TPV Visits Panasonic's Hollywood Labs

Posted by: David Birch-Jones at 2:02 pm, May 18th, 2011

A comparison between a Panasonic Viera plasma and a Samsung 8000 LED LCD featured a fast-moving still image panning across the screens, with the Panasonic showing a clearer picture with less smear than the Samsung. Who’s to know whether the Samsung’s motion de-blur setting was optimized for the best picture?

Panasonic did include a side-by-side comparison of one their last year’s plasmas against a newer 2011 model, showing that improvements in phosphor persistence timing (decay) all but eliminated green lag with fast moving white images (most often noticeable with quick scrolling white text on a black background).

Reps from SpectraCal, a video calibration software developer, were on hand to demonstrate their system communicating directly with a Panasonic set via RJ-45 LAN connection, a first. Ordinarily, a proper calibration entails a laborious and time-consuming series of steps with the technician feeding numerous test patterns to a display and fiddling with the display’s remote control to adjust the various settings.

With the direct LAN connection, the process becomes highly automated as the calibration software runs the various tests and communicates directly with the set, obviating the need for the technician to make adjustments along the way via the TV’s remote control. The end result is a much quicker and more accurate calibration process, with far less chance of human error to gum things up along the way.

While we’ve already looked at Panasonic’s 2011 midrange ST30 3D plasma (a very good performer), we’re hoping we can soon get our hands on one of the new upper end VT30 models that are just now beginning to ship to retailers, as well as looking at one of their 3D LCD sets sometime down the road.