Panasonic Viera TH-46PZ8OU Plasma HDTV Review - Performance: Summary

The TH-46PZ8OU is something of a conundrum in performance terms. Like most cheap displays (it's priced at about $1299) there are a number of compromises involved. In this case, the compromise is between color accuracy and brightness; you can have one or the other, but not both. The TH-46PZ8OU is capable of producing decent color, but to do that you have to put up with a rather dim screen. Or, you can go for brightness, and then the color accuracy falls off, with highlights in the image getting lost. And even then, its not as bright as other TVs. While brightness is only one factor in the performance of a TV, it's an important one; if a TV does not have decent brightness, it is not going to be visible in daylight.

We steer a middle ground in our testing; we calibrate the display to get as accurate color as possible, while getting the screen to be as bright as possible.  And that was a real balancing act on this display, as even the best settings that we could find involved compromising some slight color errors with brightness.

Overall, the TH-46PZ8OU had only lackluster performance. Although the screen had decent color when calibrated, it was very dim when compared to an LCD screen of about the same price. Motion did look good on the screen, and it did a decent job of rendering standard definition TV signals. But the fundamental issue remains; the color and brightness of this screen are disappointing at best.

Calibration
To get the best out of a display, it has to be calibrated, a process that finds the correct settings for the individual display. We use the DisplayMate calibration process to set the display up correctly; the calibrated settings that we use are listed below. To save space, we only list the controls that have been altered from the default settings.

Note that the settings that give the best results for you may differ widely from this; we look for the settings that give the most accurate colors with the maximum luminance for whites, but you may find another set of settings more pleasing to the eye. We also only use the controls that are accessible to the customer through the on-screen menus; we don't use the service menus that a professional calibrator might access to tweak the settings. If you want to get the best image quality out of your display, we strongly recommend that you use a professional home theater expert who can calibrate your set and advise you of the best settings for your display, the lighting around it and the type of material you like to watch.

Video Modes
The TH-46PZ80U has 5 video modes, which are detailed below:

Changes to these settings are retained, so if you boost the brightness in the cinema mode, the dislay will remembe that and use the changed setting every time you select it.

Dot Pattern
The-46PZ80U is a Full HD screen, which means it has enough dots to represent every pixel of a full 1080p signal. Each one of these pixels is created of three elements; a red, green and blue cell filled with gas that glows and a colored phosphor. You can see an image of the screen magnified 20x on the right. It is interesting to note that every third row of the elements seems to be larger than the others, presumably to help boost the luminance of the screen.

Below is a video that shows how the TH-46PZ80U creates colors; in this magnified view, the screen goes from black to white, then to red, green and blue in turn.