TH-42PX25U/P 42 HD Plasma Dis review

The TH-42PX25U/P's feature package is quite comprehensive. Two-tuner picture-in-picture heads the list, and the SD memory card slot for digital picture viewing is also uncommon among plasmas. Unique to Panasonic is the panel's PC Card slot, also located on the front panel. There's an NTSC tuner onboard to connect to an antenna and some cable systems.

A selection of preset color temperatures and four picture modes (such as Cinema and Standard) offer some user control. Unfortunately, Panasonic forgot to include individual picture memories for each input, a feature found on most other high-end TVs. That means you can't set contrast, brightness, and the rest separately for every source. The four available aspect-ratio modes don't work with HDTV sources.

Although you wouldn't know it by looking, the TH-42PX25U/P sports left and right stereo speakers that are artfully concealed in the bezel around the screen. And in case you want to enjoy a semblance of surround sound without all those speakers, a pair of simulated surround modes is onboard.

The connectivity of this plasma is quite comprehensive. The rear panel sports two sets of broadband component-video inputs with stereo audio, two A/V inputs with S-Video, two RF antenna inputs, and one set of A/V outputs with composite video only. The TH-42PX25U/P is one of the few current plasmas with an HDMI digital input, which connects to next-generation DVD players and HDTV tuners. It's backward-compatible with DVI as long as you get an adapter. The front-panel A/V inputs described above also include a 15-pin VGA-style input for computer hookup.

After a thorough calibration for both DVD and HDTV sources (see the geek box for details), we sat back and watched a variety of DVD and HDTV material. Dark scenes are the biggest challenge for plasma, and our new torture test is the Alien DVD, which is mostly dark. The TH-42PX25U/P fared better than most other plasmas we've seen, but not quite as well as the lower-resolution TH-42PD25U/P. The blackness of space was quite dark, but extremely dark areas revealed some false-contouring artifacts and telltale dancing pixels. Bright scenes such as the shuttle launch sequence on the test DVD Digital Video Essentials looked really good using our Denon DVD-2900 running progressive scan.

Frankly, we were shocked to find that the panel lacks the all-important 2:3 pull-down in its video processing, which removes artifacts such as jagged edges and moving lines from film-based material. A progressive-scan DVD player is a must with this plasma, but it won't solve the problem completely. Since lots of shows are still shot on film, folks who watch standard TV from cable, satellite, or off-air antennas are likely to notice those artifacts.

In terms of color reproduction, the TH-42PX25U/P suffered from red push out of the box, meaning that reds were oversaturated and garish in relation to other colors. We were able to fix this problem in calibration, but if you don't get the set professionally calibrated, you may have to turn down the color in the picture menu to achieve a level that, for example, doesn't give white people a pinkish hue. We also noticed that reds appeared a bit orange.

HDTV material looked mostly good, especially with bright material that was shot in HD as opposed to program material that was transferred from film. For example, the Discovery Channel looked spectacular, but 1492: Conquest of Paradise, a film original transferred to HD airing on HDNet, showed some video noise and moving-line artifacts.