LG 42PT350 Plasma HDTV Review

Motion Performance

The LG 42PT350's motion test performance was marked by a lot of errors. Images with fine details, like faces or smooth color gradients, became garbled with ugly color banding and fuzzy mosquito noise. High contrast images wobbled and distorted, leaving color trails. It was a mess. It's hard to tell which problems were caused by the pixel response time and processing, and which were caused by problems with the resolution scaling, discussed further down this page. More on how we test motion performance.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps

The LG 42PT350 has few problems displaying native 24fps, like you might get with Blu-Ray movies. There was a little judder when viewing scenes with slow, horizontal pans, but nothing notably bad. More on how we test 3:2 pulldown and 24fps.

Resolution Scaling

The LG 42PT350 has an unusual native resolution of 1024 x 768. This is not a common TV resolution. In fact, it's far more common on computer monitors, so it's possible that LG's factory had some overstock in one division, so they just pawned it off on the TV manufacturing division.

The problem is that there's no 1024 x 768 video broadcast. Everything you TV signal you feed it has to be re-sized to fit the screen, and the LG 42PT350 does a very poor job of it. Fine details, like small text, are frequently unintelligible. Moires appear in areas of high-frequency patterns (like certain clothing fabrics). More on how we test resolution scaling.

480p

The 480p signal we sent the LG 42PT350 lost 1% of the image on all sides due to overscan. There was also noticeable Moire in certain patterns. It's unusual that a TV chokes on 480p.

720p

The 720p test patterns also showed significant Moireing in high contrast / high frequency patterns.

1080p

The 1080p patterns were the biggest problem. Small text was completely illegible.