simplemoney's Full Review: Panasonic TC-P50G10 50 in. HDTV TV
For those of you who have followed my reviews in the past, I have a dedicated home theater with a projector. After spending months redoing our family room, it was time to throw out the old TV and get a new flat panel.
After doing much research, I bought the Panasonic TCP50G10 50" plasma. Before I get into the nuances of setting up the TV let me explain why no one* should buy an LCD TV at this time.
Off-axis Viewing: Ever have friends over, or just watch the tv without sitting directly in front of it? If you do, off-axis viewing cripples LCD's brightness and color. An LCD may look gorgeous in the store, but step about seven feet to the left and notice how the picture goes from great to horrific. Plasmas don't have this problem.
Motion Blur: Why do some LCD's boast 120hz refresh? Because of motion blur. The LCD's can't turn on/off/change color fast enough to keep fast moving objects from looking blurred. 120hz is better, but still not fast enough. Plasmas are based on electricity charging a panel of gas, and since electricity moves almost as fast as the speed of light, motion blur isn't a problem.
Black is Black: No matter how hard LCD's try, they have yet to get blacks anywhere past really dark gray. Plasmas can get nearly pitch black - varying by make and model.
Why Buy This Panasonic? Good question. Vizio and Samsung are still making plasmas, so why NOT buy one of their sets. Here are my reasons:
1) Price - I not only got this set for $1,410 (that includes shipping and tax), but if I bought a Panasonic BD60 Blu-Ray player I got a $200 rebate. Considering I needed a Blu-Ray player and that one was $207, it was like getting the player for free.
2) Anti-Glare Screen:One of the big problems with plasmas is they are covered in glass, which can cause annoying glares. This P50G10 has a new anti-glare screen and it works almost perfectly in negating glare.
SETUP TV's should be easy to setup. Plug them in, send your source to it and you should be done. Well, it's not THAT easy, but at first I thought it was. I mounted my TV on the wall and you better have a good mount. At 100 lbs, its heavy and requires a second set of hands. After, I plugged in my A/V Receivers HDMI output to it. Picture came through beautifully and I was happy. I went right into the menu and switched over to THX mode for an amazingly accurate picture. For those of you who don't know, all TV's are preset with the colors very inaccurate and way too bright. Why? So that they look good on the showroom floor where there are bright lights beeming down on them. They push the red so that the flowers look redder on their sets then on the one next to it. Accuracy be damned - it's about getting a sale, and that's why LCDs have been beating plasmas, because they are MUCH brighter.
So i thought I was all set - THX mode enabled, the game was on and my universal remote was programmed. During a commercial break I decide to watch a movie on the Panasonic BD60 I just got. It looks great and I switch back to the TV. But then, the TV turns off. I turn it back on and no problems. The next day my wife watched a movie with the kids and when I took over to watch the game, the TV turned off AGAIN! Here's the lesson to this story - Panasonic has this feature called "Viera Link" and it allows different Panasonic products to talk to each other. The Blu-Ray player was saying - "The owner just shut me off, so you should shut off too." So I had to go back into the menu under "Viera Link" (easy enough to find) and turn OFF that feature.
Picture Quality Absolutely stunning. This is a 1080p set, so I expected and got fantastic detail, but more importantly the colors were so accurate. One of my neighbors is a big Red Sox fan and he commented on how his LCD, the red is much nicer. I took out my Red Sox authentic jersey and put it up to the screen and it was an exact match. He stopped talking about how much nicer his TV was and has even started thinking about moving his LCD to the bedroom and getting this Panasonic plasma for his living room.
Black level is outstanding, but black detail is just as good. Dark scenes show shadows in the background almost as well as anything I've ever seen before (I have seen a Pioneer Kuro and that was slightly better for black detail, but the same for black level). A real nice job on picture quality by Panasonic.
Sound Quality Tinny sounding garbage. I expected no better, but if you think you can watch a movie on this without external speakers, you'll be sadly disappointed.
Inputs I only need the one HDMI input, since my A/V receiver does the rest, but this TV has plenty for those who want to hook everything up to it directly. 3 HDMI inputs, Cable input, RGB input and a Composite input, should make it easy for everyone to setup.
Remote I use a separate remote, but I used the one that came with it while setting it up. It's very simple and easy to navigate. One issue is that the Power On button is also the Power Off button. A real pain when trying to program macros that automatically turn everything on or off. For example, if my kids want to watch a movie they click my universal remotes "Watch Movie" button. Everything turns on and their happy. If my wife wants to watch TV, she clicks the "Watch TV" button - but now the TV turns off because the macro sent the POWER TV code. It's a bit of a pain to program a work around and in this day and age should be completely unnecessary, but I thought you should know.
Conclusion This TV is a no brainer for anyone looking at this size/price range. The picture is gorgeous and blows any/all LCD's right out of the water. Highly recommended!
* You should buy an LCD if looking for TV's under 40" and/or have a room with a lot of ambient light.
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