There is a five-level Power Saving control in the Option menu. Each level produces a progressively dimmer image. I used zero (the brightest setting) for all of my tests and viewing.

The Option menu’s ISM Method control offers three different features (Orbiter, Inversion, and White Wash) to help mini- mize image burn-in. The features work on both temporary (which LG calls image sticking) and permanent burn-in. The set also produced very light, nondefeatable side bars on 4:3 material, which some viewers might find distracting.

The LG did appear to be more prone to temporary image retention than the comparable Pioneer and Panasonic plasmas I’ve tested. But it clocked less than 100 hours at the end of the review period. Plasmas in general are less prone to various degrees of burn-in after their first 100 to 200 hours of use.

SimpLink is LG’s version of HDMI Consumer Electronics Control (CEC). LG claims that this feature will operate seamlessly with other LG components that carry the LG SimpLink logo and are connected via HDMI.

Performance
The first thing I noticed about the LG’s picture was that a blank screen was medium gray. A screen with a full black image—with no input—or a full fade-out between scenes should ideally be (but almost never is) totally black. This is a strong hint that a set has a relatively high black level. The second thing I noticed was that the set’s picture was remarkably impressive despite this.

I’ll get to the inevitable discussion of black level and shadow detail before you can finish that cheeseburger and fries. But first let’s look at the things that the LG does extremely well. And there are plenty. Its post- calibration color is superb. More than a year after its release, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl remains one of the best Blu-ray transfers on the market. The bright opening scenes, from Jack Sparrow’s star-making entrance to his initial escape, were striking. Fleshtones were natural, the green foliage of Port Royal was convincingly real, the sky was a perfect shade of blue, and the red of the British uniforms was a solid crimson.

The second Pirates film on Blu-ray, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, is a significantly different-looking disc. It’s a bit more subdued and moody, touched with a trace of sepia, and a little grainier. But it’s no less impressive, and the LG clearly brought out the visual differences between these two transfers.

The LG also excelled in resolution. A Sharpness setting of 50 didn’t produce any ringing but did display a barely visible trace of white edge sharpening on vertical lines in a sharpness pattern, even at a setting of 0. There was only a subtle difference between a setting of 0 and 50 (I settled on 20).

There was no shortage of detail evident in any good HD source I watched, including Stargate: Continuum. The actors’ facial textures were clearly defined but not exaggerated in this made-for-video movie’s many close-ups.

Hidalgo is also loaded with fine detail. The film’s many harshly lit desert scenes showed the set’s ability to clearly render details of backlit, shadowed faces without obscuring them or lightening them too much. This isn’t an easy balance to get right. The few dark scenes in this film do have well-lit highlights, which helped them from turning as gray as the set’s performance on a full black screen suggested they would.

My early reaction to the set’s black-level performance was that it was superior (on most of the program material I checked) to the Mitsubishi LT-52149 LCD I also review in this issue (page 82). The star field near the beginning of Stargate: Continuum and the scenes of the tramp steamer on the ocean at night from the same film both appeared to have more punch on the LG. However, neither scene was exactly a knockout on either set. The same was the case with dark scenes from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

However, as it turned out, the LG’s measured black level was unimpressive and nowhere near as good as the measured black level on the Mitsubishi. Nevertheless, on a side- by-side comparison, the LG was clearly the superior set. The two sets didn’t look all that different on many dark scenes despite the measurements. When they did differ, the LG clearly looked better. That was also true of the set’s crispness of detail and the accuracy and naturalness of its color. The LG’s image was clearly less bright than the LCD set on very bright images. Still, I can only explain this discrepancy between the measurements and my subjective viewing impressions by pointing to the fact that the LG’s image popped off the screen with a more convincingly real vividness on mid- and low-brightness scenes. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this phenomenon on a plasma set.

In more mundane but important matters, the LG, like all plasmas we’ve tested, has a very reflective screen. But it has no inherent motion blur, and it lets you view it from as far off axis as you might choose to sit without any obvious loss of image quality.

The set’s 480i-to-480p video processing turned in several excellent scores and only two fair ones: the waving-flag and 2:2 cadence tests on the HQV Benchmark DVD. In our standard HD tests, it was only a few notches short of excellent. It turned in a good but slightly flawed result in 3:2 pulldown recognition and treatment. It also passed two standard tests but showed slight moiré and flicker on the Vatican walls and steps in chapters 7 and 8 of Mission: Impossible III. It performed poorly on the Spears & Munsil 2:2 pulldown tests and only scored fair in its handling of mixed film/video content. Still, it’s rare for a display to sail through all of our tests, and overall, I’d rate the LG’s video processing as good.

Conclusions
I wish the LG had deeper, richer blacks. And I was disappointed in the accuracy of the THX Cinema mode. But these two limitations aside, the LG’s performance, after calibration, was superb in almost every other respect. Its color and resolution were exceptional, and its images were lively and compelling. Apart from a few of the most difficult dark scenes, I enjoyed every minute I spent watching it.