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9 out of 9 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Perfect Home Theater Plasma!"
Pros: Sharp, precise picture; excellent contrast and colour; sleek, no-frills look
Cons: ED only; burn-in concerns
Summary: I've been researching HD-compatible TVs for more than six months now - plasma, LCD, DLP, LCD projection, LCoS, and of course CRT. This TV came out the clear winner for several reasons:
1. Contrast: there's nothing that I hate more than greyish blacks in dark scenes. This TV is a superstar when it comes to black level performance. You get CRT-deep blacks with this TV.
2. Resolution: ironically, the fact that this is an EDTV (vs. HDTV) makes DVDs look *a lot better*. There's no video rescaling done on the images coming from the DVD, so what you get is a pristine picture. With an HDTV, the image has to get scaled up to HDTV resolutions (or even non-16:9 resolutions like 1024x678 with rectangular pixels), and so image quality is lost. With this Panasonic baby, however, there's none of that.
3. None of the stuff I don't need: the lack of tuners and inputs isn't a bad thing...you can completely customize the TV with the set of inputs that you need based on the video sources that you have. Need HDMI? OK. DVI with HDCP instead? No problem! Complete input flexibility!
Of course, nothing is perfect. Here are the issues that I see with this TV:
1. Burn-in concerns: This is a not a problem that is specific to this TV, but rather to plasma TVs in general. I'm worried about burn-in due to "Anamorphic Widescreen" DVDs. Most widescreen movies are not 16:9, but rather 2.xx:1 (I can't remember the exact ratio). This means that even with a 16:9 TV like this, you'll see black bars at the top and the bottom of the image. There's nothing you can do to get around that, because these black bars are embedded in the 16:9 video that DVD players output. So if you want to avoid burn-in, you'll have to zoom in the image from your DVD player (image gets stretched and cropped, so it becomes less sharp), or one of the TV zooming functions (aspect ratio goes out of whack, such that people's faces become thinner). Again, this is not a problem with this particular TV only, but with all plasmas.
2. EDTV: I'm still kinda bummed out that I can't see the finest of fine details in HD broadcasts (though the image still looks absolutely spectacular). Honestly, this one isn't that big of a concern. Most people can't tell anyway.
In short: go buy this thing now!! If you're looking for a plasma TV, stop researching...this is it!
