Panasonic TH-42PW5B Review

Overall Rating

Superb contrast, particularly black levels.

Lack of concurrent DVI and componenet video connectors, as well as need to use RCA/BNC adaptors.

I have spent nearly two years traveling from store to store, sampling high definition television sets, from the very first 34" Sony tube TV's, through the latest 2nd generation DLP front and rear projectors, but particularly the plasma sets in various iterations. In the last two months, I have had very cooperative dealers feed identical HDTV and DVD signals to two plasma screens, namely the Pioneer 50" Elite and Panasonic 50" set. In the past, I have been very impressed with the luminance of the Pioneer model, and its generally exemplary spatial resolution. However, upon closer inspection, dark areas of an image appear to be gray, and if calibration is off, tinted a pale green. Moreover, these dark areas show rather visible video noise. I confirmed this behavior by displaying the THX gray scale test pattern. By comparison, the Panasonic screen exhibited far better black rendition, approaching the best that CRT sets can produce. This difference alone added remarkable vibrancy to the picture. Moreover, the color rendition, particularly blue skies, was far more realistic than the Pioneer sets. As both sets used an identical pixel arrangement, the spatial resolution was quite comparable. While the Pioneer sported a far more flexible set-up menu, with more color temperature adjustment steps, as well as video noise reduction, it still was not possible to produce an equivalently pleasing picture. Thus, I lean toward the Panasonic. My only reservations with these plasma sets is the ability of their scalers to produce visually acceptable, though admittedly much lower resolution of our NTSC broadcast signals, as well as the need to show 4:3 material with gray bars, to prevent burn in. I simply find it heretical to view 4:3 classic movies through the stretch mode- it's ok for "casual" viewing, but seems an oxymoron to spend so much money on a "high definition" device, but one which cannot provide accurate geometry of a picture!

Members' Comments onJonathan K.'s Review

• pigmeat2000 on 23rd Oct 2003

  An excellent review

• Kingdom Come on 19th Nov 2004

  As far as I know the bars when viewing in 4:3 mode are silver not gray. If only they were grey I would buy a panasonic tomorrow.