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The HDTV and Home Theater Podcast
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All the HDTV and Home Theater news and information you need, without all the reading.
Listener Comment Line: 1-949-528-6747
News:
We have a review of the Panasonic TH-50PX60U 50" Diagonal Plasma HDTV and we discuss an article written by Rebecca Day of Electronic House Magazine titled: "Companies Battle to Serve You and Your TV A war between cable, satellite and phone giants could yield more TV options and lower costs for consumers".
In a recent podcast (Podcast 132) we both put together and HD starter system. Braden chose the Panasonic TH-42PX60U Plasma HDTV ~$1300 US Street Price. Today we are going to take a look at its bigger cousin the TH-50PX60U 50" Diagonal Plasma HDTV ~2000 US Street Price (Buy Now).
Other than the resolution of this TV,
pretty much everything else we say about it applies to the 42 inch
version. This TV come with built-in ATSC/QAM/NTSC Tuners, SD Memory
Card Slot (for photo viewing). It has a contrast ratio of
10,000:1 and can display 29 billion colors. This is a 720p TV with a resolution of 1366x768 and has to
HDCP compliant HDMI inputs.
The TV build quality is first rate. The only thing we didn't
like about it was the silver finish. We have really started to take to
the Piano Black finish that other manufactures are using. Another plus
with this TV is that the speakers are mounted underneath the screen
which makes the overall width of the TV smaller. The full dimensions of
the TV are31.6'' x 49.9'' x 5.5'' ( 80.26 x 126.75 x 13.97 CM) without
the pedestal and its pretty light as far as Plasmas go weighing in at a
hair under 95 pounds (43.2 Kgs).
The picture looks amazing with high quality HD material. The
blacks are a black can be. Colors are vivid and accurate. The greens
just popped off the screen. The nice thing about plasmas is the off
angle viewing and this TV is no exception. Colors stayed true out to
about 170 degrees. Vertical colors stayed true whether you were
standing up or sitting on the floor. So gaming with the Wii should be
no problem. The TV passed the detail test as well. It consistently
displayed detail that was lost on other TVs that we have reviewed or
own. Dark scenes are not an issue for this TV. We did pick up a lot of
glare in these scenes and that is a problem with most plasmas. The
glass is very reflective and because it is dual layer you get double
the reflection. Its not an issue with bright scenes.
Not everything was good with the picture however. We found
that it did not do well with overly compressed 1080i content. Most TVs
don't do well with this type of signal but we found the Panasonic did
worse. Heroes, which looks bad on Ara's DLP also, looked very bad.
Forget about Sunday Night football. If you base it on NBC's HD you will
be disappointed. The picture would pixelate at any motion. By contrast
1080i on CBS looked much better. Football looked like you were looking
through a Skybox window. So with a good source the Plasma was amazing.
With a poor source it made it difficult to watch.
The TV was more forgiving with 720p material. Even with
highly compressed material the TV presented a clear and sharp picture.
With a quality source like ESPN the picture was amazing! Movie sources
like DVDs (both upconverting and standard) looked sharp. With a TV of
this size we would recommend an upconverting DVD player. Standard DVDs
looked good but it was easy to see the difference with the upconverting
player. HBO, Showtime, and HD Net Movies looked great as well. Standard
Definition TV looked OK in our opinion. Text was not very crisp so it may
bother you when watching a news program with a ticker. But when
Standard Definition was run through a set top box that upconverted the
picture we found that it didn't really matter as the set top box
cleaned up a lot of the issues. This would only be an issue if you were
watching standard cable via this TV.
Menus are very clean and simple to navigate. The remote is
basic and we recommend replacing it with a universal remote (but when
have we not said that). The TV has a digital output that makes it
possible to send the Dolby Digital audio track received over the air
via the ATSC tuner to your Home Theater Receiver. The speakers as we
mentioned before are underneath the screen and sound OK. The TV has a
virtual surround mode that we found kind of useless. The audio was
clear and easy to hear though.
What we liked:
- Deep Inky Blacks
- Bright Vivid colors
- 720p picture second to none
- Very wide viewing angle (both horizontal and vertical)
- Digital Audio output
What we disliked:
- Poor handling of highly compressed 1080i content
- Standard Def viewing
- Silver Cabinet
Conclusion:
Panasonic is the
number one manufacturer of Plasma TVs today. When you consider that
they are the most reasonably priced tier one manufacturer its a no
brainer. If you watch a lot of NBC you may want to go to a retailer and
ask them to turn on NBC HD one evening and see if you can live with it.
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