HDTeleVision Review

Panasonic VIERA X1 Series TC-L32X1 32-Inch 720p LCD HDTV

Better than Samsung LN32A550, Interestingly enough the product says it’s iPod compatible (iPod Classic, Touch, Nano, etc.) but it also works great with iPhone 3G and charges the battery. VIERA Link lets you control your compatible Panasonic DVD, Blu-ray Disc player, home theater sound system and HD camcorder, with a single remote. the picture quality is beyond excellent.
In Game mode, quicker image response increases the enjoyment of video games when a game console is connected to the TV. What’s more VIERA produces the dark images in video games more clearly. This mode works anti-image retention (wobbling) too.

What’s you Get
Panasonic Viera X1 Series TC-L32X1 32-Inch 720p LCD HDTV, Universal dock for iPod, Remote control, Remote batteries, AC cord, Pedestal with installation hardware, Cleaning cloth, Operating instructions, Quick setup guide, Product Registration Card, Customer Care Plan Card Read more…

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By David Mackenzie

The TH50PZ800B’s bezel design is more or less consistent with Panasonic’s other Plasma displays. Its stand-out feature is the rather attractive silver curve at the bottom of the display, which features a unique “curved” Power button, as well as a rugged-feeling flap which lifts smoothly upwards to reveal front-mounted HDMI, legacy video, and SD card inputs, and some buttons. Panasonic dubs this arrangement the “Horizontal Arch design”, and we have to say, we like it quite a lot.

Panasonic TH50PZ800B is a 50″ plasma television positioned at the high end of the company’s lineup. Key features of this model include the Full HD 1920×1080p resolution, a quoted contrast ratio of 30,000:1, and the company’s V-REAL PRO 3 processing engine

Connections

The Panasonic TH50PZ800B plasma TV includes connectivity options to suit most purposes. The back panel features two SCART terminals (one of which can also accept S-Video feeds), analogue Component video and stereo audio inputs, three HDMIs, and a VGA PC input.

The fourth HDMI port is located under the flap on the front of the Panasonic TH50PZ800B (alongside the SD Card input and legacy S-Video and Composite video inputs).

The top-level adjustment in the Picture menu is for the [Viewing Mode], which allows selection of [Dynamic], [Normal], [Cinema] or [Eco]. The Panasonic TH50PZ800B plasma television does not feature per-input settings; but these four modes can be applied to inputs to partially address the problem (however, there are subtle differences in the video output between the modes, even if both are configured identically in the menu).

[Colour Balance] controls the Greyscale, with options for blue-tinted video [Cool], less-blue tinted video (oddly labeled as [Normal]), and [Warm], which we selected. [Colour Management] makes an almost unnoticeable change to the saturation of certain colours, and is not a Colour Management System like the name suggests. Finally, [P-NR] uses spatial noise reduction in an attempt to soften areas of the picture where noise often lies. This is a relatively ineffective noise reduction technique, as most objectionable noise is fast moving and would be better tackled with a temporal filter.

The [Setup] menu houses additional video tweaks, with options to toggle the [Intelligent Frame Creation] interpolation feature, [Picture Overscan] (which can be used to achieve 1:1 mapping on 1080i/1080p sources), and the [Side Panel] option to change the intensity of the side-bars for 4:3 content (the default option is [High] which uses grey-coloured bars, to help avoid image retention).

The Panasonic TH50PZ800B HDTV will certainly please gamers with its low level of input lag (which we measured at around 10-20ms). However, as most next-generation console games do not contain consistent frame rates, we assumed that users might like to turn on the [Intelligent Frame Creation] mode to improve fluidity. This created two adverse effects: firstly, the level of input lag was upped to 30ms, and secondly, scanline-esque jaggedness and jitter were introduced, suggesting that IFC function converts internally to 1080i for its operation.

Benchmark Test Results

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