50-inch HDTV Plasma Television review

Performance
Overall, the Panasonic TH-50PF9UK delivers excellent picture quality that's solidly in the tradition of its lower-resolution commercial-model predecessors. Its black levels remain among the best we've seen for any plasma, color was mostly accurate, and details, as expected from a TV of this resolution, were superb. We did detect some false contouring in some scenes, and the primary color of green appeared yellowish, but that's about it for complaints.

Our first step in evaluating the TH-50PF9UK was to attempt to create the best picture possible by adjusting its image quality settings. Initially the Super Cinema setting provided the most accurate color temperature readings, but its gamma was off somewhat. We ended up using the Cinema mode, which allowed us to choose our gamma curve (the default 2.2 was nearly perfect), and calibrated the user-menu color temperature controls to arrive at an excellent grayscale overall (see the Geek box at the end of this review). We're used to the grayscales from Panasonic industrial plasmas having a green cast even after calibration, but that wasn't the case with the TH-50PF9UK. For our full user-menu settings click here or check out the Tips section.

After setup, we were able to compare the Panasonic directly to a couple of other displays we had on hand: the 65-inch rear-projection Mitsubishi WD-65831; Panasonic's lower-resolution sister set, model TH-50PH9UK; and the direct competition, Pioneer's excellent PRO-FHD1, another 50-inch 1080p plasma. Equipped with a PlayStation 3 playing back the Crank disc at 1080i, we settled back to see how the TH-50PF9UK looked.

The results were mostly great. The Panasonic exhibited excellent, deep black areas in the film's few dark scenes, such as when Chev (Jason Stratham) enters Sin City Disciples. The deepest areas of the film appeared slightly darker than on the Pioneer we had right next to the TH-50PF9UK, but the difference was very subtle. We were also impressed by the lack of noise in shadows, which appeared remarkably clean--more so than on the lower-resolution Panasonic TH-50PHUK.

The color on the TH-50PF9UK was a step below that of the Pioneer, however, but it was still more accurate than on most HDTVs. Color decoding was nearly perfect, so we could achieve great saturation and rich colors. The skin tones during the Chinatown outdoor tryst looked quite realistic; we could see the changes in tone in Eve (Amy Smart) from her arm to her upper chest, and her yellow dress was brilliant in the sun. But her skin appeared just a tiny bit too yellowish--a result of the Panasonic's inaccurate green primary--and some green areas, like a pepper in the kitchen, were also slightly yellow. We stress "slightly" because the difference was hardly enough to spoil the experience, and was mostly apparent because the Pioneer's green was significantly more accurate.

One area where the difference wasn't as subtle appeared in a couple instances of false contouring we saw with the Panasonic. At the one-hour mark for example, when Chev and Eve climb down a fire escape, the sun in the sky had a couple of distinct rings in the area of transition from light to the blue of the sky; the rings were also visible on the other Panasonic plasma, but not on the Pioneer or the Mitsubishi. We also saw a similar effect in the white light of the windows inside Sin City Disciples, and in the cell in Aeon Flux. Instances with visible contouring were still rare, however.

As we expected from the very sharp Crank Blu-ray, detail was spectacular. When Chev jumps into the pool to talk to Carlito, we could see every droplet of water on their faces, down to reflections in the droplets themselves. In the scene where Chev chops off the guy's hand, we could see the incredibly fine texture of the guy's blood-soaked polo shirt. When he crashes his car in the mall (15:26 into the movie), the image was sharp enough to easily detect the fake-looking green-screen work as he rides the upturned car up the escalator. As with the Pioneer, the Panasonic easily resolved every detail of a 1080i test pattern from our Sencore signal generator, although we were not able to test 1080i deinterlacing.

Of course, the sharpness had more to do with the disc than with the Panasonic's high resolution. We compared scenes directly with the lower-resolution TH-50PH9UK, and time after time they looked essentially identical from our seven-foot seating distance. Only when we got really close could we detect any difference, and then only in very highly detailed areas like blocks of cement or Strathan's ubiquitous stubble. One benefit of the high resolution is that individual pixels are invisible from distances farther than about six inches, so if you actually do want to sit five feet away, you'll see pixel structure on the 1,366x768 TH-50PH9UK but not on the 1080p TH-50PF9UK. But we imagine very few people want to sit that close to a 50-inch plasma.

We also checked out some of the standard-definition tests from HQV, at 480i resolution via component video, and the Panasonic turned in a relatively good performance. It conveyed every detail on the DVD, the image was relatively sharp, and 2:3 pull-down detection functioned well. The Panasonic's noise reduction also took care of the snowy interference in low-quality scenes, although it wasn't as effective as the Pioneer. The TH-50PF9UK also had a difficult time smoothing out jagged edges on diagonal lines.