is great looked so much nicer than the slightly ghosting Cable. He said that this was an incompatibility between Virgin Media's compression and both LG and Samsung TVs. This is only likely to be true of their conventional programmes and not anything ...
...in HD so we're stuck with just about watchable cable from Virgin mostly.

However, this bad news isn't really the fault of this excellent TV. Those issues are about the poor source. Freeview looks much clearer which proves it.

The picture gets a whole lot better with DVDs. Even the good Freeview can't compete with that. This is because we're feeding the beast a better quality input from a Toshiba HDE1 DVD player. Now, ... more

This is a great TV. It's huge, clear, shiny and black, and works perfectly. People compare our living room to a cinema. A massive 50" set in a conventional living area should be too big though shouldn't it? You'd think so.

In fact we have more room than ever! Why? Because the old 28" TV it replaced was much larger. It had a smaller picture but the bulk of it went back and back to house the cathode ray tube. The 50PC56 doesn't have one. So it's effectively flat. Because it's flat it goes on the wall over the fireplace. It's mounted on a mighty bracket that allows a small amount of forward angling if required and looks pretty much like a big shiny picture of a black cat, at night, in a dark cellar. It's actually as wide as our fireplace but we really did gain a lot of room! The corner was made free.

Installation: this can be expensive. I've seen £300 quoted. On the other hand it needn't be. I did if for nothing. This involved buying a half inch drill bit to make the big holes for the bracket bolts and getting a strong friend to help lift the other side of the TV onto it once things were all readied. It's unmanageably heavy for one person unless that person is huge and a wrestler. It's also unwieldy being so wide and you wouldn't want to lean the weight of the delicate screen on your chest so it really does have to be a two man job. It would be tragic to slip with it. Once in place, of course, the TV weighs nothing and is more secure and, in our case higher up and child-proof, than a conventional one.

Obviously, we don't use the fire and it we did it's a gas fire pretending to be a coal fire and couldn't damage the TV. Should anyone consider installing one over a fireplace, commonsense should be used. You wouldn't want to melt or distort it.

The quality of the bracket which you need to buy separately is up to you as is the price. I found great variation on the Internet whilst shopping around for one and you could save a great deal by doing the same thing. One well known PC superstore local to me was charging over £80 more for the bracket than the shop next door to it.

There was a £300 variation in price between the big three main high street electronic specialists on the TV itself. If you added the extra costs of installation and inexplicable price variations for the same machine and stand you can see what a fortune you could waste if you didn't keep your wits about you.

Connectivity: The 50PC56 has two HDMI sockets. These are a lot smaller than Scart sockets and are required for HD to work fully I believe. They certainly make connecting and setup simple. These are the modern connectors for such things as digital boxes as supplied by Sky and Virgin Media and HD DVD players.

There are also two Scarts for connecting VCRs or conventional equipment, and RGB socket which means I can run my laptop through it easily (including multi-region videos that my HD DVD player can't play), and my son has his Playstation 2 plugged into the side of the machine and working fine.

There's an optical digital connector that I've chosen to use to feed a surround sound amplifier and speakers and it does that perfectly. The cable wasn't supplied and was a further expense of £30.

The only criticism I'd make of the connectivity is that most of the sockets are on the back and although that's better than on the front in the middle of the picture... it's not as good as, say, underneath for access. Once connected the various plugs are invisible but it's quite a tricky feat to reach up behind the machine whilst looking at the manual's picture of the back and plug anything in. Fortunately, once things are attached they're done for a long time.

You can't take this TV out of standby without pulling the mains plug out of the wall or flicking the switch. This annoys my wife as the socket is difficult to reach and we can't easily do that. The manual suggests turning things off fully whilst being struck by lightning or going on holiday.

How good is the LG 50PC56 for watching? This depends entirely on what you feed into it. If you have Virgin Cable then it's very poor. I've had an engineer come out to see why the built in Freeview which is great looked so much nicer than the slightly ghosting Cable. He said that this was an incompatibility between Virgin Media's compression and both LG and Samsung TVs. This is only likely to be true of their conventional programmes and not anything they put out in HD. Unfortunately, they have barely anything in HD so we're stuck with just about watchable cable from Virgin mostly.

However, this bad news isn't really the fault of this excellent TV. Those issues are about the poor source. Freeview looks much clearer which proves it.

The picture gets a whole lot better with DVDs. Even the good Freeview can't compete with that. This is because we're feeding the beast a better quality input from a Toshiba HDE1 DVD player. Now, if you're new to this technology this may be good to know: this player and a lot of others can produce improved DVD quality. This particular player can play HD discs so the quality is breathtaking. However, ordinary discs are better than usual too due to a process called 'upscaling'. Imagine holding an old film with frames on a strip of celluloid. Upscaling extrapolates and inserts frames between the real ones so that the result is smoother and more detailed.

Actual HD on this TV is faultless to my eye although how good it is will be a lot to do with the movie. The first one I bought was 'Doom' because I like computer games and it's about that world. Unfortunately it was a movie full of dark corridors and probably not great as a showcase for this TV's HD capabilities. We hired one about penguins and the arctic from Amazon.co.uk, on the other hand, which had fewer explosions but looked much more impressive. The detail is superb.

There are TVs that can run at a resolution of HD with the catchy number 1080P and this one doesn't. It does a top resolution of 1080i which means it's interlaced. That suggests flickering but I've never seen any.

To bring those points together in my attempt to say how good a picture you get from the 50PC56: rubbish in will give you rubbish out. High quality inputs will produce vivid clarity you'll be delighted with. It depends greatly on your signal source. DVD will be noticeably better than Freeview and Freeview may be better than something else.

Being a 50" monster of a screen this means that where problems with your picture signal are significant, they'll be magnified and irritating. If you can sit back a long, long way, they'll be reduced. On the other hand, if you're close to the screen as we are in a not particularly large living room, strong signals such as 'upscaled' DVD or actual HD DVD are just wonderful to watch and you'd have to be some kind of technical expert to explain where any faults lie. I can't see any at all.

We have family disputes about the picture settings. I like to soften the images by reducing contrast and sharpness controls. I find that this makes the picture better when the signal is weaker - such as on Virgin Media. It reduces the number of things wrong with it when set on factory settings or standard settings from the menu by my wife and children. They like it to look brash in my opinion. One nice feature of the LG50PC56 that makes this sort of problem go away unless, of course, we're all watching the same programme, is that there are two 'user settings' slots in the picture set up menu. That means I can quickly find my ideal 'washed out fog' whilst they can breeze in and just as quickly change it to 'glaring chocolate box'.

The sound quality is probably typical of that to be heard on plasma televisions. It's loud and clear and quite acceptable. We even use it in its standard form. The news, for example, rarely benefits from having lots of speakers around the room. It produces a sound quality quite suitable for Newsnight or anything involving debate and speech.

For movies - and here I'm suggesting additional expense - a good surround system has much to recommend it. When the input source is an HD or upscaled movie and the picture is so very good it would be a shame not to have sound of a comparable quality. Using the optical output (why waste a valuable HDMI one) we feed a large surround sound amplifier and five speakers plus a thumping subwoofer. This does justice to so mighty an image and makes a movie on the LG50PC56 an even more compelling experience.

I don't know of any plasma televisions where this caveat wouldn't apply. They don't sound bad at all without surround being added. It's just that if you do add it the difference will be entirely worth it and movies will be more enjoyable. Let's face it, this is a TV bigger than you'll see in an airport departure lounge or hotel reception. It's fine (once you get used to the shock of such a big picture) for watching anything but the most appropriate use for it is surely enjoying movies. That needs the further expense of a surround system in my opinion and some would include copious amounts of popcorn as another vital requirement.

Price: I found mine for little more than £900 but you could easily buy it from shops or off the Internet for three hundred pounds more if you're not careful. The main dealers on the high street are less far apart on price as I write this than they were when I bought mine buy even so - be careful. Also, look at the difference between their online and instore prices because there's a huge saving to be made by ordering on the Internet in some cases.

Technology: the LG50PC56 is a plasma television as opposed to an LCD model. That's the choice currently with flat screens. The LCD has been found in computer monitors for a long time and smaller sets have a greater likelihood of being LCD. They're getting a whole lot bigger just recently though. Big screen TV has meant Plasma for a long time and, when you get to 50" and above, Plasma is still more likely to be what you'll find available.

There are strengths and weaknesses in both technologies.

LCD screens can get stuck or dead pixels resulting in a tiny light or dark speck that can't usually be fixed. Manufacturers will do nothing about that unless you get a few of them. They have policies about this based on the number of dead pixels. LCDs in the past have lost picture quality fast if you've looked at them from an angle such as sitting next to someone at a PC. Straight on was always better. This issue is being resolved as new machines come out. You can see a perfectly clear picture on our LG50PC56 wherever you sit in our living room. There's no reduction of quality from any reasonable viewing angle.

LCD screens use less electricity and last twice as long according to the predictions made by manufacturers. Again, plasma TV manufacturers whilst they may not dispute the higher power consumption, are eager to stress that their machines' longevity is improving all the time. The 'half life' of a plasma TV is currently 50,000 hours if I remember correctly. That doesn't mean it will then cease to be radioactive. That means it will be half as bright as the day you bought it. If you read the comments I made on how my family and I set up the picture as either 'washed out' or 'chocolate box', you'll appreciate how I long for the day when it can't be made too bright and sharp!

This is a luxury TV. Nobody really needs one this large. I'd recommend it highly to film buffs but if you're just a couch potato and wish you weren't this machine is going to hypnotise you into submission and you're not going to be going out again, ever.

Other televisions of this immensity may be even better for all I know but the LG50PC56 is a sub £1000 one. For those of us who want to spoil ourselves but not spend two or three times that amount, this is a great option. With technology the prices go down and the technical content goes up all the time. Waiting for a cheaper and bigger TV? Well, the prices may come down but unless you live in a hollowed out volcano, any bigger than this would be just showing off.

When we first gave thought to getting a new TV we imagined a much smaller flat screen model in the corner. My wife said a 32" set would be fine - after all our existing model was only 28" so even that would have been an improvement. So why - apart from all the technical considerations such as how far one should ideally sit from a set of a given size (ha!) and the relative merits and disadvantages or LCD versus Plasma technology - did we get such a monster of a TV?

It wasn't a difficult or very technical reason that clinched it. We went to Dixons one day as we were passing by and went in to take a casual glance at what all these new TVs were like. She'd wanted to either keep our old one or, at most, go for something modest. However, despite her being unequivocal in these views at home, when I found her she wasn't looking around. She had no interest in any of the TVs but one. It was the biggest. Her eyes were twinkling and her feet planted in front of it. Decision made!

The LG50PC56. 

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