Give your TV a new home from IKEA
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- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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3 out of 3 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Extremely happy with my purchase"
Pros: Excellent picture quality; very small border for max. screen size in confined cabinet; high qual amplifier with tonal settings; excellent picture controls;great screen splitting/pip control
Cons: Does not display Closed Captions; does not include stand, which is hard to find
Summary: I am very happy with this unit. As I write this, I am watching Jeopardy on the left half of the screen and my son is playing Sonic Adventure Battle II on the right side. Not something that I?d recommend for long term viewing, but with three kids, what a great feature. With a DVD player driving the monitor via components and my home theater amp via the digital optical input, the viewing experience is awesome. I did quite a bit of comparison between the ED and the HD, and I agree with consumer reports who said the Panasonic ED is better than the low end HD?s. The most conspicuous difference is seen in white text, in which you can see the white/black crosshatch pattern. But viewing from anything over about 2 feet, the differences dissipate.
I had exactly 36.4 inches in my cabinet, and this points out another feature of the commercial mode. This unit comes in at 36.2? wide, yet providing a 37? viewing diameter. Even the consumer version of this model wouldn?t fit, so I feel lucky that just about the only unit to fit was one of the best on the market. (Why manufactures put un-detachable speakers and super wide borders around their monitors is completely beyond me. It seems that just about everyone is going to have some width limitation and the smaller the border, the bigger the screen that will fit.)
The unit does not ship with a stand since there are multiple fixtures, but I have tried to but the stand from two on-line manufactures so far, and after stating originally that they had them, neither has been able to deliver.
The only disappointment so far is that you cannot use this set with closed caption (I suspect this is due to the fact that it is not a tuner); of course you can use the DVD?s own capability, but my satellite won?t deliver the closed caption text to the monitor. I?m still investigating this, but I?m pretty sure there is no other way to get cc as broadcast.
I paid $1,399, delivered to the door, so from what I?ve seen, I?m satisfied with the value. Of course, you have to supply the speakers, but I had a really nice pair sitting around and the (non-hometheater) sound is fine. But the impedance of the amp output is 6ohms, which, according to Panasonic, will drive 8ohm speakers fine, but nothing less. Of course no tuner is supplied, but if I did want to receive air broadcasts, I?d simply run an antenna into my VCR and use that tuner.
