Panasonic Z1

Panasonic’s flagship HDTV is its thinnest 54-inch (137cm) plasma HDTV ever, with only 2.5cm depth. They did it by eliminating a third sheet of glass found in all other plasmas except Pioneer’s Kuro and bonding the anti-reflective coating directly top glass. The Z1 employs SiBEAM’s 60GHz 1080p for wireless glitch-free images sent via the included transmitter/media box from up to 10m away. The Z1 has THX picture mode and a custom calibration mode, plus nice bonus features including Viera Cast internet connectivity and an SD card reader for photos. The Z1 delivers amazing performance with full 1080-line motion resolution, accurate HD colour, deep black levels and 96Hz for judder free movie viewing.

The sexiest HDTV of 2009, the TH-P54Z1A has an RRP of $7000 in Australia.

Pioneer Kuro Plasma Screens

The Kuro models offer the deepest black of any high-definition display on the market — without any white-letter-on-black-background halos occasionally seen on plasma TVs. The Kuro models feature hand-selected parts, 6cm depth, custom calibration, 72Hz refresh and control over the internet via its Ethernet connection. The Pioneer uses a single top sheet of glass to minimise internal reflections, with the anti-reflection coating bonded directly to the surface.

In Australia, the 50-inch (127cm) PDPLX509A retails for $6499, while a 60-inch (152cm) size PDPLX609A has an RRP of $12,499.

Samsung Series 8

Samsung has the slimmest LED television in the world (3cm deep). It’s feature packed with wireless connectivity, four HDMI inputs, no edge blur thanks to 200Hz refresh, a PV+C input for connection to your computer or HTPC, and it uses 40 per cent less energy than previous similar-sized LCD TVs. This is a benchmark LED LCD to judge against every other make and model.

All this performance comes at a price. The 46-inch (117cm) UA46B8000 and the 55-inch (140cm) UA55B8000 retails for $4699 and $6499, respectively.

LG LH90QD

This LG has all the hot LCD performance features video freaks crave, including LED backlights for excellent black levels, invisible speakers, and TruMotion 200Hz for increased sharpness and reduced motion blur. This LG also has all the tweaks anyone could ask for including ISF calibration and LG’s “picture wizard” for user set-up without calibration discs or external test signals. The LH90 isn’t the thinnest LED LCD, but it more than makes up for it with its price.

The LG LH90 series is available in 42-inch (107cm) and 47-inch (119cm) screen sizes in Australia. The 42LH90QD has an RRP of $4024 and the 47LH90QD goes for $4944. In case you couldn’t tell, the LH90 series is the value/performance leader of the pack.

Sony XBR

The XBR series is the only HDTV available with separate red, green and blue LED backlights (rather than all white). It’s got accurate HDTV colour, local dimming for deep black levels, enough brightness for a beach house, a 178-degree viewing angle, 100Hz Motionflow technology and Sony’s Bravia Engine 2 signal processing.

There are three screen sizes available in Australia. The KDL40XBR45 40-inch (102cm) version retails for $2999, the 46-inch (117cm) KDL46XBR45 retails for $4999, and the 55-inch (140cm) KDL55XBR45 goes for $8499.

Gary Merson is the HD Guru, the industry’s leading HDTV journalist. He’s been reviewing TVs for well over a decade, and recently wrote a guide to choosing an HDTV.

To be clear, we’re only looking at sets that are at least 46 inches (117cm) — go big or go home. And though there are some nice 720p plasmas out there for amazing prices, the majority of TVs we’re concerned with are 1080p — it’s the standard now, even in cheap HDTVs, and probably the only resolution you’ll see next year.

We focus on LCDs quite a bit here, not because we prefer them, but because there are key enhancements that can be put in LCD technology to make them look better. With plasma, the problems — energy consumption, weight, thickness — are more of an evolutionary, year-to-year thing. A cheaper plasma often is one that’s just using older technology.

Also, we’re using Amazon as our pricing base line, since it’s on average a good standard for low but legitimate street prices, and we use Samsung examples a lot because they have a ton of different models on the market, so it was easier to isolate individual features and to gauge subtle differences in pricing.

Size Matters

The first and most obvious thing that’ll cost you is more screen real estate. There’s not an absolute inches to dollars ratio, but generally speaking, the first step up is the cheapest, and somewhere in the middle there’s a sweet spot, after which you basically lose money by upgrading. The funny thing is, each maker seems to have a different idea of where the sweet spot is, which you could play to your advantage:

Take for instance, Panasonic’s plasma G10 series. It’s $US200 to go from the 42-inch model to 50 inches, and then $US400 to go up to 54 inches. So the sweet spot is at 50 inches. Similar thing happening with Vizio’s XVT line: Going from 42 inches to 47 inches is just $US250, though going up to 55 inches from 47 inches costs about a grand. Hence 47 inches makes the most dollar-per-inch sense if you like that TV.

With Sony and Samsung, though, it pays to keep going up. In Sony’s top-of-the-line Bravia XBR9 series, the hop from 40 inches to 46 inches is $US360, but going from 46 inches to 52 inches is just $US250. Samsung’s LED-backlit TV costs $US350 to go from 40 inches to 46 inches, and just $US500 to go from there to 55 inches. (There’s a limit, of course, Samsung’s 65-inch LN65B650 doesn’t have many of the frills discussed below, but still lists for $US6000.)

The real lesson here: Don’t think of size as a foregone conclusion. When you’ve narrowed down your options using all the criteria, go back and check the sizes and relative prices. There may be a surprise, hopefully good but possibly bad.

Vroom, Vroom

Everything after size you can roughly sweep everything you’d pay more for into the category of performance. The grand trick of buying TVs though, according to our friend Gary Merson of HD Guru, is that “the TV industry is set up like the car industry”. Just like buying a Corvette to battle your mid-life crisis because it vrooms real good, when you pay extra money for extra horsepower, you’re also going to get leather bucket seats and the in-dash GPS. It’s hard to buy a stripped-down car that just delivers better performance, and the same goes when you’re trying to scrimp on a TV without compromising picture. In the case of TVs, a higher performer might come with a million HDMI jacks or integrated Wi-Fi and video on demand, and you never know exactly what you’re paying for.

Fortunately, we can break performance into two major categories so it’s slightly easier to interpret those price differentials: Backlight (for LCDs) and panel quality.

Fancy Backlighting

The single most expensive upgrade for LCD TVs right now is LED backlighting. As we explain here, there are a bunch of advantages to LED over conventional CCFL backlighting for LCD TVs. Which particular advantages you pick up depends on the kind of LED backlighting in the set. While both offer instant on and power savings, edge-lit models mainly deliver serious thinness, while backlit sets can offer local dimming, which delivers noticeably better black levels and contrast.

How much will it cost you? Well, comparing two Samsung sets with fairly equivalent panels, the price difference is about $US500. The CCFL-backlit LN46B650 is $US1360, while the UN46B6000 is $US1850. Because it’s got LED edge lighting, the B6000 is only 3cm thick, compared to the B650’s 7.8cm. When you step up and compare Samsung’s edge-lit to back-lit, the difference isn’t as great: A 46-inch 8000 series edge-lit model goes for $US2300, while the 8500 series with local-dimming is $US2600. (If you’re already paying for LED technology, you definitely want to step up.)

So yes, backlit LED sets with local dimming tend to cost more. Sony’s year-old Bravia XBR8 uses tri-colour LEDs to improve colour accuracy over the most LED sets, which use white ones. Though its production is discontinued, it’s still nearly $US2200 at 46 inches. However, Toshiba consistently delivers cheaper sets than most of its fellow “name” brands, and their 46-inch LED backlit set with local dimming is just $US1700.

Panels and Oh, It Hertz

The panel is the other major thing that determines how good an HDTV actually is, and it applies to both LCDs and plasmas. Typically, as you move up in price, you get a better panel. Cheaper sets generally use older panels with previous-generation tech that Merson says have a poorer viewing angle, so there’s a smaller area you can actually stare at on your TV to get a good picture. The problem is that no TV manufacturer actually declares its panel attributes on the box, so you’re often on your own to figure it out. The best way is to go to the store and check out the viewing angles.

Hertz, for the uninitiated, is simply the number of times per second that LCD TVs refresh their picture. (Plasma isn’t part of this discussion because phosphor pixels work differently than liquid crystal ones, and plasma’s “refresh rate” would be way higher — to the point of irrelevance.) A 60Hz LCD refreshes the picture 60 times a second, 120Hz is 120 times a second, and so on, up to 240Hz in the top-priced LCD sets. A higher refresh rate is supposed to increase the ability to see fast-moving video at its highest intended resolution, and it works well in theory, though there are issues with 240Hz execution. At this point, a minimum of 120Hz is a given on all premium LCDs, says Merson. There isn’t one LED-backlit set that doesn’t have it.

Here’s how the refresh-rate step-ups look: The 46-inch Samsung B550 is a standard 1080p CCFL-backlit set for $US1020. Moving up to the same size B650 for $US1360 — $US300 more — gets you 120Hz (plus a higher contrast ratio). Going up again, to the B750 for $US1630, another $US300, you get 240Hz, and again even better contrast ratio. That’s about the top of Samsung’s CCFL-backlit line.

You can see the same thing with their LED sets: The 46-inch B6000 is a 120Hz LED edge-lit set for $US1850. The 46-inch LED edgel-lit B8000 goes to 240Hz and it costs $US2300, about $US450 more.

What About Plasma?

As we mentioned, plasmas are a little less complicated, since there’s nothing like refresh rates to deal with. On the other hand, the situation may be more obtuse, since you don’t always know what the real differences are. Merson says there are a few basic levels of plasma performance. Stepping up to the 50-inch 1080p plasmas will generally cost $US300 to $US400 more.

There are more issues, however. Panasonic has a new panel called NeoPDP that’s more energy efficient, but it’s sometimes hard to tell which models have it and which don’t. (Hint: Look for the Energy Rating sticker.) Finally, you have THX-certified panels that offer nearly perfect calibration right out of the box. Beyond that, contrast ratios do tend to get better over time, but it’s relative: At the low end of the HDTV price spectrum, plasma sets have generally delivered better picture than LCD anyway.

Frills and Other Stuff

The funny thing about TVs nowadays is that there’s more to them than the screen. Like inputs. Until recently, one thing you got more of by paying more money were more holes to stick things into. That’s not really the case once you get up into 46-inch sets — you’re gonna get four HDMI slots in a set that big no matter what. But there are other things nowadays. Like video services that come in through other holes, or maybe without wires at all.

An example, to use our old friends at Samsung: The B6000 looks a lot like the B7000, but with the B7000, for $US180 more you get online video services via Yahoo’s widget engine, like YouTube.

Or, let’s look at the upcoming crop of LED TVs that aren’t even out yet, or are in limited distribution for now. LG’s 55LHX and Sony’s Bravia XBR10 both have wireless HDMI and 240Hz, but with Bravia Internet Widgets and Slacker radio, the Bravia is $US5000, $US200 more than 55LHX. Wireless HDMI itself is a pretty pricey feature. Same Sony, compared to Samsung’s 8500. The 8500 has built-in video services, but no wireless HDMI, and it’s $US500 cheaper, at $US4500. Oh, and did I mention that the Sony is even 7cm smaller than the Samsung and LG?

Wireless is still in the gimmick phase, but next year, we assume we’ll be able to track its price premium as well as we can track size, refresh rate, backlighting and other factors today, $US300 to $US400 at a time. How do you get from $US600 to a $US6000? You just add, add some more and then keep adding.

You will learn important lessons like: sizing your TV to optimise resolution, whether to choose LCD vs plasma vs LED and why you don’t need to spend money on a 240Hz TV. So make sure to check out the following link before you shop. [HDGuru]

As you’re probably aware, plasma displays use noble gases wedged between two sheets of glass, which are zapped with electricity to make them change colour (for more, check out this post here). What you may not know is how the technology has progressed almost exponentially in the past 20 years.

It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the so-called “father of plasma”, Larry Weber, began researching plasma at the University of Illinois. According to Wikipedia, he has 15 patents related to the technology in his name today. What’s more – he essentially saved the technology from extinction in the early 1980s, when IBM planned on closing their plasma display factory, by buying it off them.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that plasma prototypes even started appearing – up until then, the screens were used in cash registers, calculators, pinball machines and a whole host of other gadgets. In 1992, Fujitsu showed off a 21-inch colour display, although it used other technologies to pump up the brightness. The first full-colour plasma display was demonstrated by Larry Weber in 1994 and led to Panasonic buying his plasma company.

The rapid expansion of plasma continued in 1997, with the sale of the first 42-inch plasma TV from Fujitsu. It had a resolution of 852×480 pixels and was followed by a Philips display with the same resolution. It didn’t come cheap though – that first set cost $US14,999, although that included home installation.

Over the past 12 years, the technology has progressed even further. The panels developed to display Full HD resolutions, increased their contrast ratio, and worked out all the kinks in the technology, like burn-in and problems at high altitudes. Today, LCD has definitely taken over plasma as the main TV technology available, however many pundits (myself included) argue that the plasma picture quality is a more enjoyable watching experience. And when you couple that with some of the latest plasma screens – which use much less power than previous generations and can be up to 1-inch thick for a whole 50-inch television, it’s easy to see that the technology still has some life left in it.

History of TV is Giz AU’s month-long look back at the development of the world-changing medium and its influence on our daily lives.

If you do happen to pick up an eligible plasma TV from Panny between October 24 and December 24 this year, you’ll be eligible to receive either an HD Tough LUMIX Camera pack valued at $643, an HD Blu-ray Home Theatre valued at $1,099 or an HD Twin Tuner DVD Recorder with 250GB HDD also valued at $1,099.

There are 12,000 of each bonus gift to giveaway, which isn’t too many. I can’t imagine too many people would jump at the camera pack either considering the much lower value in comparison. But still, if bonus free stuff influences your TV purchasing decisions, this isn’t a bad little offer.

The eligible TVs are as follows:

TH-P54Z1A 54-inch Full HD 1080p $6,999
TH-P58V10A 58-inch Full HD 1080p $4,599
TH-P50V10A 50-inch Full HD 1080p $3,299
TH-P50G15A 50-inch Full HD 1080p $2,999
TH-P42G15A 42-inch Full HD 1080p $2,299
TH-P50G10A 50-inch Full HD 1080p $2,799
TH-P46G10A 46-inch Full HD 1080p $2,499
TH-P42G10A 42-inch Full HD 1080p $2,099
TH-P54S10A 54-inch Full HD 1080p $3,399
TH-P50S10A 50-inch Full HD 1080p $2,599
TH-P46S10A 46-inch Full HD 1080p $2,299
TH-P42S10A 42-inch Full HD 1080p $1,899

[Panasonic]

These beautifully stunning videos show the formidable power of the Ad Astra’s VASIMR VX-200, the most powerful space engine in existence. Running at 1,000,000 degrees Celsius, it looks like Satan opened the peephole of the doors of hell.

The plama engine was tested on September 30, breaking the 200kW maximum power milestone. According to the company, the design has exceeded the predicted performance by 25%. The engine has two electromagnetic stages: The first one runs at 32kW and generate plasma from Argon gas, while the second one boosts the output an additional 168kW.

The plasma engine cuts the need for massive amounts of fuel, taking down the current 7.5 tons of propellant per year used in the shuttle and other spaceships down to 0.3 tons. It will also be extremely fast, cutting down the travel to Mars from six months to just 39 days.

It will be tested in late 2013 at the International Space Station. Hopefully those guys will pull the handbrake before they find themselves halfway to Saturn. [Universe Today]

In case you weren’t already familiar, the 103-inch Panasonic Plasma is a behemoth that requires 12 fans, sucks up 1500 watts of juice at 220 volts, and is so big that when you crank up split-screen multiplayer gaming on the thing, you essentially have your own damn television.

So this year, we’re gonna be playing plenty of Call of Duty: World at War, Beatles Rock Band, Halo: ODST, Street Fighter IV and whatever other HD goodness we (or you) can think of (Sorry, Chen…no porn). That said, I don’t care if they’re not HD, I’m playing some PunchOut! and Metroid Trilogy on the damn thing.

When we’re not gaming, we’ll be showing exclusive art and behind-the-scenes content from the Star Trek movie, which should make you Klingon-loving Trektards salivate profusely.

Read more about our Giz Gallery 09 here.

It should be noted, all designs require glasses. (More technical background on the types of glasses here.)

Panasonic’s 3D Plasma Concept
The Tech: Plasma with Active Shutter (alternating left eye, right eye progressive frames)
As a baseline reference to get our bearings, I took yet another look at Panasonic’s 103-inch plasma display that we’ve seen twice before. My original impressions stand. It’s decent—and definitely the best technology of the three that we saw at CEDIA. Why? There’s virtually no flicker in the image because of plasma’s instantaneous response times/ability to push legitimate high frame rates. Plus, it probably helps that we’re talking about a 103-inch display (that has its own trailer). The bigger a 3D display, the better the illusion. But glasses aside, it’s not what I’d deem a perfect experience. You see ghosting around some objects. And…OK, I still can’t ignore the damned glasses. It creates an inherent distance from the image inducing an unintentionally ephemeral viewing experience.

Sony’s LCD Concept
The Tech: 240Hz LCD with Active Shutter (alternating left eye, right eye progressive frames)
Even Panasonic will tell you that 240Hz is the baseline speed needed for an LCD to pull off 3D. But you know what? 240Hz isn’t enough. Watching Pixar’s Up, the colour and sharpness are both great, but there’s an absurd level of flicker that’s nominally better than on old timey crank projector. And on this normally sized LCD, it’s incredibly obvious when 3D objects break the illusion by reaching the TV’s frame. Granted, we’re not talking about a final product here, but the specs seem pretty much identical to what consumers can expect to see in the high-end display market next year.

JVC’s GD-463D10 LCD
The Tech: TKTK with Polarized Glasses (two images are interlaced on the screen, each eye sees half the data, glasses don’t need power)
Of the three technologies here, JVC’s is the only final product that’s actually available now. And it costs $US9153. It’s also easily the worst of the three—completely unwatchable, in fact. The interlaced 3D means that the resolution takes a huge hit. But it’s worse than just a 1080i picture. Your brain can almost make out these lines. I could say more about the tech, but I honestly couldn’t stand to look at the screen for more than 10 seconds at once. Oh, and the kicker? For nine thousand bucks, you still only get two pairs of the cheap, polarized glasses. Sorry kids. mummy and Daddy need to watch

There’s no doubt that some home theatre enthusiasts will go out and plop down $US5k or more on a commercially available 3D display when they enter the TV lines of major manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic in 2010. But I’m hoping, really hoping, that the public can resist the gimmick until the technology is perfected. To me, that means when we don’t need to deal with these silly glasses at all. But for whatever it’s worth, plasma is definitely looking like the clear front runner in execution. [Image]

On the left, the recently announced Toshiba ZV650, a locally dimmed LED LCD. On the right, Toshiba’s last gen CCFL LCD display (click image for full size pop-up). Both were promised to be configured with the default “sports” settings—no special engineer tweaking.

Local dimming is one of the catchwords of CEDIA—the US’s big home theatre trade show. It’s basically when a backlit LED display completely turns off backlighting in the dark parts of the image, pretty much making black as black as it can be.

Seeing Toshiba’s side-by-side, the TVs produced pretty much identical images in terms of colour, sharpness and dark details. But the blacks were way blacker, even when the lights in the room were turned on. And the difference is even more pronounced in person.

In other words, from Toshiba or any other company, this is what “local dimming” really means when you read it on a spec sheet. The more you know, kids!

This according to the guys at HDguru, who proclaimed the new $US2,600 set was easily the “New King of HDTVs.” In some cases, they said, the Panasonic was able to best the KURO.

The V10 distinction carries with it the same NEO PDP panel as its cousins in the recently released G10 plasma line, but adds in a bevy of new software and hardware features, including three colour modes, a thinner profile (2.8cm deep at top and 8.4cm middle), and a 96Hz refresh rate for 24Hz sources. The V10 line currently comes in 50 and 54-in. models, with larger 58 and 65-inchers due out in August.

And lest you still remain on the fence about this HDTV, know that HDGuru changed their frickin review system from four to five hearts to accommodate all the wonderful new awesomeness provided by Panasonic in this pricey new HDTV. [HDGuru]