Major Features:

• 42" diagonal widescreen
• 1024x768 actual resolution
• Picture in Picture
• Built in CATV, ATSC and Analaog tuners
• Supports 480i,480p,720p,1080i signals
• PC support
• LG XD Engine
• Plasma Technology
• 2 year in home warranty standard
• DVI, 2 Component

My experience:
This Plasma TV had the most features and best warranty out of all the HDTV's being sold at the time. Everything else comparable would have cost $1000.00 more. I got this at Circuit City using a price match against Brandsmart. Even today, hardly anyone offer's 2 year warranty on electronics. Out of the box, the brightness and contrast were way too high and things looked a bit green. The Circuit City rep said it was fanless - NOT TRUE. While not excessive, you can hear the fan noise. I lowered the brightness to around %70 and contrast to %50. I ended up going into the service menu to fix the green problem because


playing with the tint simply didn't do the job. Viewing analog signals is mediocre. Viewing DTV signals is great even with 480i. Standard DVD's look great too although a poorly mastered DVD can look so so. After 7 months while watching TV the screen went black. Sound still worked - just no video. I found an authorized LG repair center and called. They picked up the TV??? What happened to in-home repair? Anyway, I let them take it to their shop. I had the TV back 4 days later. They said it was the high voltage power supply. The repair slip showed it would have cost me $500.00 if it wasn't under warranty. I have noticed vertical lines on the left side - not a dead pixel, but an entire vertical line. This occurred for around 6 months. It wasn't that noticable and I never called it in for repair. The problem went away by itself. 3 years later the tv is still working fine. The Picture in Picture feature is cool BUT this is a plasma screen - I did not want to burn in the screen with the PIP frames and frankly it's a useless feature.

6 Years later it has developed a snow or solarization issue - it looks like this.

It can be purple, blue or green snow depending on the video and does it on all input signals. It turned out to be a bad solder joint on the control board. This was determined by prying on the control board and seeing the problem go away. The control board is behind the two boards behind the small removable access panel. All I did was remove it, resolder as much as possible and re-installed. Working perfectly so far.

10/20/2011 - Well a new problem has developed - now it has red or blue bars on the left or right side and sometimes both. It looks like this.

This problem also appears to be the control board since putting pressure on that board causes the bars to go away or come back. The control board should never have been designed this way - it's a thermal disaster using silicon heat pads under the board instead of traditional heat sinks.

Pros:

• Good picture (after tweaking) for the most part
• Enough inputs for my needs
• 2 year warranty - Although I only used the warranty in the first year

• Failure of high voltage power supply after 7 months
• Vertical line issue that has fixed itself
• Analog sound output does not output sound for DTV signals
• Not Fanless
• The control board is garbage and needs to be replaced.

Spot Rating:
This set has issues and defects.