LG 47WV30MS, 47WV30BR, 47WV30-BAAM, 47WV30BS, 47WV30-BAAL Owner's Manual

LG RZ-42PY10x

THE WORLD’S BEST PLASMA!

Now it’s exactly three years since I in HemmaBio magazine did Europe’s biggest test (at that time) of plasma
screens. The development since then has really moved forward and we today have screens that without pardon an­nihilates those from that time, and at the same time only cost a fraction of what they did. I recently happened to
pass by this LG plasma by coincidence at a fair in Stockholm and after just a short glance I realised the need to get
this machined out in the medias so you as a consumer would know that you actually can by a plasma with a good
conscience today – because here, every cent does what it’s supposed to do. This XGA plasma gives a CHOCKING
good picture at an attractive price!!!

© BigScreen Entertainment

When this test was made, in December 2001, a normal plasma in size 42 inch (which is the normal ”mainstream size”
for a plasma, as 29 inch is normal for a traditional CRT TV) was around 8-12000 Euros. The fi rst generation emerged in
98-99 and was even more expensive – a shameless 20-25000 Euros and then there were only fi lthy rich morons that
bought screens. Today we have reached a price tag of below 4000, that means less than 100 Euros per inch, and this with
a picture quality that makes the fi rst generation screen look like industrial waste. If you would take a screen from the fi rst
generation and place it on the side of this screen even a nearly blind would see and understand the difference between
rocks and diamonds. Now this might sound hard, but the fact is that the fi rst generation screen were pure crap – even
related to their price. You get a pretty decent car for 25000 Euro. NEC’s test winning screen 2001 - NEC PlasmaSync
42MP3 – was the one considered the best, and it was good, but hardly worth as much money as 8000 Euros. Today NEC
is still one of the top players in plasma, together with the founder of the technology Fujitsu (co-operates with Hitachi),
and the contrast and black masters within plasma: Panasonic. These are three very good suppliers of plasma screens and
TVs (built-in tuner), but none of them has ever presented a screen that for such a low price as this LG manages to get such
an incredibly good picture quality. LG is one of only ^ve manufacturers of plasma screens. The others are Fujitsu/Hitachi,
NEC, Panasonic and Pioneer. Read more about the plasma technology under “Everything about Image – Image reproduc­tion techniques”.

Good looking design furniture and “element”

Buying a plasma screen initially was more a question of design, interior decoration and taste, which gives a sense of luxury,
even though the actual picture quality was not the best available. This was the main reason the screen were sold. Those
who could afford was soon tempted to throw the big CRT TV out the door and instead opt for the piece of wall art that a
plasma screen actually is. Now when LG presents a screen that delivers such a good movie picture we can please you with
the fact that they do it in a great design as well. This model – RZ 42-PY10x which ends with a little “x”, is a more luxury
model of the PY10 (which lacks the x). The only thing that differs them is that this version has a black glass frame around
the screen while the other is in black plastic - this gives the x model a much more luxury look. Above and below the black
frame there is a thing silver edge that connects to the two side placed speakers in the same finish. The silver colour is a
nice contrast to the black and also matches the enclosed table stand in the same silver finish. We thought about giving it
a small minus due to the fact that the stand makes it somewhat tricky to reach the connectors but with some tweaking it
works out. Obviously the screen looks best on the wall which at the same time frees up some floor space in your home.
RZ-PY10 is a really nice looking piece of furniture and will without doubt look great in all fresh homes that wishes for a
big and good TV on the wall. On thing worth mentioning before we go on is that the screen, like most plasma screens,
has a small fan that is hardly noticeable unless the room is dead quiet. Nothing that really bother us, but we still wanted
to mention it. The fan is necessary as the screen gets pretty hot after a while and feels like an electric heater set at a nice
comfort temperature.

Loaded with connectors and DCDi

The remote control is really great looking and fits well with the screen. From the remote you quickly and easily manage
everything like channel setting, picture calibration and so on. You can also set up the remote to control other components.
The buttons on the screen has been hidden below the lower edge and are easily accessible without interfering with the
clean design. Small symbols on the right side of the screen informs about which input is active etc. It looks very neat but
you may shut off the backlit with the menu option “Index On/Off”. On the lower back side we find a complete set of con­nectors that fills you every need. We get RCA audio, composite video, S video, component video, SCART (3 connectors),
VGA (D-Sub15), DVI and of course the usual coaxial antenna input as this is a true plasma TV and not just only a plasma
screen. The service input is the ordinary 9-pin RS-232C. We also get a few side mounted inputs, as customary on ordinary
TVs, (composite, S video and RCA audio) for fast connection of a digital camera or a game console. The manual, which is
very clear and easy to read, state that LG recommends (as we always have) to use the component input for DVD and the
SCART connector for VHS. Why? – because the picture in a DVD is stored in component video format (YCbCr) whereas
the VHS picture is stored in RGB format. The best (analogue) picture from DVD is obtained via the component input as
is only beaten by the fully digital DVI input or a VGA signal from a PC. There’s no way you’ll be missing an input on this
screen! As a bonus LG has implemented a Faroudja DCDi chip that handles the de-no matter what signal you use.

XGA plasma for a shocking price!

It’s totally incredible that this screen only cost (for a plasma) as little as 3999 Euros (incl. VAT) as there still are low resolu­tion VGA plasmas around at the same price or higher. The fact that the screen utilises XGA resolution (1024 x 768) which
is a 4:3-resolution and not the 16:9 WXGA (1366 x 768) is something that might wonder many people. This depends on
that they haven’t managed to make the plasma cells small enough to fit 1366 in the width of a 42-incher. Here every pixel
consists of three (RGB) dots in a somewhat rectangular constellation to achieve the 16:9 format. But I can also testify
that you wont see any difference. The difference downwards in resolution you can see VERY clearly, which LG has helped
us illustrate with two very clear pictures that up close compares a VGA plasma with a XGA model. See the pictures at the
end of the test!

5000:1!!!

Contrast ratings is something the industry has started to use as a weapon in marketing and the different manufacturers
constantly presents higher and higher ratings. This is true for plasma screens as well as projectors. The rating of 5000:1
stated for this screen is NOT hard to believe when compared to the other screens on the market. Panasonic has for quite
some time lead this race with screens at 4000:1. I have seen them and they are truly sharp, dynamic and full of contrast
with a very good blackness, but none has made such an impression on me as this LG plasma did. The blackness might
not be as deep as on the best screens from Panasonic and is more comparable to DLP projection in HD2+ class, but the
brightness is much higher and this, in conjunction with almost as good blackness, gives a better contrast ratio. And it was
the contrast that made me notice this model. This, the resolution and the price makes RZ-42PY10 to a leader today! The
contrast on this screen is virtually too high and that gives it a picture so dynamic it almost made me fall over.

Very easy handling

Modern things doesn’t have to be complicated, which LG shows here. Setting the TV channels is very simple on this screen.
You search, the screen finds, you choose, name and store the program place. It’s simplicity itself! If we then proceed to
the most fun part – to calibrate the picture as optimal as possible (for DVD) – we quickly find that this screen has enough
functions to trim the picture, without making the task to time-consuming or difficult. PSM stands for “Picture Status
Memory” and is, simply put, a few presets for brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness. The Dynamic mode is very hard
and colourful, the Standard mode is more normal and tough enough and the Mild mode is a bit too pale and careful.
Obviously we went for the fourth mode – User – where we could set and store our own calibration. We’ll get back to the
values we found most suitable. The XD function is something that falls under LG’s proprietary technology “Digital Reality”.
Often functions with hip descriptions and names are mostly rubbish that add nothing valuable to the picture – only to the
marketing – but for once the manufacturer can be proud to say “Look what we did” as XD really adds to the picture, no
matter the source. With XD activated you obtain a better contrast through a steeper gamma curve and more sharpness. It
doesn’t say what it stands for (Xtra Dynamics perhaps?), but XD is recommended anyway! Colour temperature is the last
of the more “advanced” settings you can tamper with. The function is called CSM which presumably stands for Chroma
Separation Mode. Here you can choose between Cool, Normal, Warm and User. The temperature seems to be accurate
on all the settings and the blue-white Cool is definitely colder than Warm which has a yellow-red tint. PY10 has as LG’s
DLP projector JT92, a small problem with green tint, but this is easily fixed with the white balance setting under User. We
virtually eliminated the green tint by changing to: R: 0, G: -15 and B: +10. The result was without remarks. The colours are
now rich and dynamic without the green tint. Fleshtone is another setting with four modes for changing skin tones. The
differences are so subtle that they are hardly noticeable, but we went for mode 1 anyway.

Built-in washing machine

The screen has a few functions for “washing” burn-ins that arise from static images with high contrast. Often these disap­pear anyway within 30 seconds or a minute or so, even if you don’t run these “washing programs”, but it’s still good they
are there. All plasma screens suffers from this major or minor problems, but they are only noticeable in completely black
images and, as I said, they soon disappear anyway. Another common problem is what I use to call “half tones” (borrowed
from the print industry) where it sometimes looks like the screens lacks enough tones of each colour, or grey tones to
create really smooth colour and tone gradients. This is almost never seen and is only noticeable in special scenes with a
lot of the same colour, for example an animated movie. This is not something we can blame LG or any other manufacturer

- they all have this problem and they all work on developing new solutions to it. The drawbacks on this screen are too few
and to small to threat all the good qualities!

Picture in picture

The PiP feature is an old invention that allows for viewing of two sources on the same TV. If you’re too lazy to get up from
the couch you can quickly get a PiP picture of 1/8 size and zoom it in to 1/4 size. You can choose the position for the
small picture and also set the transparency of it. Crazy, but cool!

Rich sound!

On the sound side LG shows a pretty good face as well as the PY10 delivers a rich and good TV sound that will suit ev­eryone that doesn’t want to go for a separate audio system. The SSM function (Sound Status Memory) is a memory for
different sound modes suitable for movies, music or TV. TruSurround XT from SRS is a sound mode that you might recog­nise from your computer system and this might be useful for the ones wanting to play computer games on the screen. We
opted to the User setting here as well, so we could raise the bass and balance the treble to obtain as low distortion as
possible. This sounds very good for a flat screen TV! The AVL feature (Auto Volume Leveler) is a VERY welcome function
that can solve this issue of different audio levels between different TV channels and mainly between TV shows and the
extremely annoying commercial breaks. In particular this is aimed at the shiny German family in the sepia light running
around in the their perfect house with their perfect children eating tons of chocolate while doubled totally inappropriate
to Swedish. And why not for the 19 year old model with exaggerated make-up pretending to be a mother of three shouting
something about how superior her laundry detergent X is compared to brand Y or the make-up commercial and so on…
All these insults towards the viewer’s intelligence is, apart from being showed about 15 times every hour, presented much
much louder than the actual show you’re watching. Thank you LG! We owe you for AVL!