Hands-On Review: Panasonic Viera TC-P50V10 Plasma HDTV

PLUS
Wonderfully neutral colour
Superb blacks and shadow detail
Slim profile and attractive styling

MINUS
Complicated picture settings
Room reflections

Selling for $2,700, this 50-inch plasma TV is the smallest model in Panasonic's top-of-the-line Viera V10 series. Panasonic offers 54-, 58- and 65-inch V10-series plasmas for $3,300, $3,700 and $5,500 respectively.

Like last year's premium 850 series (which won a Gear of the Year award from Here's How), it has a single sheet of glass covering the entire screen and surrounding bezel, making for a very beautiful presentation. But this year's TV itself is much slimmer, and the bezel is narrower. The gloss-black frame tapers downward to a subtle silver accent at the bottom. It looks lovely.

Technology: Panasonic's new Neo PDP (plasma display panel) uses new materials and processes, including a new cell design and new driving circuitry. The result, Panasonic says, is greater efficiency: higher brightness with lower consumption.

The system used to excite the gas in each cell (which produces images in a plasma TV) has been improved to produce deeper blacks. Panasonic specifies dynamic contrast ratio at 2,000,000:1. Native contrast ratio, which measures the display's ability to produce deep blacks and brilliant whites at the same time is 40,000:1, a very impressive achievement, and a significant improvement on last year's models, which had native contrast ratio of 30,000:1.

Because plasma TVs create images in quick bursts, rather than holding them on the screen continuously, blurring is much less of an issue than it is for LCD televisions. But this new TV improves resolution in moving subjects through a feature called 600Hz Sub-Field Drive. Each video frame has 10 sub-fields, for maximizing resolution even with fast-moving subjects.

There are two videophile-oriented picture modes: THX (which Panasonic says delivers "the images that were intended by the movie-makers) and Studio Reference (which Panasonic says creates pictures with "essentially the same quality as a reference studio monitor"). From these descriptions, you might expect that the two settings look much the same, but that's not the case. For reasons I'll explain in the Evaluation section, I think the Studio Reference setting is preferable.

Settings: When you first set up the TC-P50V10, you're asked whether it's being installed at home or in a store. Choose "Home," and the TV will come up in Standard mode, with contrast maxed out at 100, brightness at the 50 midpoint, sharpness boosted way up to 75, and colour and tint at the middle positions. In the Advanced picture menu, colour temperature is set at normal. Picture-processing features such as Digital Cinema Colour (which expands the range of colours the TV can display) and colour management are turned on.

The resulting picture is satisfactory, though a touch overblown, More seriously, blacks are somewhat crushed so that dark details remain hidden.

The THX and Studio Reference modes produce better results right out of the box. True to their purist intentions, both leave picture-processing features like colour management and Digital Cinema Colour turned off.

THX sets contrast at 100, brightness at 58, colour at 50 and colour temperature at Warm 2. The results are certainly satisfying, except for one thing. There is a considerable amount of overscan, in which some of the sides, top and bottom are cropped so as to block out artifacts that can appear in the boundaries of some TV stations' programming. The sizing option that lets you scan the full picture (choose HD Size 2 in the Advanced picture menu) is greyed-out in THX mode.

It's available in the Studio Reference mode, which produces a picture that's quite a bit more subdued than THX (not to mention Standard or Game). Contrast is maxed out at 100, brightness is boosted to 75 to bring out dark details, colour is cut to 41, sharpness is set at 50, and colour temperature set at Warm 2. There is probably additional adjustment behind the scenes, because the picture looks more subdued, and more commendably film-like, than one would expect from these settings. It's very good for movie-viewing in a dark environment, but I'd want something punchier for watching when there's light in the room.

This TV has a bewildering range of picture adjustments. For videophiles, it's worth spending some time experimenting, using your eyes and a calibration DVD.

A good starting point is to put the picture in Custom mode. Using test patterns on our calibration DVD, I set contrast to 90, boosted brightness to 65 so as to allow dark-area detail to come through, cut colour slightly to 40, left sharpness at the midpoint of 50, set colour temperature to Warm 1, and in the Advanced picture menu, set HD size at Size 2. In moderate to high room light, I preferred these settings to the default settings in Studio Reference mode.

Evaluation: Reflections from windows and other bright objects are visible on the screen, especially in dark scenes. On the other hand, as with all plasmas, there's no falloff in brightness when the TV is viewed from the side, as there is with LCD.

This excellent plasma gives you a clue what to expect even before a picture appears on the screen. If the TV is turned on, but the source (Blu-ray player, cable box etc.) is turned off, the blank picture looks very neutral; there's no smoky green or purple tinge, as there is on many flat panels.

In actual viewing, I was continually wowed by the natural colour. Skin tones looked spot-on; and vibrant colours that some displays have trouble with shone through. For example, deep reds, which on lesser models can have an orange tinge, looked completely convincing. And they were well differentiated. Watching a couple of NHL playoff games, the red in the Washington Capitals' jerseys looked different from that in the Carolina Hurricanes'. Similarly, I could see a difference between the deep black of the officials' uniforms and the dark brownish black of the Boston Bruins', even in long shots. This is a testament both to the colour accuracy and to the huge contrast range of this great television.

It was satisfying in other ways too with sports. As I expected, resolution remained high with moving objects on the screen; there was no visible blurring at all.

At the default settings, the grass at New Yankee Stadium looked too vibrant; that was one area where cutting colour to 40 paid off. In every other respect - detail in still and moving areas, colour, the three-dimensional modeling of players' faces - baseball looked fantastic in high-definition on this wonderful plasma.

Prime-time drama looked great too. The dark tones and colours in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation were subtly delineated. Blacks were satisfyingly deep, but it was easy to differentiate dark details; even in very dark scenes, a dark blue jacket that Gil Grissom was wearing was the right colour.

For movie playback, we used Pioneer's new premium Elite BDP-09FD Blu-ray player connected via HDMI to a Pioneer Elite SC-07 A/V receiver. Predictably, given its very high contrast ratio, the Panasonic plasma dealt very well with the extremes of light and darkness in Slumdog Millionaire. Challenging scenes where there was bright and dark content at the same time, such as a barbershop that looked out onto a street, came through beautifully. The dingy semi-tropical colours were wonderfully portrayed.

The Shallow Seas episode of Planet Earth looked stunning. Blacks in nighttime underwater scenes were inky-dark; colours and detail in the bright coral were stunning.

When I reviewed Panasonic's premium 850-series 50-inch plasma in the summer of 2008, I didn't see many areas where it could be improved. But this model beats it in every way, with more natural colour, better blacks, better three-dimensionality. And as a bonus, it's also slimmer and better-looking.

Article Tags:  panasonic, plasma, neo, PDP, contrast, V10, P50V10, resolution, contrast, colour, color, detail,, viera,