Halfway There

When Hitachi announced a 50-inch plasma with 1280x1080 resolution for $2500 at the Consumer Electronics Show last January, we at TPV got pretty excited. True, it wasn’t 1920x1080, but unlike most plasmas of that size, it was able to display the full vertical resolution of 1080-line signals. And, at the time, $2500 seemed like a pretty sweet deal for a 50-incher. Since then, prices have dropped appreciably, making cost less of an issue. Still, $2500 isn’t bad for a flat panel of this size. Does the P50H401’s unusual resolution offer an advantage over other reasonably priced plasma TVs? Perhaps, but there are a few drawbacks that weaken any such advantage.

Features

The P50H401 and its brethren (with screens measuring 42 and 55 inches) are sold under the moniker “HD1080” to indicate a resolution of 1280x1080, as opposed to Hitachi’s 1920x1080 models, which carry the “Full HD” designation. Amazingly, the HD1080 models can accept a 1080p input signal from Blu-ray and HD DVD players, something no other TV with less than 1920x1080 resolution can do as far as I know. Also, one of the aspect-ratio settings (“16:9 Standard2”) avoids cropping any pixels from the edges of the screen, allowing you to see more of the image than other non-1080p panels.

Navigating through the TV’s menus was very slow, taking about two seconds for each menu to appear. And you have to go two levels deep to get to the picture controls—at least they’re all in one place instead of being scattered throughout several menus as with many sets. Like most TVs these days, this one includes a universal remote that can control up to four devices other than the TV. It’s not illuminated, but the layout is clean and well-organized with no multi-function buttons—hooray! As usual with universal TV remotes, this one does not have dedicated input-selection buttons, but rather a single Input button that opens a menu of input choices.

PERFORMANCE

The first thing I noticed when I fired up Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back on DVD was how wimpy dark areas of the picture looked. Instead of being a deep, rich black, outer space was washed out and flat, and the letterbox bars above and below the image stuck out instead of “disappearing” as they do on plasmas with excellent black performance. On the other hand, the many shades of white on the ice planet Hoth were nicely differentiated, leading me to shiver as Luke searches for what he thinks is a meteor strike in the snowy wasteland.

Turning my attention to color rendition, I thought the green swamp/jungle on Degoba looked pretty exaggerated, as did bright red lights on spaceship control panels. Also, skin tones were a bit ruddy in some cases and slightly green in others, making it hard to fool myself into thinking that I was watching the action through a window.

On the plus side, detail was excellent—the myriad controls in the Millennium Falcon were sharply defined, as were the structures on the outer hulls of the Imperial cruisers. Shadow detail was quite good as well. It was easy to see what Han and Chewbacca were doing as they repaired the ship while hiding from the Imperial forces within an asteroid, and Darth Vader’s dark lair on his command ship was suitably frightening in its gloom.

Switching to Superman Returns on Blu-ray, the Man of Steel’s face looked slightly orange, and the green kryptonite positively glowed, which might not be a bad thing, though I don’t recall it being quite that pronounced on other TVs. Grass in the baseball stadium above which Superman saves the crashing jetliner also looked a little too green.

As with DVD, detail was the saving grace—it was easy to imagine that I was sitting stunned in the bleachers along with thousands of other clearly defined spectators as Superman gently lowers the massive plane to the ground. But when he’s floating in space above Earth to ponder the state of humanity, what should have been deep black was instead washed out and unconvincing. The Desert Speaks on KCET-HD, L.A.’s digital PBS station, was spectacular in its detail—I could almost feel the texture of rock walls as I stumbled on the debris of the desert floor. A red bird in a tree was somewhat overdone, as was the green foliage, but skin tones seemed more natural than they were in the movies I watched. As expected, the darkness of night just wasn’t dark enough to pull me into the scene the way a TV with superior black performance can. In standard def, faces of the guests on Oprah were just a bit too orangey, and reds were exaggerated, though detail was good—a guest’s herringbone jacket looked perfectly clean, showing no signs of the shimmering artifacts that often plague such attire.

Conclusion

I’ve always liked Hitachi’s idea of making plasmas with 1080 lines of vertical resolution, even if the horizontal resolution is less than 1920. Such a TV needn’t vertically resize a 1080i or 1080p signal, preserving more detail than with 1280x720 or 1366x768 sets. And the P50H401 does a wonderful job in this regard. However, its inability to render deep, solid blacks and the exaggerated greens and reds tend to offset its detail advantage. If Hitachi can improve performance in these areas, the resulting picture should be awesome.