- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 5 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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7 out of 7 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Almost Perfect..."
Pros: Amazing picture quality and both utilitarian & stylish
Cons: Cannot adjust aspect in hd mode
Summary: I waited to get all of the "kinks" out of my setup before writing a review. One of the things that prevented me from giving this tv a 10 was that one of the two inputs was defective. It would not pick up the signal from the red component cable (Pr), so the picture was a white out. This TV comes with 2 slots for input boards, and you can change them for different input types. It comes with a component board and another one with s-video & audio. To be sure it wasn't the board, I switched the component video baurd into the other slot, and everything worked just fine. Being that I have an AV receiver with component video switching, upconversion, etc., I only needed one input working, but after paying $2G's for a new TV, i wanteed to get everything working right. The vendor (buy.com) does not provide service, so I went to Panasonic. It was pretty frustrating to find the right person, but once I did, he took execellent care of the problem. As an "industrial" model, I had to bring the TV to Panasonic which is not close to me. They fixed it and had shipped to me in within a week, and communicated with me via phone & email all the way through. He also advised me to get an rf isolator (by jensen, approx $50) for my cable line to get rid of the faint white line I told him about - and that worked. Great service from Panasonic.
That out of the way, If you have an av receiver with compnent video switching/surround sound and an HD cable box (hd dvr works well too - have SA Expl 8300HD from Cablevision), this is an ideal TV. It is utilitarian in nature which keeps the unit svelt and attractive...looks pretty damn cool mounted above my mantle. It does not come with any of the extras that would likely just add extra bulk to the unit and never be used if you have a similar system (tuner, speakers, etc.) - however, Panasonic does make speakers for this tv that you can buy separately.
Also, the interchangable input slots will allow for compatibility with other protocals such as DVI or HDMI digital connections...the cards are available from Panasonoc for just over $100...this may become essential since the folks leading the HDDVD & Bluray efforts are looking to "plug the analog hole".
Panasonic rates the potential for burnin the same as that on a CRT, and I hope that is true.
I don't typically like to mess with the native aspect ratios (not into the "stretchy" look), but they say it is good to avoid black bars in the first 100hrs of a plasma's life, and hd aspect cannot be adjusted on this tv (sd aspect can be adjusted however).
The best thing about this tv is the picture. Unbelievable when watching anything in HD - decent amount of hd prgramming from cablevision. It also looks great with a prog scan dvd player. If you are considering an hd plasma and don't need a tuner or sound (that is if you have a component video swithcing surround sound receiver and an hd tuner/cablebox/dvr) definately go for this one.
