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Panasonic TH-P50GT30A

The Panasonic TH-P50GT30A is the company's second-tier plasma and promises excellent image quality and a smattering of "smart" features.

Ty Pendlebury Editor
Ty Pendlebury has worked at CNET since 2006. He lives in New York City where he writes about streaming and home audio.
Expertise Ty has worked for radio, print, and online publications, and has been writing about home entertainment since 2004. He is an avid record collector and streaming music enthusiast. Credentials
  • Ty was nominated for Best New Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, but he has only ever won one thing. As a youth, he was awarded a free session for the photography studio at a local supermarket.
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Ty Pendlebury
2 min read

Last year the TV buzz word was "3D", and this year it's "smart", but when it boils down to it what you really want from a television is "performance". You don't want to pay a fair sum of money for features that will be outdated in six months, but instead a TV that will give you a high-quality picture for the next five years or so.

While the GT30 offers up all of the above buzzwords, Panasonic takes pride in its picture quality and that's what the GT30 promises first and foremost. The GT30 features the company's 14th-gen Neo Plasma Panel, which boasts a 5,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio and an anti-reflective filter for better daytime performance. The TV is also THX certified for both 2D and 3D pictures, which should mean you can get a reference-level picture with little effort on your part — simply change the TV into THX mode.

But TVs don't sell on picture alone, and if you're interested in checking out the latest features then the Panasonic offers up quite a few. Entertainment is catered for with Yahoo!7 and ABC iView catch-up services, YouTube and music via SHOUTcast internet radio. The TV is also a DVR with the addition of a USB hard drive. Plug in the Skype camera and you can use the GT30 to call your friends across the world. If you're really keen, you can also Facebook and tweet from the set too, but the set lacks the keyboard or "Magic Motion" controllers of its rivals.

In the past, there have only been incremental differences between the flagship and the step-down Panasonic televisions, and so we're expecting big things from the GT30. Look out for a full review soon.