The bottom line is that I could get a more accurate picture, without going into the service menus, in the Expert modes. I used Expert1 for all of my calibrations, tests, and serious viewing.

The fun really begins in the Expert Control submenu. However, three of the options are best left off (or in their default modes) most of the time: Dynamic Contrast, Color Gamut (default is Standard), and Noise Reduction.

The Gamma control offers three settings, and High almost always looks (and measures) the best. A Color Filter control lets you view the red, green, and blue colors independently, which is useful for setting the Color and Tint controls accurately without an external filter. The set also has an Intelligent Sensor that monitors the room’s lighting and optimizes the image’s brightness accordingly. It’s part of the Energy Saving feature’s three active settings (Minimum, Medium, and Maximum), plus Off. I used Off for all of my tests and viewing except where noted.

The White Balance adjustments set this LG (and many of its recent siblings) apart. It not only offers the classic high and low adjustments for red, green, and blue, but also adjustments at each 5-IRE step in the brightness range. That is, you can perform a two-point or 20-point calibration.

There’s also a color management system with color and tint controls for the primary (red, green, and blue) and secondary (yellow, magenta, and cyan) colors.

The remote isn’t backlit, and you can’t select inputs directly from it. But the button size and layout are sensible, and the set’s onscreen menus are among the best and most intuitive I’ve seen. All things considered, the set’s ergonomics are hard to fault.

Widgets and Gidgets
The LG 60PS80 is loaded with Internet features. You don’t need a computer to access them, but you must supply the Internet service and a wired Ethernet link to the set. As with all similar features that many of today’s sets offer, the content is limited to the partners that LG has signed up. As of this writing, these include Yahoo!, Netflix, YouTube, and VUDU.

If you include the pages that describe the network setup and how to use the set to play photos and MP3s, the manual dedicates nearly 40 pages to these features. The various widgets and Web features worked largely as advertised, but some of the ergonomics you need to make full use of them could use further refinement—or better explanations in the manual. For example, I couldn’t figure out how to use the YouTube Search mode.

Perspiration in Calibration
The 20-step calibration I performed was time-consuming and tedious, but the results were spectacularly good—at first. When I rechecked it the next day (to record the Before and After Calibration results), it had dramatically worsened. I performed the calibration once again (the results of this second try are shown in “HT Labs Measures”). At the same time, I performed a simpler, two-step calibration, which was effective but clearly not as precise as the 20-step version.

Because of this odd experience, I rechecked it again on the third day. It had significantly shifted yet again. When I discussed this with Joel Silver of the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF), he noted that plasmas in general tend to be unstable in their gray-scale tracking until about 300 hours of use—that is, until their phosphors settle in. He also recommended that the 20-step calibration be performed from the top down, beginning at 100 IRE.

Putting 300 hours on any display is wildly impractical for a timely review. I generally aim for at least 100 hours with a full-screen white test pattern at mid-brightness before I do any serious setup on either plasmas or projectors (projection lamps also need to settle in). The color shifts I found, while clearly measurable, were not visibly significant enough to impact my judgment of the set’s color performance.