Great Picture - Crummy Sound

We've had this Plasma TV for 6 months and we're totally satisfied with the great picture. The TV's sound is nothing near home theater quality. But hey, if you're going to go with this level of Plasma TV, you most likely have a separate surround sound system anyway!

Buying process:

Being a bit of a geek, I did a ton of research into resolution, contrast, brightness, image quality, etc. I traded off the cost vs. quality of the picture before settling on this product.

We went with good 1080p performance as you will be hard pressed to come up with a higher resolution video source during the expected life of this TV.

We considered the LCD vs. Plasma debate and decided on Plasma for it's better brightness and better price performance. The debate over screen life we think is moot anyway as even if you watched your TV 24/7 by the time the screen degraded it would be long obsolete!

I should mention that this is our second Plasma TV. We bought our first one back in 2000, in the days before High Definition, when they a heck of a lot more expensive. Back then we paid $14,000 for a Runco (a very high-end boutique home theater equipment manufacturer) 42 inch Plasma TV. Our Runco is still working great and we love it. But we had it built-in to our Sailboat and we wanted one for the house.

We bought our Panasonic at our local Best Buy in Santa Rosa, CA and the experience was trouble free. I had them deliver the TV and do the basic setup. Best Buy had to coordinate the DirecTV install with the local DirecTV Reps and that took a bit longer.

I bought a DirecTV HD HR20-700 DVR from them (Best Buy) at the same time, but if I had it to do all over again - I would buy the DirecTV equipment and service directly from DirecTV and not Best Buy. You can get a better deal that way and the DirecTV part of the installation is better coordinated.

Our Experience Using the Product - Getting the best picture:

You face a number of challenges getting the best possible picture from any HD TV. I'll divide those into three categories:

1. Making the best connection signal connection to your TV

There are a number of ways to get the picture from your home theater setup to your TV.

The best picture quality is by HDMI cable. If you have a cable, satellite box, DVD player, PC or game system with this type of output - we strongly recommend that you hook your set up this way. Save yourself some money though - you don't need to spend a bunch of bucks on the high end cables. The HDMI digital interface works well on the inexpensive cables available from Internet suppliers like Blue Jeans Cable.

Next best quality comes from connections using Component Video. This standard has been around for awhile so your older equipment, DVD Players, etc. should be able to output it. This is analog and not digital signaling, so a better cable is warranted.

Then comes S-Video, use this only if you have to - you won't get anything approaching HD over this.

Worst is composite video. This is Standard Definition only, so don't expect much. This standard NTSC (which stands for National Television System Committee) dates back to the old black and white TV days. It's so poor that some of us call it "Never Twice the Same Color"!

2. Tuning your HDTV

There are a lot of picture settings you can twiddle with in your set. Out of the box, you probably won't be satisfied with your picture. If you're a perfectionist, there are DVDs and other tools you can buy to help you tune your picture.

We just used one of the presets in the setup menu. We like Vivid the best.

3. Getting a source for HD content (Broadcast or Prerecorded)

a. Broadcast - In our area we have the choice of Comcast Cable, Dish Network or DirecTV. We're out in a rural area of Sonoma County CA and can only get 2 off the air channels.

None of the providers provide true HD - all compress the signal and degrade it to some degree. Subjectively the picture is still darn good! We went with DirecTV since they have the most HD content, especially the HD versions of the channels we like. The only ones missing are the HD variants of the San Francisco PBS stations.

b. Prerecorded - Now that Blu-Ray has prevailed in the format battles we expect to see less expensive players and movies available. However, while we've borrowed a friends PS3 to watch an occasional Blu-Ray movie, we have yet to make the plunge. We still use our good old DVD player.

You can also get one of the new Internet connected video download boxes like an Apple/TV or the new Netflix box, but so far we haven't been seduced.

Loves and Hates:

We love that this Plasma TV has performed flawlessly over the last 6 months. We get a great picture and we've received very good value for the money.

There's not much not to like about this TV. We have a good home theater sound system so we don't use the internal TV sound except when one of us is trying to sleep on the other side of the house. A minor annoyance is that the TV forgets its setup when it loses power, we have frequent power outages here in the boonies.