Panasonic Viera TC-P65VT50

Display Size & Technology

The Panasonic Viera TC-P65VT50 is the flagship plasma, and as such it showcases all the new technology that Panasonic has to offer. It turns out that that’s not much, just a handful of minor performance upgrades that may or may not improve video performance. Of course, they made a lot of claims, but we can’t verify any of them until we get the TV in the lab. (You can bet we’ll have it as soon as it starts shipping.)

The three big improvements they’re touting are a brighter whites, deeper blacks, and a smother motion performance. All appear to be results of a panel redesign, including new, faster switching phosphor. If the cells can discharge electricity more quickly, that would eliminate problems like lingering light and color in the individual pixels.

Formats & Resolution

The Panasonic Viera TC-P65VT50 is a 1080p TV, no changes there.

Brightness, Blacks and Contrast Ratio

Brightness is a genuine problem that Panasonic needed to solve in its plasma TVs. Two years ago, the Panasonic VT20/25 series had a terribly dim screen, which was improved upon in last year’s VT30 series, but still problematic. If they can manage to boost the brightness a bit more without adversely affecting the black level or the gamma curve, they’ll definitely be on to something.

The new panels are supposed address both brightness and blackness concerns. However, there weren’t issues with the black level on the previous plasmas. The VT20/25 series had a 0.03 cd/m² and the VT30 had a 0.02 cd/m² black level. That’s a pretty great performance, but one must suppose there’s always room for improvements.

In summary, plasma cells are naturally dark, but they light up when you zap them with electricity. It takes a moment for that charge to dissipate and return the pixel to black. Before that can happen, the next zap usually comes along telling it to light up again. As a result, the black pixels are typically never really black – they’re nearly black, and human eyes are pretty good at spotting that difference. If Panasonic has figured out a way to get the cells to dump the charge faster, that would likely make for a darker black levels.

Color

Nothing of note was mentioned here. A Panasonic representative made brief mention of the new panels allowing for more levels of gradation, but that probably won’t have too much resonance in everyday viewing. If you spend most of your time watching anything other than the highest quality Blu-Ray discs, the MPEG compression in your input signals (cable, satellite, DVD, etc.) is so high that most of the gradation has been discarded.

Motion & Refresh Rate

Panasonic is also touting an improvement in its motion performance, which is again related to the faster phosphor switching. If the cell can discharge faster, that pixel can can change to a new color with a different intensity level more quickly. They’re also stating the panels are producing faster subfields at 1/2500th of a second, though the sheer number of subfields (600Hz) has not changed. We’re not very clear whether this will have any noticeable improvement.

Viewing Angle

Like most plasmas, we expect the Panasonic Viera TC-P65VT50 to have a wide viewing angle.