LG PM9700 review: LG PM9700

If there's one company that's really doubled its efforts in regard to TV design this year, it's LG. Judged purely from the outside, the 2012 line looks like it should comprise the best TVs on the market -- very sleek and slim. But based on our experiences with models such as the LM9600, LM6700 and the G2, looks can be deceiving. Similarly, the LG PM9700 has seen some design improvements and even some picture quality tweaks, but it still finds competition tough.

This plasma is decent enough but out of its depth at this price level. Picture quality is improved on last year's with better black levels and a new matte screen that's a real boon in bright rooms, but when you're comparing it against plasma TVs as marvelous as the Panasonic ST50 and Samsung PNE6500, it loses out.

Featurewise it's not bad, with unusual inclusions like WiDi for mirroring your laptop display on your TV and LG's exclusive Wii-like Magic Motion remote, and the Smart TV suite is easy to use and content rich. But when it counts: picture quality trumps features.

Is the TV the company's best plasma yet? As a Magic 8-Ball would say, the "signs point to yes," but is it enough given the superiority of the competition? "My reply is no."

Series information: I performed a hands-on evaluation of the 50-inch LG 50PM9700, but this review also applies to the 60-inch screen size in the series. Both have identical specs and according to the manufacturer should provide very similar picture quality.

Design
If you're looking for a sexy television, then LG's 2012 range of LED TVs can't be beat. Slim, with impossibly narrow bezels, they're the supermodels of this year's TV fashion catwalk. The PM9700 may not look like Miranda Kerr, but it's still quite restrained and even elegant, though with one major caveat.

At a 1.5-inch thickness, the TV's bezel's diagonal is as about as thin as plasma can get these days; a measurement also seen on the Panasonic VT50. However, as the VT50 has what's called a "bezel-less" design (with the additional sheet of glass on top) it does look slimmer.

The strangest part of the LG's design is the stand itself. It's a metallic concoction that looks a little like alien fingers, or a boomerang if I'm kind. At least it's mostly hidden by the TV itself, but I definitely prefer the ribbon stands of the LCD line.

The PM9700 also comes with the company's patented Magic Motion remote, which now comes with a scroll wheel. While it works relatively well, you can find yourself sweeping wide due to a sometimes low sensitivity. I would have liked to see an additional wand remote for some of the finer controls we expect from the company's other TVs.

Features
The LG PM9700 is the company's flagship plasma, but it lacks some of the features found in the LCD range. The most obvious is passive 3D. While the company has been gung-ho about its passive technology for a while, it's not something that can be easily implemented in a plasma; therefore this TV requires active 3D goggles. Unfortunately, the AG-S350 3D glasses are sold separately and not included in the box, and the TV is not compatible with other companies' active 3D specs. Also omitted is the dual play mode for simultaneous two-player gaming.

Some other models in LG's range have a four-mode remote (with voice) but the included model nixes the voice search -- no big loss, though.

In case you glossed (ha!) over that chart above, check it out one more time. This is the only a plasma TV with a matte screen available today, and honestly that screen finish is its most exciting feature in my book. I haven't seen its like in a plasma since the Panasonic TH-PX77U series in 2008.

The TV also includes THX certification for both 2D and 3D sources, which is the other major step-up over LG's less expensive PM6700 series.

The TV is also compatible with laptops and other devices that use Intel Wireless Display for desktop PC mirroring. I didn't test that feature by press time, however.

Smart TV: In concert with the Magic Motion remote, the LG Smart TV platform is one of the most fun to use. The different tiles are fairly sensibly arranged, with the video services front and center while the "useless gumpf" like 3D World is relegated to the second screen. You can also create and edit different "cards" to surface the apps and functions you want, making the system one of the most customizable of any TV. Unfortunately, the Smart TV interface is also the TV menu, and accessing the Settings menu, for example, requires a bit of wand waving to access.

For a list of all of the video services and other important apps the LG offers you can see the list here.

Picture settings: Due to the issue with smoothing dejudder being stuck "on" for everything (see below), your only nonbuttery option is to use the Game mode, where picture settings are quite sparse. There is a color temperature slider and a control for "skin," "sky," and "grass" colors. If you want to venture into other modes -- in the hope they'll fix the dejudder issue -- there is no adjustment possible in THX (both 2D and 3D). Elsewhere, namely in the two Expert modes, control is plentiful. The two-point grayscale system only has one point, although LG's 20-point control obviates that problem, and there's a full color management system.

Connectivity: The LG PM9700 includes all of the connectivity a modern TV needs including four HDMI ports, two component inputs, two USB and a PC input. Internet connectivity is handled by both onboard wireless and Ethernet.

Picture quality
At CES 2012, LG told us that the company's new models can produce black levels up to 40 percent deeper than 2011 models. Comparing the 2011 50PZ950 to the 2012 50PM9700, that claim appears to be sound, with an noticeable improvement in depth of black (0.0136 compared with 0.0219 for those counting).

There is one major thing holding back the LG PM9700 however, and I wish it didn't have to be this way: there is no way to turn off the TruMotion effect in most picture modes, including THX and Expert. As a result, you'll see the excessive smoothing (aka Soap Opera Effect) and jellylike haloing artifacts characteristic of dejudder. The only mode I found that lacked smoothing was Game, which I used throughout my calibration and testing.

In Game mode, the picture was fairly punchy with reasonable color and a decent amount of depth. The only other major strikes against the TV's picture quality are the noticeably lighter black levels compared against competing TVs like the Panasonic ST50 and UT50 and the Samsung PNE6500. The LG does handle bright reflections better than any of those, however, although a trade-off to its matte screen was a slight softness to detail when viewed in the dark.

Click the image below to see the picture settings used in the review and to read more about how this TV’s picture controls worked during calibration.

Black level: Every year, as the new plasma models come out I am constantly surprised to see black levels improve -- even when I think they couldn't get better, they do. The attention has been on Panasonic for the last few years, and rightly so, but LG has also achieved modest gains with its PM9700.

While the TV delivers better blacks than an equivalently priced LCD TV like the HX750, when up against heavy hitters like the Samsung 6500 and Panasonic ST50 the difference is very noticeable. The LG also didn't get as deep as the Sharp in our comparison. Still, it was able to conjure a respectable sense of depth, and the fly-by of the Romulan ship in Star Trek looks sufficiently spiny -- a sign of good shadow detail. That said, the Samsung and Panasonic delivered greater gravitas in their presentation.

The No. 1 reason to buy a plasma TV is for the black levels it can produce at a modest price when compared with LCD. The problem is that despite the company's own improvements in this area, its competition is simply too far ahead. There's no reason to choose the LG over either the Panasonic ST50 or the Samsung 6500 even for the just the black levels alone.

Detail: While not a subheading we normally use here, the detail resolution of the PM9700 is worth drawing attention to. The PM9700 has a matte filter, which means it deals with light reflections well, but I suspect that it is also responsible for the slight softness of the telly's pictures when viewed in the dark. This effect is most obvious on text as seen in the TVs Smart TV interface, but is also noticeable when I viewed it side-by-side with the 6500 -- James T. Kirk's chiseled features look a little weather worn on the LG. Facial details such as wrinkles on the grizzled Captain Pike are a little "botoxed" as well. There's an upside, it might actually make Keith Richards look a little more age-appropriate in the "Shine A Light" documentary. Maybe, but it can't erase the ugly.

Color accuracy: Despite the inability to control the color in any meaningful way, the LG was able to provide vibrant colors that weren't too dissimilar from the lineup's accuracy champ, the Samsung 6500. When it came to secondary colors like cyan that it was a little desaturated compared with the ST50 and Samsung 6500. This was most noticeable on partially clouded skies, but unless weather documentaries are your thing it's not actually that noticeable.

Video processing: Apart from the little problem with ultrasmoothing, the LG is actually talented at other forms of processing. While not usually noticeable, I found noise reduction to be better on the LG compared with the UT50 alongside it. The LG scrubbed out some of the grit in Blu-rays I didn't even know was there, particularly in shadows in the corners of rooms.

When parsing sources like our 24p test disk, the LG simply presented the scenes as close to "real" as the disk would allow. Only some artifacting in the Film resolution test pattern hurt what was a pretty good run for this television.

Bright lighting: If your only criteria is "a plasma TV that performs well in a lit room," then the PM9700 might well be the model to go for. It boasts a matte screen, and is one of the few televisions to do this at all in 2012, and combined with what appears to be a louver-based filter the television performs very well under lights. The blacks look black and contrast is even better than before. If subjected to direct light, such as from a facing window you get a smear of light as opposed to a reflection as on the Panasonic ST50, and this proves to be less distracting.

That said, all of the other sets in my comparison did a better job preserving black levels under the lights. While the Panasonic UT50 was not a part of my lineup, it's probably worth mentioning again that it's one of the worst bright-room performers this year, and far inferior to the LG.

3D: For a company that prides itself on its passive Cinema 3D technology, LG isn't able to come up with the goods with its own competing active solution. The TV has a 3D specific THX mode, but pop in the "Hugo" Blu-ray and ghosting looked terrible when viewing 3D shapes -- the "ghostly hand" that appears as Hugo reaches out to steal a toy mouse near the beginning of the movie comes out green. The TV isn't able to make strong 3D effects coalesce into a whole, something that Samsung's active 3D solution as seen on the ES8000, and the Panasonic plasmas in their 48Hz modes, are able to do very well.

I tried the TV with a pair of glasses based on the Full HD 3D Glasses standard, and found it did work -- once you turned them upside-down. So buying cheap Samsung replacements will only work if you like being uncomfortable.

Power consumption: No surprises in the power testing results for this TV, with a fairly average power result for TVs of this size. But at least in Standard mode the light output is normal and not completely sacrificed to meet Energy Star requirements. This may be bad for the green-conscious but it's great for your eyes.

GEEK BOX: Test	Result	Score
Black luminance (0%)	0.0136	Average
Avg. gamma	1.9178	Poor
Near-black x/y (5%)	0.3035/0.316	Average
Dark gray x/y (20%)	0.3028/0.3176	Poor
Bright gray x/y (70%)	0.313/0.3257	Good
Before avg. color temp.	6223.2757	Poor
After avg. color temp.	6562.9501	Good
Red lum. error (de94_L)	3.743	Poor
Green lum. error (de94_L)	3.3243	Poor
Blue lum. error (de94_L)	2.8685	Average
Cyan hue x/y	0.2098/0.3135	Poor
Magenta hue x/y	0.3179/0.1505	Good
Yellow hue x/y	0.4303/0.5225	Poor
1080p/24 Cadence (IAL)	Pass	Good
1080i De-interlacing (film)	Pass	Good
Motion resolution (max)	800	Average
Motion resolution (dejudder off)	800	Average

LG PM9700