Ratings: 
Price: $1,350
Homepage: www.play.com
LG’s lastest plasma TV is rather different
than its competitors. Besides standard remote control, it has a pentouch
letting you write on a 50-inch screen. If you do not want to give the new
expensive tablet to the kids, this may be the next best thing.
Before starting to scrawl, you have to
install driver on PC (Mac OS X is not supported) and connect it to TV. This process
is easy to execute but it took us a few trials to make everything combined and
synchronic.
Software app includes diary, photo galary,
web browser, office file viewer, and sketchbook. Except you intend to use TV as
another choice for office projector, the most useful app is certainly
sketchbook. The kids like drawing ability on TV, although if they know how to
use iPad, they may not be very impressed with using a pen. The system is quite
fast but its limited tools are not sure to attract everyone.
TV base has 4 hard legs. Silver bezel of
the thin screen looks so great and all connections are behind. 3 HDMI ports,
video component, VGA, composite and SCART inputs, digital optical and 3.5mm
audio inputs, a general interface slot and a single USB port will be enough for
most home settings.
50PZ850T
uses the active 3D glasses
Touch features do not force you to pay by
other features - 50PZ850T includes DLNA media transmit ability, USB hard drive
recording and Internet TV. Unfortunately, Internet TV is limited by LG’s
specific apps, so there is no famous name like BBC iPlayer or Five on Demand.
LG’s interface may be slow to react, but at least it is easy to navigate – we
encountered no problem in playing file from USB drive. File format support is
excellent, and all files we tested played appropriately. USB recording ability
is quite basic; you have to format the memory bar fisrt and just be able to
record one channel per time.
Image quality is not as good as last year’s
Sony and Panasonic TVs, but plasma technology helps create extremely excellent
black level compared to LCD TVs with the same price. Footage with standard
sharpness on TV is quite reasonable, with some noise artcfacts from
high-quality channels. Low bandwidth streams sounds rather bad, lacking facial
details. HD Blu-ray video is much better, with fresh lines and plenty of
details. Colors are a bit light at defaut settings, but we can increase
liveliness in menus.
Unlike most LG TVs we have seen since this
year, 50PZ850T uses the active 3D glasses in stead of the passive ones. We
often prefer passive 3D due to no screen shake, but the glasses accompanied by
TV well reduced this impact. They are also lighter than most active glasses
although you still need to buy additional glasses ($75/pair from www.play.com) if there are many people want to
watch 3D film. There was a little of shadow and crosstalk, so we could watch
the film comfortably without resting.
Sound quality was quite basic. Two 10W
speakers worked quite well with satellite TV, but we want to use the surround
sound system to watch film – the speakers lack bass and are not very loud.
Pentouch is an interesting idea, but
complex settings and limited features reduce its attractiveness. Besides, there
is a question about the price. You pay much for the pen (LG’s standard Full HD
Plasma TV, 50PZ570T, $150 cheaper). 50PZ850T has good image quality, but if you
do not intend to use it, there is no reason to pay more for the PenTouch
feature.
Summary
LG
Pentouch 50PZ850T - A well-equipped TV
Verdict. A well-equipped TV, but the addition of PenTouch means that it is
not a very good value.
50-inch 3D plasma TV. 1,920 x 1,080 native resolution,
3,000,000:1 contrast ratio, 3 HDMI inputs, 2 SCARTs, 1 VGA, 1 component, 1
composite, Freeview HD, analogue tuner, one-year RTB warranty
Power consumption. 1W – standby mode, 179W – on mode
