Panasonic TX28PS12C Reviews

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Good Points: Connections
TV easy to setup
Overall picture quality and colour contrast
Digital comb filter even works well on dodgy terrestrial analogue TV signals
Unit and build quality

Bad Points: slight "graininess" in picture as programmes pan left to right
Visible vertical bands at higher brightness levels on dark background

General comments: I poured over reviews on the internet for months before deciding what widescreen to buy.

I didn't want to pay a fortune, but at the same time I wanted a good quality TV that would deal with mainly digital TV and intense DVD viewing...also a TV that came equipped with relatively new technologies so that it wasn't out of date in 6 months.

In addition I didn't want a TV unit that was very big.

I compared many TVs in stores, but the problem was always the same - no decent digital TV signal on any demo models! Why do stores insist on having the worst TV signals to demo even the best TVs?!?! It doesn't make sense!...anyway, this meant that the purchess was to some extent a gamble.

I have to say once I got the thing home I was really impressed with the overall picture quality particularly on DVD viewing. This model is a true flat screen and (standard) 100Hz to boot. At the side of the 50Hz model you can really see how the 100Hz improves the picture quality even on not so good terrestial analogue TV signals. Sometimes a little tweaking of the bightness/contrast/colour settings is required from one input to the next (or from one DVD to the next on my player), but I can't say that this particularly bothers me. If you don't do this sometimes on dark pictures you can see two wide vertical bands that appear brighter than the rest of the picture.

Sometimes a slight vertical "graininess" in the picture can be seen. This appears on pictures with bright backgrounds when panning left to right. I assume the main culprit of this though is the Sky digital signals, as I can't say I've ever really noticed this when watiching DVDs.

The sound is OK from the set, although you need to be selective on when you use the "ambience" setting as it can sometimes dramatically lower the volume of the vocal frequencies. There is a "speech" and a "music" setting, but I tend to leave this set to "music". As I have a full Dolby digital amp I'm not relying on the sound production of the set anyway.

The other major bonus for me was the connections provided. There are THREE scart sockets, TWO of which are RGB. The only other 28inch TV I spotted this on was a vastly over priced Sony set. This is great because it means I can get the best picture quality from my DVD player and digital TV box (previously I had these sharing the same SCART socket which degraded the picture quality). All the scart sockets are auto-switching (my last set only had one that auto switched for some reason). There is S-Video input, and the usual audio output (2xRCA)

And I have to put a word in for John Lewis - free delivery, a great price comparable with internet prices and a 5 year guarantee...
http://www.johnlewis.com/stores/product.asp?sku=230189755&str=131&trsid=2452&m=-1