TR Forums

I think VRock needs a 35" CRT TV plus one of these:
http://www.independentliving.com/prodin ... ber=107098

Heh, intersting find.

Too bad non one has made a CRT worth owning since 2004.

And this is why I still have a Fish's old 30" crt hdtv.

I spent some time at the local Crutchfield yesterday playing with some of the new Panny plasmas (a couple of G series units). They're fine TVs. Unfortunately I still see the yellow/blue trails in high contrast, fast moving content. This was in store lighting, which flatters TVs, so I imagine it would be worse under total darkness.

I also played with a small screen Sammy B750 in a darkened (but not dark) room they had. As far as I could tell the backlight looked pretty good, but that was on a smaller screened TV (40", I think). The 52" they had out was in a brighter area. I may wait after the holidays and see if they have a Superbowl sale or something, and take a gamble on the B750.

Glad you find the B750 mostly agreeable- I'm going to have to go look at the plasmas some time and see if I can perceive that blue/yellow trailing. I assume it looks something like ghosting?

Airmantharp wrote:

Glad you find the B750 mostly agreeable- I'm going to have to go look at the plasmas some time and see if I can perceive that blue/yellow trailing. I assume it looks something like ghosting?

Something like it. It's visible if you flick your eyes across the screen or more importantly, when there's a high contrast scene with lots of movement or camera cuts.

*edit: to be fair, I also see this effect with my CRT RPTV, but it's not as objectionable.

I suppose the short life span of early plasma screens killed the tech for me, that an fuzzy pixels, oh and screen burning (though I had to watch that with my RPTV as well). Paying 6-10k for a screen that may only last two to three years doesn't help the bank account much. I know they are much better now, but initial impressions are hard to overcome. I'll have to go look for the streaking too as I have never bothered to study a plasma screen too closely.

--SS

SecretSquirrel wrote:

I suppose the short life span of early plasma screens killed the tech for me, that an fuzzy pixels, oh and screen burning (though I had to watch that with my RPTV as well). Paying 6-10k for a screen that may only last two to three years doesn't help the bank account much. I know they are much better now, but initial impressions are hard to overcome. I'll have to go look for the streaking too as I have never bothered to study a plasma screen too closely.

--SS

They float on par or cheaper than LCD in the 42-50" range, and have much better picture depending on your conditions.

At this point, believe it or not, I'm leaning toward the 54" G10 Panasonic plasma. 'Twould be the perfect TV, if not for that artifacting that plasmas and some CRTs exhibit. Hmm.

Vrock wrote:

At this point, believe it or not, I'm leaning toward the 54" G10 Panasonic plasma. 'Twould be the perfect TV, if not for that artifacting that plasmas and some CRTs exhibit. Hmm.

I am leaning toward the 50" G10 myself. I'm just waiting for a deal on it.

You might want to bump up to a V10 if you can afford it. It has 96hz processing so 24hz media doesn't run into the 24/60 problem. I can't afford it :-/.

3:2 pulldown doesn't bother me much, and the price diff between the G series and the V series is considerable. Biggest problem I am having with the 54" G10 is that it's not in stock at Crutchfield right now. Newegg has it (for $100 less, with no tax to boot) but I'm leery of ordering this through them as their return policy sucks.

Damn, I didn't realize the G10 series is discontinued. No wonder it is so reasonably priced... and getting hard to find.

are you people sure panasonic is trust worthy now?
i have been burned by them in the past and I know for a fact their first two generations or so of plasma TVs have a high failure percentage rate
i did see the awesome sales going on and I Would love to own a new killer plasma instead of settling for a 120hz LCD

SpotTheCat wrote:

Damn, I didn't realize the G10 series is discontinued.

It's not discontinued that I've read. It's new for 2009. They're just selling well, I guess.

potatochobit wrote:

are you people sure panasonic is trust worthy now?
i have been burned by them in the past and I know for a fact their first two generations or so of plasma TVs have a high failure percentage rate
i did see the awesome sales going on and I Would love to own a new killer plasma instead of settling for a 120hz LCD

Well, you can always pony up for the extended warranty. Not a bad idea with TVs. I think the Pannys we're talking about represent the company's 12th generation of plasmas, so I'd think they'd be leaps and bounds better than the 1st/2nd gen.

Vrock wrote:

3:2 pulldown doesn't bother me much, and the price diff between the G series and the V series is considerable. Biggest problem I am having with the 54" G10 is that it's not in stock at Crutchfield right now. Newegg has it (for $100 less, with no tax to boot) but I'm leery of ordering this through them as their return policy sucks.

Ya, I was a little leery of purchasing my lcd through Newegg. I purchased one of those budget 40 inch lcd's. It's the Toshiba 40rv525r. It turned out pretty good though, the lcd is uniform, no dead pixels, decent colors with little tweaking, and good blacks.

The speakers are terrible, custom controls are a tad limited, and the stand is cheap.

The TV was 569 with shipping plus an extra year of warranty.

sidenote
Does anyone use dynamic lighting? It's extremely annoying.

Vrock wrote:

3:2 pulldown doesn't bother me much, and the price diff between the G series and the V series is considerable. Biggest problem I am having with the 54" G10 is that it's not in stock at Crutchfield right now. Newegg has it (for $100 less, with no tax to boot) but I'm leery of ordering this through them as their return policy sucks.

Do you have a Sears near you? The P54G10 is on sale there for $1299! I'm impressed, and thinking heavily about it. I don't know though, the wife thought a 46" was too big. Add tax, a blu-ray player, 1TB HDD, 30ft HDMI cable and 30ft optical cable and we're over the $1500 budget .

SpotTheCat wrote:

Do you have a Sears near you? The P54G10 is on sale there for $1299!

Wow. Closest 'real' Sears is 35 miles away, I may give them a call.

SpotTheCat wrote:

I don't know though, the wife thought a 46" was too big.

Go as big as you can afford. They look smaller after a few days.

Edit: Boo! They don't have it.

Man, I want.

SpotTheCat wrote:

Vrock wrote:

3:2 pulldown doesn't bother me much, and the price diff between the G series and the V series is considerable. Biggest problem I am having with the 54" G10 is that it's not in stock at Crutchfield right now. Newegg has it (for $100 less, with no tax to boot) but I'm leery of ordering this through them as their return policy sucks.

Do you have a Sears near you? The P54G10 is on sale there for $1299! I'm impressed, and thinking heavily about it. I don't know though, the wife thought a 46" was too big. Add tax, a blu-ray player, 1TB HDD, 30ft HDMI cable and 30ft optical cable and we're over the $1500 budget .

Think of it this way - this is something you'll be looking at almost every day for the next couple of years. Do you really want to be kicking yourself in the bum down the road when you had to settle for less because of your budget?

30ft HDMI and 30ft optical cable? Maybe down the road you should just think about building a HTPC.

Jive wrote:

SpotTheCat wrote:

Vrock wrote:

3:2 pulldown doesn't bother me much, and the price diff between the G series and the V series is considerable. Biggest problem I am having with the 54" G10 is that it's not in stock at Crutchfield right now. Newegg has it (for $100 less, with no tax to boot) but I'm leery of ordering this through them as their return policy sucks.

Do you have a Sears near you? The P54G10 is on sale there for $1299! I'm impressed, and thinking heavily about it. I don't know though, the wife thought a 46" was too big. Add tax, a blu-ray player, 1TB HDD, 30ft HDMI cable and 30ft optical cable and we're over the $1500 budget .

Think of it this way - this is something you'll be looking at almost every day for the next couple of years. Do you really want to be kicking yourself in the bum down the road when you had to settle for less because of your budget?

30ft HDMI and 30ft optical cable? Maybe down the road you should just think about building a HTPC.

We're going to use our only desktop as both a media server and as a regular desktop with a monitor. Good thing for monoprice!

The cables won't be in our vision either, so that's nice. They're both in-wall rated (higher temps, etc.) so I can run them under the baseboard heater and between the wall and the carpet (under the baseboard).

I got MicroCenter to price match for me. Nice!

Turns out Sears stores were not honoring that price.

Nice, enjoy your new toy. And i know your going to take advantage of it! I know too many people who have a nice quality HDTV and say: "bluray? HD channels? Why on earth would i pay extra for that." /facepalm

Jive wrote:

Nice, enjoy your new toy. And i know your going to take advantage of it! I know too many people who have a nice quality HDTV and say: "bluray? HD channels? Why on earth would i pay extra for that." /facepalm

Yeah, I'll have plenty of HD content. No cable/dish though, screw that. I'm upgrading my netflix for sure as soon as we get a blu-ray.

SpotTheCat, did you get a G10? If so, I highly encourage you to get an extended warranty. Lower end Panasonic plasmas have been exhibiting an abnormal failure rate where a vertical band of gibberish a few inches wide appears and doesn't go away. There are whole batches I've seen where they exhibit this trait after they've been used a hundred hours or so. Here in NJ, there's currently two floor models exhibiting the exact same defect at Best Buy and when I asked they said both started doing it and they left them up to show people why they should get the extended warranty. It's no big deal if it's in warranty, but if it happens out of warranty, you'll be SOL.

Wow is that ever terrific. The first hour or so was (being picky) flickery like a CRT. But now I don't notice it, even when looking at it through my peripheral vision (more sensitive to flickering).

I turned the contrast down to half way, this is what you supposedly do with a new TV. The brightness out of the box is perfect when set to THX, for the lighting conditions (dark room, it's nearly solstice!).

The colors, uniformity, and black levels are all great. The size is great too, 54" is not too big at 8-9 ft, and it helps a lot without my glasses on (which I don't wear for non-HD content anyways).

Seems Panasonic's Viera TVs have a problem with shifting black levels. Panasonic's response is that the TVs are designed to do this.

What crap.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10449939-1.html

*edit: a better link with more info ^

Follow up. I am donating my 10 year old Sony CRT RPTV to the volunteer fire department. Farewell!

Today, I ordered one of these.
http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-TC-P54G ... 572&sr=8-4

Based on what I've read here, the 'shifting black levels' of the G10 series is somewhat overblown:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-200 ... =mncol;txt

The latest measurements of the V10 reveal a black level of 0.016 footlamberts at 982 hours of use, compared with the 0.008 we measured previously. Black on the S1 measures 0.017 after 1,012 hours, compared with a previous 0.011....These results are similar to increases we measured on a TC-P50G10 and a TC-P42G10. Neither was aged under controlled conditions in our lab, but both reproduced black at 0.023 ftl after about 1,500 hours (at the average rate of 5.2 hours per day, a TV logs about 1,900 hours in a typical year). Samsung's 2009 PN50B650, a direct competitor to Panasonic, measured 0.018.

So, the 2009 Pannys exhibit slightly worse black levels after 1000 hours than the Samsung does with almost no hours on it. This just doesn't seem to be a big deal to me. Supposedly the 2010 models (one of which I ordered) make the change more gradually/less noticeably? I dunno. The way I figure it, it will still be better than a LCD, no matter what.

I hope this TV works out for me.

I've noticed the black levels increasing on my P54G10. However, anybody that comes over is amazed by the color and viewing angle.

It is very weak in the summer though. Not that we mind, we watch most of our TV on **** days anyways. It's fine on a cloudy day or on any day in the winter when it's dark when we're home.

What do you mean it's very weak in the summer months?