Panasonic Viera TX-P42G10 Freesat HD TV It was a smart move by Panasonic to time its recent ad campaign to coincide with the French Open and Wimbledon tennis season. Indeed, tennis is certainly the sort of sport that highlights benefits of the company’s 600Hz ‘intelligent frame creation’ technology used in its Viera NeoPDP televisions. Panasonic Viera TX-P42G10 …
I don't think it is really 600Hz. It doesn't do frame interpolation like competitors 100-200Hz models instead it shows the same picture with 10 different levels of brightness. Please check with Panasonic whether it is really an honest 600 different frames per second.
The one I saw actually reintroduced the flicker I haven't seen since 50Hz CRTs. Also the blacks look horribly grey in anything other than complete darkness.
Bought a 32" Panny LCD when my conventional 24" CRT died a couple of years back. I have been very pleased with the set and added a Humax Freesat PVR which is really rather good.
Somehow my 32" Panny seems to have shrunk, it seemed HUGE when I first got it, so I would be in the market for one of these with a built in HDD to enable the recording of TV programs.
Mount a 2.5" HDD caddy on the back and it would open up all sorts of possibilities
You really should review the V10 Plasma. I have the 50" model and its treatment of SD content is quite astonishingly good. Roughly speaking an SD broadcast looks as good as a 576p DVD playback. Set the panel mode to THX and lower the sharpness to nearly zero for best results. Nothing else on the market can touch it except the, now out of production, Kuros from Pioneer. I'm actually very surprised that you don't rate the G10 for SD but I haven't checked one out personally.
And no it's not 600Hz in the interpolated way of the 100Hz and 200Hz technologies that are out there. Instead it displays the same frame up to 12 times per received-frame to eliminate flicker. You get a good steady picture but you don't get the errors that interpolation can lead to.
The V10 series also benefits from a THX certified screen with very accurate colour reproduction and 24p playback over and above the G10's features.
No I don't work for Panasonic but I do love my new screen!
I have a V10 (same NeoPDP panel inside), and no, the 600Hz processing doesn't create frames in between and display them, although this is what all the marketing and slow motion tennis adverts suggest.
These panels flicker like crazy, and if you're in any way susceptible to flicker, you'll hate them or worse end up with splitting headaches. Having moved from an LCD to this screen, I was SORELY disappointed. When you can't see the flicker then YES it really is fantastic, but to my mind a product of this caliber and price should deliver a perfect image and the NeoPDPs simply don't.
When off, the panels aren't black, they're a grey/green colour much like an old CRT. In daylight then, this is the darkest shade it can produce which makes images look really washed out. In lower light the contrast obviously improves and they do look impressive. The flickering is also less noticeable in lower light.
If you hook up a PC, you can expect amazing pictures but calibration is impossible since the panel can't actually display certain patterns - making even simple gamma correction impossible since you can't reliably gauge the shades being shown because they flicker like crazy. My best interpretation ended up with a picture that was way too dark.
It's tiresome reading reviews that quite obviously don't do very comprehensive tests, try one representative film, obviously in a dark room, and hail it is a fantastic TV. Reading reviews is no longer a guarantee of an impartial viewpoint or comprehensive test.
Sorry to be a pain but this needs mentioning,
the reason that it's only the Plasma sets which have a 600 Hz model is due to the reason behind 600Hz, ie Sub Field Decay.
essentially a plasma pixel is unable to kee the same level of brightness for the 1/50 of a second a TV frame is broadcast for. This can be seen on cheap sets as a shimmer on screen.
in order to keep a steady level of brigtness the plasmas use Sub Field refreshing each field 12 times per field (ie 12x50 +600Hz) think of it like stirking a match initially bright then fading often, so the set stikes lots of matches (LCD is like a torch so constant brightness). However it's just the same frame so no creation meaning it won't give a noticable benefit for motion!
It so happens that as it happens so many times a second it's a frequency and can so be called Hz, so a clever marketing company could confuse people to help grow market share.
The best sticker I've seen on a TV was on a Samsung with had "600Hz" massively promotedwith "sub field decay" very small, then below "100Hz" motion mentioned.
gotta love it!
this could be seen to be a conspiracy if it wasn't so obvious!
also I'm a bit shocked that the writers of this review didn't point this out, isn't this exactly the kind of thing ElReg is meant to expose?
With all due respect, we didn't simply copy the waffle off Panasonic's marketing brochures for this review. We spoke to the product manager for the G10 range at Panasonic and our first question was - "what's the point of 600Hz refresh if the original signal only refreshes at 50Hz".....
Panasonic specifically told us that the set does indeed perform some interpolation. Its internal processor generates multiple frames for each frame in the original signal, and then attempts to select the frames that best display the trajectory of fast-moving objects, such as a tennis ball.
So while the image that you see on screen is still only 25 frames per second, some of those frames are Panasonic-interpolated frames. It's possible that they were lying through their teeth, but at the end of the day we did think that it performed well with sports programmes (and less well with bog-standard talking-head SD content due to the relatively poor scaling - a bit of interpolation and upscaling might help there too...).
The motion handling on this set is terrible.
As previously mentioned we have flickering, judder and poor black levels.
Putting 600Hz on the ticket is one of the most cynical marketing gimmicks I have ever seen a company do and all because there are manufacturers out there with 100 and 200Hz actually trying to use this technology to improve a customers experience.
What Panasonic are doing here is nothing more than the good old con trick. They must be thinking 'our customers are so stupid lets feed them this 600Hz marketing spin and make a few bucks out of those who know no better'. I would advise people to really re-consider Panasonic as a brand after this debacle and reviewers would do well to run thorough tests on all manufacturers sets rather than listening to product managers who (unsurprisingly) will say absolutely anything in order to shift their products.
There is no point in mentioning the price if the cost of running it is ignored. Panasonic claim 200W, so if it were to be switched on 24*7, it would cost about £200 per year to run, with electricity costing a typical 11 pence per unit (kWh). More normal usage might be 4 hours per day, in which case it would cost £33 per year to run. Claimed standby current is only 0.3W, so a negligible 30 pence a year, if you cannot be bothered to switch it off at the mains.
Panasonic have no equivalent LCD device, but the running cost of a Freeview Panasonic 42" TV is nearer £20.
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