oxbrown's Full Review: Panasonic TC-P50G10 50 in. HDTV TV
Do you want to watch a computer monitor, or do you want to watch television? If you answered "television", then buy a Panasonic G10 (now a G15). Other reviewers discussed the features, so let's talk about image quality and compare Panasonic plasma to LCDs...
LCD has a number of inherent problems. The viewing angle is poor, you have to sit in the sweet spot...directly in front of the screen. Anything short of that and the color starts to shift and look unnatural. Now, with the Panasonic, you can sit anywhere in the room and the picture does not degrade and the colors don't shift. It's a perfect picture from any angle.
LCD has problems with fast action. It can't turn on and off the LCD pixels (picture element) fast enough to keep the motion smooth, so the manufacturers have to use gimmicks like 120hz or even 240hz to try to overcome the limitations of the LCD technology. This Panasonic plasma, like all plasmas, has no problem with the fastest action. Sports, and action movies all look perfect.
LCD "blacks" are really dark gray. LCD screens are a passive image technology, which means they need some sort of backlight, either CCFL tubes, or recently LED lighting. When the LCDs are displaying black, they are essentially turned off. But the backlighting is still on and some of that light leaks to the screen, making blacks look dark gray. Plasma screens are a transmissive technology, each pixel is lit individually, so when it's off, it's totally off, creating black. Movies look great, shadow detail is there, black is black and everyone is happy.
Now, to be fair LCD technology is improving, but you'd have to spend $4000 to get the look of this Panasonic G10. I've had my G10 for 4 months and the image quality is literally like looking out a window. No joke. The image is so natural, colors are accurate, blacks are black and it doesn't look like I'm watching a computer monitor like LCD.
So what is the downside of this Panasonic? Two words...image retention (IR). Because of the plasma technology, any static image (station logos, movie bars, ticker bars) displayed for too long, will create a temporary ghosted image of that logo, bar, etc. Keep a static image on screen long enough and it might permanently burn-in the image on the screen. Panasonic has the least problems with this. Samsung and others are more susceptible to image retention. Just be aware of this and mix up your viewing habits (16:9, 4:3, movies, etc.) and you won't have a problem. But be especially careful during the first month of use. Any IR I've seen has gone away in seconds when I change channels or switch inputs.
This TV has tons of features, as other reviewers have already talked about, but for me, the best reason to buy this TV is the image quality. It's all about the picture.
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