[ music ]
^M00:00:07
>> Hi, I'm David Katzmaier, Senior Editor at CNET. And I'm sitting next to the Panasonic TC-P50V10. This is a 50-inch version of the V10 series. There's also a 54-inch version that this review also applies to. There's even larger sizes than that, but we'll use a separate review for those later. The V10 series is Panasonics second highest end model of plasma TV's announced this year. It's got plenty of features. But one of the big differentiators of this TV is its one sheet of glass design, which gives it this really sleek look. There's just a big piece of glass that extends over the entire frame and includes the bevel in the screen itself, so it really needs, leads to a nice sleek look. The only other accent is this kind of really thin boarder around the edge here and this little silver along the bottom. The TV also has a swivel stand, so this entire round a stand has sort of a Lazy Susan on the bottom of it that allows you to swivel it to either side, which is a nice bonus. The features on this TV are extensible; we'll start with the back panel, which includes 3 HDMI inputs, 2 component video inputs, and a land port for Ethernet connections. There's also a side panel with a 4th HDMI input in addition to a PC input. It has a 1080p24 mode and a digital cinema color mode. We'll get to those in a little bit. There's also a VIERA CAST feature on this, so the TV can go out onto the Internet and stream YouTube, Picasa, even Amazon Video on demand content and there's gonna probably be more VIERA CAST added in the future, so it is kind of a nice little interactive TV bonus. On this one there's also Weather and Bloomberg News. The set also has more picture controls than a lot of other Panasonic TV's. It has a pro setting menu that's only on the custom preset that includes adjustments for white balance, gamma, and a lot of the other more esoteric functions, also allows us to really dial in the color on this TV. This is one of the best performing plasma TV's we've ever tested. The V10 series, those extra adjustments allow it really get the color to be a lot better than even we saw in the THX Mode. So we chose not to use THX Mode for our evaluations. Instead we adjusted the color parameters using the custom and we were really pleased by the results. But the best thing about this TV is its deep black levels. It really can get a very nice dark shade of black that's among the best we've ever seen. The color on this TV, again, after adjustment is pretty darn good, although not perfect. And the video processing is excellent. We were able to use that 1080p24 mode to preserve the native frame rate of film without that flicker that we've seen on previous Panasonic plasma's. Throw anis [phonetic] TV is a digital cinema color mode; we really didn't find that it was all that accurate. But if you want that extra pop to the color it is another option. That's a quick look at the Panasonic TC-P50V10 series, and I'm David Katzmaier.
^E00:02:43
