What Hi Fi Sound and Vision
20 MAY 2008
Panasonic TH-42PX80
A big-screen plasma with big-name cachet, which performs superbly, for well under a grand. What else do you want?
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The Winners' Enclosure in last year’s Awards issue featured quite a few Panasonic flatscreens. The Award for Best Budget 40-42in screen, for instance, was carried off by the £1200 TH-42PX70 – and this screen is its direct replacement.
It may seem a little unnecessary to dispense with such a successful product, but Panasonic seems committed to ringing the changes regularly while the flatscreen land-grab is still in full swing.
Mind you, if the changes are as (generally) positive as they are here, then we’ve no cause for complaint. The reworked fascia may suffer from a rather glum-looking downturn in the silver accents, but the TH-42PX80 offers just a little more than the outgoing ’70.
Ker-ching! What a bargain…
The most obvious thing it offers is a cost saving. A cool £700 or so for a 42in, HD Ready plasma screen from one of the established market leaders looks prodigious value for money, and bargain hunters can even better that.
Technical specification is everything you’d expect, even at this price: three HDMI inputs, plus digital and analogue TV tuners, make for decent flexibility.
All this counts for nothing, though, if performance isn’t up to par. Happily, this Panasonic upholds the long and proud tradition of its plasma siblings and forebears by turning in a very agreeable performance across the board.
Receiving a 1080p/24fps Blu-ray remaster of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and using its own internal scaling to fit the picture to the HD Ready screen, the Panasonic impresses in every respect.
Black tones and motion tracking, the two disciplines that really separate the plasma men from the LCD boys, are handled consummately – dark scenes enjoy deep, inky blacks without sacrificing detail levels, and the most testing movement is gripped with casual authority. Elsewhere, colours are neutral and natural, white tones clean and bright, and depth of field is expansive.
Picture noise, even in the most complex or smoky scenes, is repressed well, and textures – skin tones especially – convince.
Coherent visuals, competent sound
With less attention-grabbing content, like a DVD of I Am Legend or a Sky Sports News off-air broadcast, the Panasonic continues the good work – though on a lesser scale, naturally. There’s not quite the level of detail revealed, nor the confident motion-tracking, but by the standards of its rivals the TH-42PX80 acquits itself well.
That Sky channel is a particularly stern test, preoccupied as it is with constantly scrolling text while showing highlights of fast-moving sporting events, and the Panasonic manages to keep the overall picture coherent and well composed.
Flatscreens tend to attract only faint praise where sound is concerned, and this plasma is no different – soundtracks are decently spacious and dialogue reasonably distinct, but it’s the usual skin-and-bones presentation with no real weight to speak of and a hard, zizzy, two-wasps-in-a-bottle top end.
Still, the TH-42PX80 is such a bargain that you’ve even fewer excuses not to buy a decent sound system to accompany it.