Rand Wacker

A few weeks ago when Alexis was home and went she went to turn on the TV and it seemed like it was possessed. Without any remotes in site, the on-screen menu would come on and then start flipping through different options. Soon enough it started choosing new options on its own and all of the sudden we were stuck adjusting contrast and brightness in French. I had no objections when Lex suggested we should go out and start looking at large flat-panel plasma screens.

After various investigation at local retailers, Costco, the Dell TV displays at a couple of malls, and doing tons of online reading (I highly recommend this site) I ended up ordering a commercial model Panasonic TH-42PHD7UY 42″ High Definition Plasma Monitor from lcdtvs.com (you might also want to check out drplasma.com). For several years now Panasonic has been the one to beat, and this is the latest (seventh? eighth?) generation panel with the industries highest contrast level and brightness. The picture is stunning. I had some friends over for dinner last night and then I put Finding Nemo on and the entire room was literally breathless for thirty minutes. My buddy Shac is on the prowl for a plasma as well and asked to borrow my laptop so he could order one of these immediately within the first five minutes of the movie. I couldn’t be happier with the screen.

Some things to note though before you go out and drop $2.5K on your own obelisk. This is a monitor only, there are no speakers included, no stand, and there’s no tuner so you have to have your own external video source such as a Tivo, cable box, or just a DVD player for the real purists. That was fine with me because I don’t like the styling of many of the consumer-oriented models (the Panasonic TH-42PX50U is a similar screen with consumer options, but see below). Also, the connectors on this TV are all professional-grade, so the component video and even composite video plugs use the twist-on BNC connectors as opposed to the regular old RCA jacks. You’ll need to order a set of RCA-to-BNC cables from someone like bettercables.com (and this will set you back). It does have a regular S-Video plug which is how everything is hooked up now, and that works just fine.

All of this is fine with me though, because the picture quality totally trumps all those other little issues. My understanding is that Panasonic rolls out their latest technology in their professional models and in their high-end Onyx TVs, so this panel is actually a generation beyond the consumer model I mentioned above and has comparable picture quality to the $6000 Onyx 42″. The video inputs come on modular boards, so you can add new inputs as needed. It comes with plugs for VGA, S-Video, Component and Composite (BNC connectors for the last two). I’m ordering an HDMI module for future HD DirecTivo and Blu-Ray DVD, and a DVI-to-HDMI cable for hooking up a computer. Finally, like video processors on all widescreen TVs, this unit supports various forms of stretching and zoom for different 4:3 or 16:9 pictures, but the Panasonic has a very cool “Auto” feature which seems to get the display format for broadcast shows off our Tivo just right 90% of the time. Since about half of the network programming we watch is presented in widescreen, the majority of shows we watch fill up the entire screen without any strange stretching or artifacts. The picture quality is of course less than that of HD, but we’ll deal with that later.