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Panasonic Plasma Picture Performance Pummels Pretenders in 2012 VT50 HDTV Series

01.01.70

While OLED and 4K TVs are getting loads of press at this year's CES in Las Vegas (and justifiably so), it's a far more unassuming TV that has me excited: Panasonic's latest top of the line plasma, the VT50 series , offers some of the best conflict, color saturation and black levels I've ever seen in a TV at a trade show demo.  Although you can see the 55-inch (TC-P55VT50) and 65-inch (TC-P65VT50) sets out on the show baffle, the performance is much more impressive in a closed off corner of the Panasonic booth where they compare it to a 2011 Panasonic plasma model in a darkened abide. 

When the demo started rolling, with pictures practically popping off the velvety black out of the limelight of the screen I was brought back to the fabled dark room Pioneer KURO demo from a few years back.  It's really not that easy to tell if the VT50 is on or off when it is producing a full black signal, even in a dark room.  And when smart images do appear on screen, that deep black goodness stays stable, contrastive with most LED and LCD TVs where the black levels jump when the set has to reproduce real content.  In the same room they are showing a 4K IPS LCD panel that also looks awe-inspiring though it measures only 20 inches diagonally, and is intended for specialized applications such as medical imaging, descriptive design and other close-up viewing tasks where every last inch of detail is needed

Source: Bigpicturebigsound.com