Photo gallery: Panasonic Viera TH-50PZ850APanasonic's crown jewel among its 2008 plasma TVs, the Viera PZ850-series is brimming with the latest technologies the consumer A/V industry has to offer. Aside from a future-proofed full-HD panel, it's theoretically superior than the Pioneer LX Kuro with a promising 30,000:1 native contrast. That's not even taking into consideration its motion-enhancement function, a galore of HDMI inputs and other mouth-watering addons. Is this handsome AU$4,199 Panasonic a potential "Kuro" killer? Here's our report for your reading pleasure.
Design
The TH-50PZ850's styling is a departure from last year's boxy outlines. It's now based on a refreshing-yet-subtle horizontal arch design used throughout its 2008 range. Draped in gun-metal, the angled arch is also cleverly used to conceal the onboard stereo speakers and is further accentuated with a mirror finish in the centre. For the final touch, Panasonic has gone borderless through its "sheet of glass" framing. Like the LG PG60, this basically eliminates the thick panel frame of lesser models, giving both TVs a seamlessly flat front that stand out from their peers.
To maintain its clutter-free facade, Panasonic has housed all the onboard controls, auxiliary A/V inputs and an SDHC card slot behind a flip-down cover. The spread of ports covers just about everything necessary, too, from headphones to standard composite-A/V and 1080p-ready HDMI. On the back, there're four cooling fans for ventilation. These run silently and are pretty effective in keeping our review unit cool despite running non-stop for two weeks. Rounding it up are a T-shaped swivel stand which can be traded for a wall bracket and two cable ties for wire management.
The same old 2007 remote controller is making a comeback, right down to the layout and button selection. On one hand, you'll no doubt appreciate the ergonomic ridged bottom, large keys and multifunctional Panasonic DVD controls. But on the other, we're not particularly impressed by its cumbersome A/V input toggle button and selection list combination. That said, you do have an option to label individual inputs or to skip it altogether by programming the menu to hasten the switching progress. This is in addition to the dedicated TV and SDHC card shortcuts.
It seems like things didn't change much for its software menu, either. Nested within the submenus is a relatively modest array of configurations to fiddle around with. While most of the essentials are present, advanced variants are limited to just noise reduction, proprietary colour and motion enhancements. Default picture mode-wise, there are four choices available, including "Eco" which automatically optimizes picture quality based on the room's ambient lighting. Each of these settings can be independently assigned to any of the video inputs and further customized to your personal likings.
Features
Under the hood of this 50-incher is the Japanese company's generation-11 full-HD plasma panel. It offers a three-fold native contrast boost to 30,000:1 (1,000,000:1 dynamic), 25 percent better colour gradation at 5,120 equivalent steps and an extended 100,000-hour panel life over the G10 panel. Another interesting development is the Viera's new glossy screen, which is somewhat of a reversal on the PZ700's matte, anti-glare finish. The TH-50PZ850's native contrast is technically 50 percent higher than our reference LX Kuro, though it's worth noting that most 2008 plasma entries have such ratings, so it may not be wise to base your buying decision on these numbers alone.
Upgraded 1080p24-ready HDMI ports and AVCHD playback-enabled SHDC card slot.
For technophiles, this Viera is outfitted with the most advanced visual technologies Panasonic has under its belt. These include the highest-end iteration of its in-house video-processing engine, and the inclusion of a 24p mode Cinema for film materials. Lastly, there's x.v Color for richer hues.
To set it apart from the rest of its siblings, the Panasonic has out-of-the-box photo and video playback via a memory card slot. It will support up to 10-megapixel JPEGs, as well as AVCHD-encoded clips. As for storage capacity/format, the unit will accept sizes up to 16GB for SDHC cards, 2GB for SD media, 1GB for miniSD, and 128MB for MMC. However, we think these limits are conservative as a 1GB MMC card worked fine in our test. AVCHD is a distinguishing feature of Panasonic and Sony videocams which enables a shoot, transfer and direct-to-your-TV play proposition minus the hassle of having to scramble for an HDMI or AV cable.
Panasonic has thankfully addressed its earlier HDMI shortfall by embracing native film 1080p24-compliance. At the same time, it's also upping the ante by upgrading the panel with a whopping four HDMI 1.3 terminals. Numbers-aside, these HDMI ports sport the latest Viera Link CEC functionality for one-remote operation of compatible products.
Those planning to hook up the TV to a home theatre should also benefit from the Panasonic's optical audio output which relay the sound of the onboard HD tuner digitally. The only specification which could have been improved on is the provision of a scant two 1080i-only component inputs and PC connection capped at 1,366 x 768.
Performance
To tap the PZ850's true potential you'll need a reasonably dark room due to the television's reflective screen. We also picked up some panel internal reflections which affected sharpness slightly, although the other plasma bugbear -- burn-in or image retention -- was minimal during our review.
The onboard tuner is good, and most of the stations we tuned into were displayed with clean grain-free visuals, devoid of the common artifacts we normally observe on lower-end models. Comparing it side-by-side with the LX Kuro, the Viera was better in handling a smooth, scrolling news ticker, but lost out in overall sharpness levels.
Switching over to a synthetic test pattern, the SpyderTV Pro-calibrated TH-50PZ850 was absolutely brilliant, scoring perfect results for grayscale tracking and color decoding. To verify some of these observations, we traded our Avia test disk with Blade 2 and were greeted by detailed shadows that unmasked intricate warehouse structures during the ninja assault scene. The TV's upscaling quality was spot on as well, as made evident by standard-definition HQV benchmarks in both the "waving flag" jaggies and noise reduction tests.
It was a completely different experience for 1080p24 Blu-ray. Aside from an instant boast in clarity, there was also nice image depth when we took Pixar's Cars for an … erm … test drive. This disk was rendered in rich saturated colors and Kuro-like inky blacks.
Meanwhile, flesh tones were just about right in Casino Royale with fluid motion throughout the Madagascar chase scene and without visible distortion. It was a similarly strong showing in HD-HQV, thanks to the almost flawless jaggie and video resolution loss tests. Nonetheless, there was some details lost during the film resolution leg.
Images load quickly and look great via the onboard memory card reader.
The same level of fluidity and crisp visuals were garnered in the PlayStation 3 Ridge Racer 7 and Xbox 360 Need For Speed ProStreet. Tapping on the 1080i component output of the latter did not compromise picture quality, but stepping up to 1080p caused a weird screen alignment error (but this may be an isolated case). While most plasmas deliver soft PC text at non-native resolutions, this Viera was able to deliver sharp fonts at 1,024 x 768-pixels. Unlike the Xbox, formatting was accurate border-to-border, though fade diagonal and circular banding were slight issues for our color chart.
Shutterbugs will definitely be delighted by JPEG playback quality and responsiveness, as pictures were presented in their original aspect ratio and clocking in an almost instantaneous thumbnail preview and blazing fast 2-second load time for individual images. We were out of luck playing back downloaded AVCHD files, but were reassured that it should work effortlessly with videocam-recorded media.
Wrapping up the package were the powerful 31W loudspeakers which belted out strong bass and extended treble. Good stereo imaging was another of the Pana's fortes, and it was able to reach reference level (85db) at only 50 percent volume.
Conclusion
Taking everything into consideration, the Panasonic TH-50PZ850 is mostly on par or better than our reference Pioneer LX Kuro in motion reproduction and features. At almost half the price of its rival plus a proven anti-judder engine, this Viera is probably one of the best options for a full-HD plasma TV.
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