Calibration, Test Results, and Viewing Evaluation

The Dynamic setting was much too hot overall and was easily identified as such with the naked eye. Standard agreed with me most as Cinema seemed too muted. Picture, Brightness, and Sharpness needed little adjustment and were generally very agreeable. There was a significant blue emphasis which was only slightly noticeable during use. Using the Standard setting, most people would be perfectly happy with the picture and honestly, this is a good thing. Yes, I calibrated it and yes it made a difference. Was it night and day? Only after I was through. Beforehand, I thought it looked pretty darn good.

We used the Sencore Color Pro 5000 (CP5000) to calibrate the display. As you can see, the set ran cool out of the box (varied between 7700k and 8300k between 30 and 80 IRE) with a heavy blue emphasis. After correcting for the overabundance of blue, it was much closer to the target of 6500k between 30 and 80 IRE (ranging from 6200k and 6700k).

Audioholics/HQV Bench Testing Summary of Test Results

Perfect Score is 130
Panasonic TH-50PHD8UK Benchmark Score: 31

Comments of HQV Testing

This unit isn't really designed to provide the best interlacing that money can buy. Its lot in life is to scroll arrival and departure times at the airport. As long as you provide it a good source, the picture quality will be stunning. As such, we simply recommend that you use it with a high quality progressive scan source component. There is no reason why you shouldn't be completely satisfied with this display if you are feeding it with a relatively good quality DVD player or cable/satellite box. Remember, if you are feeding a progressive signal to a television, it is not handling deinterlacing, jaggie reduction, or cadence detection, only scaling of the image to the display's native resolution.

Viewing Evaluation

So, with bragging rights firmly in place, everyone I knew suddenly found a way to come over. Let's just say that I had no problem getting enough time with this display. The first thing I noticed was how vibrant and alive everything looked when providing a progressive signal from a DVD player. Pixar material (especially Finding Nemo and The Incredibles ) were particularly impressive.

Author's Note: The pictures of the display do not do the display justice. Aside from the obvious problems of taking a picture of an image on a direct-view pixel-based screen, our in-house digital cameras leave a bit to be desired.

The Incredibles

I freakin love this movie. In my opinion, it is by far Pixar's best work. Superheroes with a James Bondish plot?! Brilliant. I was noticing a ton of detail that I wasn't noticing before. The texture of the suits, the movement of the hair, a lot of little details that just weren't apparent on other displays. Colors were vibrant but not oversaturated. Blacks looked good as did the nuances of the textures on the uniforms. Motion was never blurred nor did I notice an abundance of macroblocking during the darker scenes or explosions.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

Now, for people that know and love the game, this movie might make sense to you. For everyone else, don't think this is Spirits Within part two... cause it ain't. I never was one for the epic RPGs that have such a rabid following so I wasn't familiar with the story. Fortunately, I have a friend (who brought the movie over for me to watch), so he translated... sort of. The prelude "movie" (really, just outtakes from the game) makes no sense even with a "translator" and I don't think I could sum up the plot of the main movie if I wanted to. "Disjointed"is a word, though "drug induced" might fit better. My comment after it was over, "Hey, man. Someone went to the bank and cashed a check after writing that story. They got paid for that! How do I sign up for that gig?" Anyways, it was a beautiful movie to look at if a bit smoky. It seemed as if there was a layer of haze over the entire movie. When it was clear, however, the textures were beautiful and the graphics intense. There were lots of action scenes that were intentionally blurred but those that weren't generally worked fairly well. There was some evidence of jaggies here and there and some graininess to the layer of fog but overall, it was fairly well done.