Samsung PN50A760 Plasma HDTV Review - Performance: Color

The Samsung PN50A760 did a good job with color, with excellent performance in maintaning color temperature and very good performance in matching the standard for the color gamut. It's reproduction of red, green and blue was only average, however. All of the testing in this section was done with DisplayMate, which you can read more about in our Performance: Summary section.

Color Temperature (9.53)
You may remember learning in school that the color of stars varies depending on their temperature, from cool red to hot blue. Televisions can also show such variance in their whites with reddish or bluish casts across the range of whites from dark grey to bright white. This is what we're looking for in this test. Below you can see a graph of the Samsung PN50A760's with color temperature varying across the greyscale.

You can see from this graph that the Samsung PN50A760 does show some variation, but such variation isn't a big deal if your eye doesn't notice it. That's what we look at in the graph below. Here you see the color of every point graphed. The key feature here is the red circle, any variation within the red circle is not noticeable by the human eye. You can see that the vast majority of points for the Samsung PN50A760 fall within the circle, which means the PN50A760's performance in this test was very good. About the only thing you might notice is a slight bluish tinge to dark greys, a common occurrence with HDTVs, but even in this area the variance shown by the Samsung PN50A760 is significantly less than we've seen from other televisions. We were very pleased with its performance.

RGB Curve (7.59)
Every color that your television set produces is created by mixing different amounts of red, green and blue, much like you produced varying colors by mixing primary ones in art class as a child. As such the accuracy with which the display produces those colors is very important, and that's what we look at in this test. Below you see three graphs for the Samsung PN50A760, one for each of these colors, graphing their brightness as compared to their intensity. As you can see there's a pretty obvious relationship here, as the intensity of the color gets higher so does the brightness.

There are more subtle things we look for when deciding if the colors are being reproduced accurately, however. One thing that you can notice immediately is that the curves are slightly bumpy. We much prefer to see the curves smooth and even across the range of intensities. This bumpiness indicates that the Samsung PN50A760 has some issues when going from one level of a color to another, which can produce inaccurate colors on the display.

We also noticed some separate issues with artifacts on the Samsung PN50A760. In particular we noticed that in certain greyscale patterns the display showed a signal processing problem that produced something that looked like noise. This could certainly show up when watching content that has similar greyscale patterns, say on a suit or a building. Overall the Samsung PN50A760's performance in this area was just about average, we've seen significantly better, but also worse.

Color Gamut (7.74)
All televisions are supposed to produce colors within a specific range defined by a standard know as ITU Recommendation .709. In the graph below you can see the Samsung PN50A760's performance graphed against that standard.

You can see that the Samsung PN50A760 does a very good job here, with it's color gamut matching the standard's very closely. There is a slight bit of error, but it's not significant enough that you'll notice it in most content and is significantly better than we've seen from other televisions. If you're wondering exactly how much error there is, you can see the exact numbers in the table below.