Panasonic Viera TH-46PZ8OU Plasma HDTV Review - Power Consumption

Power Consumption (4.63)
To test power consumption we set the television's brightness to 200 cd/m2, which is a good brightness of both dark and light conditions. Unfortunately the Panasonic TH-46PZ80U gave us some problems, namely even with the brightness and picture settings maxed out at 100 it came nowhere near 200 cd/m2, instead it maxed out at 70.6 cd/m2. As this is as close as we could get to our baseline we used this for our test, and the Panasonic TH-46PZ80U used an amazing 549.3 Watts on average at this brightness level.

If you were to watch TV for five hours a day, which is the average for U.S. households, and pay average rates for electricity the Panasonic TH-46PZ80U would cost you $107.35 per year, by far the worst power performance we've seen to date. This is a common problem with Plasma televisions and one of the reasons you may want to consider an LCD display instead. For example the JVC LT-47X899 would cost you about one third over the course of the year, and it can easily reach our test level of 200 cd/m2. You can see below that you would have to turn down the brightness and picture settings to minimum to start achieving those kinds of power consumption costs with this television.