At this point I've watched about 20 hours of programming on my new set and have a good sense of it's capabilities. I'm aware that picture quality improves over the first 100-150 hours but I don't think improvements will be significant enough to alter opinions expressed here.
The Good:
The first thing that struck me is how spectacularly crisp this set is. Contrast is very good, bright whites and clearly defined blacks, with excellent detail all round and minimal PWM noise. In regards to the brightness of the whites and the noise supression I would say it trumps the Kuro.
Black levels are also very good, not quite the level of my old CRT (or the Kuro) but deep and stable ( I would however still recommend a backlight for night time viewing with the lights off).
Colour is also remarkable, appearing very natural, I'm especially happy with the presentation of red which so often comes across as overly saturated even once a set is properly calibrated. Here it always looks correct and never dominates an image.
DVDs come across a treat on this set too. It does a tremendous job of upscaling although I would recommend feeding it a 576p image from a player equiped with a decent deinterlacer as it has problems with cadence detection. Of course if you have a player, receiver or external processor with significant chops, compare the two first.
Lastly, important for gamers, input lag on this set is minimal. Compared to a CRT it is not noticeable in a tactile sense but you may pick it up in games like MW2 where you might find you tend to overshoot your target ever so slightly. This is not a problem as you should soon adjust. It is light years ahead of practically every other flat panel I've gamed on, certainly far better than the response time of the Kuro (a major deal breaker for me) or last year's range of Samsung PDPs.
The Bad:
There are some small negative points though. Worth mentioning but of no major concern.
One is that the menu is mildly annoying. By deselecting "Overscan" in the setup menu you can achieve 1:1 pixel mapping in the 16:9 aspect ratio. While this is great for BDs and gaming, regular broadcast programming (including satellite) needs a little overscan. But because the "Overscan" option is located in the Setup menu and not the Picture menu, it is a universal setting and so applies to all inputs, meaning it needs to be changed to the correct setting every time you switch inputs.
I have also come across the "floating blacks" phenomenon as mentioned in various overseas forums. In my opinion it's not a big problem. With all the viewing I have done I've only ever come across it once, watching "Have you heard about the Morgans" with my wife. In that movie there are two scenes, one when the couple goes outside to view the stars and another where they're having a conversation at night in their car. Both scenes are poorly shot and were obviously too dark, so consequently adjusted in post to bring out the detail, leading to washed out blacks and low overall contrast. Here the black level fluctuated. Interestingly though it does not appear to be employing any sort of dynamic contrast, it comes across more as though the set is idiling, struggling to hold onto that specific level of light output. I think the conditions to replicate this effect need to be quite exact. I don't see it being a big problem.
The other issue mentioned in reviews is colour banding. Now don't judge this by regular satellite programming, the low bitrates involved are responsible for the banding you see, not the set. Viewing BD material though, you can make out some colour banding, if you really hunt for it, but it is definitely not an issue. In fact, and I don't think I'm being overly optomisitc here, I wonder if it's an issue at all. This set is so crisp, the level of noise so low, I wonder if it's not simply a natural side effect of employing such minimal dithering. Personally I'd pick the level of clarity on display here over increased noise any day.
The Ugly:
Okay, now these are two issues I find relatively serious. Now to preface, I'm accustomed to CRT technology so perhaps I'm being unfair to hold this set to the same standards in terms of motion but seeing as how this is supposed to be a PDP's strength, I don't think it's unwarranted. I will also say, based on what I've found here, these are not issues that will be sorted out by next year's panels, or the year after that. These issues I believe are inherent weaknesses of the tech and are apparent on all PDPs to various degrees.
The first issue is that during fast pans you can pick up flashes of colour as the phosphors decay unevenly. It can be quite distracting, and before you point to the faster phosphors of the VT20, I see them there too. Not having compared the same content on either panel side by side I would have to trust Panasonic that this phenomenon is reduced on the VT20 but viewed in isolation, it seems equally bad to me. Now granted, when watching a film or playing a game, after a time I don't even notice it anymore. I'm sure I'll get used to it in time and I won't even register it to start. Still, it is a distraction and one that I wish didn't need getting used to in the first place.
The other issue I believe is created by the Sub-Field Drive. Now I'm aware that the drive is the reason for it's spectacular image performance in the first place but is has problems dealing with fast motion. On very fast pans it doesn't appear that the drive has the time needed to render images correctly. Instead images break up and are ill defined. A person's face for instance, instead of being flesh toned and finely gradiated with be a collection of green and magenta blotches. Not very appealing. It only takes a split second for the drive to catch up to the scene but during the transition this unsightly posterisation occurs.
Now it's worth noting that my wife notices none of this and is absolutely enthralled by the images this set produces. I'm aware it's said that some people can view these phenomena and others not but personally I believe it's all about the trained vs the untrained eye. Either way, as mentioned before, I don't think these motion issues are unique to Panasonic and I do believe, when it comes to flat panels, you'll have to pick your poison for quite some time into the forseeable future.
Overall, the spectacular image quality (at least during normal motion) easily bests my old HD-CRT in both clarity and accuracy and the large screen size really does add much to the viewing experience. I'll be interested to see what the future holds for display technology five years down the line, but for now I'm going to rest my weary review scouring, forum devouring eyes and enjoy my Panny.
