LG 50PG6900 review

Freeview suffered a lot of noise -- of course we aren't pretending that the Freeview signal looks great on any large TV, but other TVs, such as our reference Pioneer PDP-LX5090 do a much better job of processing the signal and smoothing out the rough edges. The LG struggles with MPEG artefacts and random noise. On areas of solid colour we noticed that the TV made the picture look very blocky. Also, there were distinct solarisation artefacts that made the picture look like it had been altered in Photoshop by someone who had just found the effects palette.

Plugging in our PS3 yielded a surprise though. Games such as Ridge Racer 7 looked incredibly detailed with wonderful, vivid colours and decent motion with minimal blur. We suspect that the same thing that makes Freeview unbearable is what gives games that ultra-bright and colourful look, making them look wonderful.

HD material from Blu-ray did look very good. 21, the remarkable movie about blackjack, was stuffed full of detail, proving that you don't have to buy a 1080p TV to see movies in amazing quality. We noticed there was some noise on the panel and sometimes we noticed that skin tones looked unnatural and had some faint solarisation artefacts.

One point of interest is that this TV uses LG's older menu system, which is neither as pretty nor as simple to use as the one on newer sets. It's a small point, but the new look and feel would have improved this set, especially considering the Freeview recorder functionality, which feels almost sidelined as a result of bad user interface design.

We'll end our look over this TV with some real praise. The built-in Freeview+ system is really very good. Recording a programme is as simple as pressing the right button while you're browsing through the EPG. We programmed ten recordings in about a minute and when we came back to the TV the next day, everything was recorded perfectly. Watching recordings was simply a matter of entering the menu and selecting the show we wanted to view.

Conclusion
The built-in PVR is great, the HD picture quality is decent and the black levels are very impressive indeed. Sadly the picture on Freeview is awful most of the time, and there are enough picture distortions to make watching things on this screen anything but ideal.

You don't have to spend a lot more than £1,000 to get a good plasma TV. You might have to drop some inches, but take a look at Panasonic's whole PDP line-up -- all of the screens from the low-end 720p models up to the 1080p freesat models are brilliant performers, and sensibly priced.

Edited by Marian Smith