The 46-inch screen's silver frame has a large V logo at the bottom center. A few function buttons are strung along the lower right. The panel is 3.75 inches deep, so you can easily wall-mount it with its $199 special bracket. The unit can also rest on a tabletop; unlike Gateway, V includes a stand.
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
On the other hand, Gateway's remote is quite a bit more impressive than V's, which is smallish, has tiny buttons, and lacks illumination. Scrolling to your desired input is a chore, and the menu system is a frustrating jumble of icons and often grayed-out picture controls. The V and BenQ 46-inchers come with identical remotes.
With an 852x480-pixel native resolution, the P4 can handle every DVD detail but, like almost all plasmas, can't fully resolve HDTV. Of course, the panel can still accept and display HDTV, TV, and computer sources. Because the set has a 42-inch model's pixel count but is considerably bigger, the pixels are larger and more visible.
For a plasma, the P4 does have a nice feature package. Its built-in NTSC tuner, for receiving standard television signals, is complete with PIP (picture in picture). High-definition TV requires a separate tuner. There's also an onboard audio system with internal speakers. You can set the color temperature to Warm, Standard, Cool, or User; the last option lets a technician tweak the grayscale. Each input has independent memory, so you can individually optimize the pictures of different video sources.
One set of component-video inputs and one DVI jack with HDCP copy protection head up the connectivity list. Finishing off the ins are two for A/V (one with S-Video), one for 15-pin D-Sub VGA computer hookup, and one for RF antenna connection. Finally, you get an RS232 control port.
A good input selection means little if the jacks are improperly implemented. As part of our viewing tests, we calibrated the panel and watched some scenes from Charlotte Gray. On the DVI in, we were disappointed to discover a complete lack of control over contrast, brightness, and other such parameters. You need the ability to tweak these basics to get a good picture; otherwise, the DVI hookup is next to useless for home theater. For both DVD and HDTV, we had to use the component input, and sharpness was again out of our hands. Though color saturation was excellent, significant edge enhancement appeared as rings around objects. When we switched to S-Video and completely turned off the sharpness adjustment, we got a quieter, smoother picture but sacrificed some color resolution.
The P4's color decoding was top-notch, making for great saturation at the proper color settings. Grayscale tracking was also pretty good, particularly for such a budget display. Calibration improved the grayscale's bottom end from its original 7,900K to 6,175K; the top end went from a blue 8,425K to a nearly perfect 6,475K (6,500K is ideal). The panel's video processing had solid 3:2 pull-down detection, a feature that reduces jagged lines and other motion artifacts in film-based material such as DVD movies.
Black looked more like dark gray. Significant false-contouring artifacts appeared as pools of unnatural color and video noise in shadows, and as moving patches of noise during bright scenes.
When we watched the 1080i D-VHS tape of X-Men on our JVC HM-DH3000U, color saturation was impressive, but false-contouring artifacts and noise from edge enhancement were still factors.