Knockout TV set, August 17, 2009

We replaced an 18 year old 27″ CRT set with this one and it’s a beauty. I am a TV news cameraman with thirty years in the business so I look at a lot of high end monitors at work.

When I went to the store I didn’t expect to get a great set in this size and frankly 720P didn’t excite me much either.

After looking at top tier sets from Sony, LG, Samsung, Toshiba and Mitsubishi I ended up on the Panasonic.

I was shocked at how good all the upper tier sets looked but the Panasonic seemed to have a little better detail down in the blacks and seemed to track highly detailed scenes with less digital noise than the others, but it was close accross the board.

The off air ATSC tuner is excellent and the set has all the inputs you could reasonably need. I do not intend to plug in an iPod so that wasn’t a factor in my choice.

My DVD player is older and does not pass audio through the HDMI output so I connected it to the set via the component outs and I feel no need at all to upgrade to a BlueRay player. At this size this is a wonderful combination.

My general feeling is that if you watch a lot of HDTV that is live or tape such as sports then Panasonic flat screens just seem to pull a little more quality out of the signal. For movies it is more of a level playing field.

This is pretty subjective but it’s how I see it.

It’s amazing how far your money goes in this stuff anymore.

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Works Great, perfectly fits the budget!, December 21, 2009

We have a 50″ Sony SXRD Projection TV in which we paid over ,000 for including the stand! I love the TV but when your Electricity bill is over 0.00, you need to find ways of cutting down on the utilities. Besides that, this TV needs to have its projection lamp replaced once a year at the cost of over 0! Even at discount places, this lamp is still over 0! Think about replacing that lamp every year. In no time, you would have spent enough to purchase a brand new 40 – 50 inch LCD TV. This Panasonic TV is not only smaller but Star Energy rated, so that should save some on the energy cost.

In the bedroom was an old Toshiba 13″ CRT type TV and watching movies on it wasn’t much fun, so what better time to replace the bedroom TV. Since I’m retired and have a limited income, my budget was under 0 and this fits the budget perfectly.

I read somewhere that the size of the TV one should buy should be based on the distance (in inches) from the TV to where you’ll be sitting; divided by 2.5. After measuring the distance, I came up with 80″, divided by 2.5 and it comes out to 32 inches. A 32″ TV would have been perfect but too big for the stand I wanted it to sit on, so I settled for this TV and I’m a happy camper! Besides, it would have been beyond my budget! I do wonder however if this is just another advertising ploy to sell you a larger unit? I think that dividing the distance by 3 works out just as well.

In comparison, the Sony has a softer smoother image while the picture on this TV is more vivid and has more contrast. Having worked at a large Electronic Store, I have noticed that most people prefer a brighter more contrasting image when it comes to TVs and monitors. I still prefer the Sony because the picture (to me) is a bit more realistic but that’s just a minor complaint.

One concern was choosing between a 1080P and 720P monitor. But from what I’ve been told, it makes a difference on a larger TV (40″ or more), but not so much with the smaller screens. I tend to agree with that since it’s all about the number of pixels (dots), the distance between each pixel and their size. Have you ever noticed on the old CRT TV’s that the smaller the TV, the better the picture quality? That’s because (without getting too technical) there’s a set number of pixels horizontally and vertically on a CRT, and the smaller and closer the pixels are, the better the image. On the smaller screen size, the pixels are smaller and closer together which makes the images clearer. The number of pixels does make a difference, but only to a certain extent. It depends on the area to be filled. On this size TV, the 720P works very well and you won’t see a major difference if it had 1080P.

Another concern was whether to purchase a new DVD player. Hooking up an old standard DVD player to an HDTV didn’t make any sense. So I had to consider a Blu Ray or an up-converting DVD player. That was an easy decision since we have about 2000 standard DVD’s. Replacing all those with the Blu Ray equivalent would get costly (about 10-20 grand), so an up converting DVD player was the obvious choice

So I purchased the Sony HDMI DVP NS710H up-converting player, and combined with this TV, works great! The picture is stunning and I couldn’t be happier. No, it’s not quite as good as having Blu Ray, but it does improve the image of a standard DVD considerably. However, the up-conversion only works if you hook it up via an HDMI cable. So please be aware of that!

You can hook your PC video output to this T.V. via a 15 pin VGA cable and the image looks fairly decent, but you may have to adjust the Horizontal and the Vertical positions on the TV, and the resolution on your graphics card as well. The native resolution for this T.V. is 1366 x 768, but you can try the different resolutions that your graphics card has to offer and find one to your liking. The process is fairly simple if you have the right cables and a 15 pin VGA output plug on your PC. However some of the newer graphics cards only have DVI outputs, so you will have to get a DVI to VGA converter. Right now, I have this set up to output my Netflix movies to this T.V.

(Addendum as of Jan 16, 2010) I now have a Roku HD player for watching Netflix and Amazon movies and it works wonderful. Now I don’t have to mess around with flipping back and forth from Computer monitor to the T.V. It was becoming a pain and the PC is unusable while it was being used to stream in the movies. The only thing you should be aware of is that you NEED some kind of a router for it to access the internet and use HDMI cable instead of the provided composite cable for best results.

In regards to the poor viewing angle; It IS disturbing that the description of this TV states that the wide 178 degree viewing angle ensures clear images even when viewed from an angle. This is clearly…

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Fantastic TV, May 29, 2009

I just received this TV yesterday and all I can say so far is WOW!!!!

It is in our bedroom and looks great (picture and aesthetics wise). The iPod dock is also very nice. The sound is excellent for a small (?) TV.

One thing to note. Unless you are a magician, be sure to use long needle nose pliers to get the screws started into the stand/base when attaching it to the TV. Very hard to do with just a screw driver.

My only complaint so far is that the sleeper timer does not have a dedicated button on the remote. You have to go into 2 different menu screens to get to it. My way around that was to set each of the 5 timers the TV has so that each one goes off at 11pm Sunday night through Thursday night. This obviously is not an issue if you are using it somewhere other than a bedroom.

P.S. – Don’t be swayed by the talk about size of your TV and the viewing distance. This 26″ is a perfect size for our bedroom (sits on 5 drawer dresser about 12ft from my pillow). The charts for LCD TVs had me at a 42″ minimum, which is not true IMHO.

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