Death Knell for Plasma? Highly Exaggerated! This Panny Matches CRT Quality

"Reports of my demise are highly exaggerated"....

A few years ago,plasma TVs were out of most people's budgetary reach. They "burned-in" (or so the story went), they ran hot, had poor black levels, and relatively small screen sizes compared to rear-projectors. The obituary was written and the pundits waited for the death certificate.

The plasma-makers responded with dramatic improvements....better blacks, lower power consumption and some debunking of burn-in, lifespan and other persistent plasma-rumours.

So I Bought a Plasma!Why?

Namely, a 50" Panasonic TH-50PX60U. It replaced a Sony WEGA XBR 910 CRT set (weight-approx. 3,000 pounds by my guess). The Sony had a Super Fine Pitch tube for amazing HD picture Quality. Clearly, the 50" plasma would have big shoes to fill. But the Sony was simply too small (in screen size - 34")and too bulky (the size of a small bus) for the room in which it was relocated. And my wife- never interested in this sort of thing- was REALLY interested in a wall-mounted set. Wall-mounting the Sony CRT would result in the collapse of a portion of my home, I feared.

I had done some due diligence on LCD and other non-plasma options and found their PQ just did not compare to the old CRT, especially regarding the ability to produce deep blacks. And until I recently opened-up to the plasma option, I had simply been unaware of the vast improvements plasma-makers have implemented over the past several years.

Out of the box

The box is the size of a small billboard. Have the delivery folks open it for you in the driveway to inspect for damage, then remove the set (with help) and carry it inside . Let the driver take the box for recycling and save you the effort.

The 50" screen is just big enough and awkward enough to require 2 people to safely carry it around. The chassis tips the scales at just under 100 pounds. A smaller box contains a pedestal stand for table mounting, a remote control, batteries , a few cable ties and a fairly-readable manual.

Many plasmas have often had their speakers mounted to each side of the screen. This model places them across the bottom, behind a silver bezel. That silver portion of the set runs across the entire bottom and is about 5" high. If you're not a fan of silver, you won't care for this. Doesn't bother me, so on to mounting.

Who wins....the wall or the Plasma?

Plasmas beg to be wall-mounted and this one is no exception. And remember the incredibly high WAF (wife appeal factor, of course) You can now brag to her that instead of taking up 35-40% of the family room with audio/video components over the years, with oodles of associated wires, cables and power bars, the "footprint" of the AV system will soon be reduced to less than 2%, and nary a cable to be seen.

You'll need to get a good wall mount. This is no place for cost-cutting. (Vantage Point's UFO-01 was my choice). READ the instructions carefully, then read them again, and once more. If an instructional DVD is included (it was), watch it. Several times. Discover the locations of 2 strong wooden wall studs and then find the very CENTRES of those studs. That's where you'll be attaching everything, and where the weight of the set will ultimately be spread. Failure to mount onto the centres of the studs may end up distributing the weight of your flat panel across the width of your floor at a time not of your choosing. Observe the many dire warnings included within the instructions.

It's also a 2-person job to lift the panel onto the mount, and that second person is probably not going to be your wife. A 50" TV is heavy and needs to be lifted quite high to engage the wall mounting connectors. I know I struggled myself. (This is what neighbours are for.)

Before lifting the set onto the wall mounts, connect all of your cables...power, HDMI, etc. It's easier to do it now, trust me.

Well, there it is! Hanging from the wall at a modest 5-degree angle (don't exceed 10 degrees, say many manufacturers.) I'm a bit nervous seeing this massive thing hanging in mid-air. Time to see if it works!

Ignition!

Anxious to get a peek at the picture quality, I simply hooked up my HD-PVR (satellite receiver) using an HDMI cable (expensive and NOT included). It IS nice that the cable includes all audio and video connections for HD though. There are, handily, 2 HDMI connectors.

I loaded the 2 batteries into the remote, and pressed POWER. Connections to my home theatre 5.1 audio system could wait for another time.

The first thing I noticed....a really QUIET power-up, unlike my old Sony CRT (the lights in the house would dim and the cat would run away when the Sony fired-up with a menacing buzz).
Mere seconds later, a picture....a BLAZING picture (painful to watch). These sets come off the line set for "megawatt" brightness levels for the showroom floor (Do the manufacturers really think most of their sets will be demoed on showroom floors? Won't most be sitting inside their boxes in warehouses until they're sold?) First thing to do with this or any other plasma is go into the PICTURE menu and crank down the brightness, contrast and picture levels.

Scanning for stations is a snap....for both digital and analog stations. If you have an antenna, be sure you hooked it up before hanging the set....you may be able to receive free HD content over the air. Signal-strength meters make tuning in these OTA stations and orienting your antenna a snap.
All menu settings are intuitive once you understand Panasonic's particular logic for button-pushing.The on-screen menu displays are clear and easily-read.
Several options exist to configure the internal speakers. Let's just say the speakers sound fine....they won't replace a good home theatre 5.1 system but for much content the on-board rig will suffice.

The Picture- Good as a good CRT?

My wife and I both agree......the 50" plasma picture is AS GOOD or BETTER than the state-of-the-art Sony it replaced. That's saying something. Even with the black level setting set to LIGHT, the blacks were deep and rich, the colours simply eye-popping. The digital stations look great, DVD's look yummy, and HD is remarkable.

If you've owned an older big-screen projection CRT screen (I had a Toshiba 53-incher that dwarfed our piano), you got used to compromising on picture QUALITY to get that boffo big screen SIZE. With this Panasonic plasma, the sheer brilliance and clarity of the big picture is quite startling. Clearly, a good plasma can take a CRT-lover for a sweet ride at screen sizes where CRT's simply cannot tread.

Breaking In

Panasonic has a few words to say about things you should NOT do in the first 100 hours of use of the set. Don't use the 4.3 mode for too long (shows black bars on each side of picture...the bars can leave a residual image). The idea is to make the ENTIRE screen area work equally hard over the break-in period. Bottom line is to simply keep the entire screen covered with video, whether you're watching HD or standard def or DVD's. And do make that MOVING video, not static images, logos or DVD menu screens. If you're not watching the set, turn it off.

Panansonic and other companies could help a lot by NOT cranking up picture, brightness and contrast to absurd levels before the sets leave the plant. Those high settings, left unchanged, are not good for the life of the screen and it's too bad the customer has to figure that out for themselves, but there it is. You've been warned.

The remote control

Looking at the remote control, you get the feeling the designers of the set and the folks who worked on the design of the remote had different objectives. While the set seems a stellar, elegant performaer, the remote is a slab of mostly similar-looking buttons on a rather longish hunk of plastic with - natch - no backlighting, with the curious exception of the device-selection buttons. They light-up in red but have NO PRINTED LABEL on them. The button labels, alas, are printed in black on the plastic case. You can program it for other devices, but my guess is if you can use any OTHER remote as your "main" one, you'll do that. In the cluttered world of remote controls, over the years I've seen very few that came close to matching the design and build-quality of the devices they are supposed to control.

Conclusions

You've stayed with me this far! Look, I'm not a core videophile. I have not spent hours "tweaking" my set for maximum-possible output (would I even know the difference?) I haven't counted the pixels, looked for burned-out ones, or anything else other than to make the common-sense adjustments already mentioned for help breaking-in the screen. I can't talk to you about 1090i vs. 1080p except to say this set "does both" according to the spec sheet. In this complex world where analysis-paralysis surrounds us, sometimes it's great to find something that "you just LIKE."

This is one of those things. Technology may (and probably will) change, but right now, if you liked the quality of CTR's but didn't think you could duplicate it in large screen sizes,and if you have a good source of HD programming, the new plasmas...and the Panasonic TH-50PX60U
in particular, could really, really change your mind.