JUST RIGHT
Having a parade of big-screen TVs march one after another through your living
room sounds a bit like a dream, but it can spoil you. It is also entirely unfair
because you tend to compare the TV you have now with all the TVs that have come
before it. So, although it’s unfair, it is in the same way that life is
unfair.
The last plasma I reviewed was a 42-inch model, a size that is now
very popular at my local Costco. That TV, coming after several rear-projection
behemoths, was derided as “inchtiny” by my 7-year-old. The rest of the family
was, sad to say, equally underwhelmed by the size and the features of that
plasma, so much so that when I mentioned I was bringing home a new plasma
television I got a rather unenthusiastic response from them.
After I set up
the LG 50PX4DR 50-inch plasma HDTV with a built-in 160-gigabyte digital video
recorder (DVR), my wife spoke for the entire assembled family. “Kore ga iijann,”
she said, which roughly translates to “this is just right.” That was a sentiment
I returned to over and over when watching this LG plasma. It wasn’t the biggest,
but it was plenty big at 50-inches. After watching this set for a few minutes I
found myself wondering how anyone would settle for a mere 42-inch television.
Eight more inches should not have made such a big difference but perhaps it was
a combination of the bigger screen size with a superior picture. Plasmas don’t
always have pictures as sharp as a DLP rear-projection television, but this set
was so good that it was hard to find fault with it.
I tortured this display
with my quiver of tricky movies, forcing one of my teenage girls to run from the
room saying, “Daddy is watching Lawrence of Arabia, again,” while clasping her
hands over her eyes, seared apparently by the brilliant sands of the desert. Of
course, I found where the orange sands went a bit flat on the plasma. I would
have been stunned if they were perfect and crisp, but overall the performance
was excellent. This same daughter tortured the screen herself with the Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban PlayStation 2 video game. This provided hours
of fun for her and her vacant-eyed and slack-jawed friends, who positively
drooled over the LG. Then again, perhaps they are always drooling; it is hard to
tell, being that they are teenagers and all.
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