With silver, bottom-mounted speakers, shiny black bezel, and side-mounted controls, the Vizio P50HDTV 50-inch plasma HDTV looks just like its 42-inch sibling, which we reviewed in our May 2006 issue. Like the P42, it has a built-in tuner for pulling in over-the-air digital TV broadcasts, and there's also Faroudja DCDi for deinterlacing duties. A relatively sturdy (for a 50-inch model) plastic stand comes with the TV, and you can order Vizio's optional $90 stationary wall-mount, or a tilting version for only 10 bucks more — a good deal either way you slice it.
Inputs on the P50HDTV include not one but two HDMI jacks (the standard on new bigscreen HDTVs these days, but still surprising on a budget model), a VGA connection for hooking up a computer, and component-, composite-, and S-video jacks. There's no CableCARD slot for tuning in encrypted premium-cable channels without a separate cable box, but you can receive both regular analog and unencrypted digital cable by plugging into the set's antenna input.
Vizio's remote control is sturdy and has a clean button layout. The buttons are small, however, and there's no backlighting, making it hard to locate a specific control when the lights are dimmed. Picture-in-Picture, Freeze, and Zoom controls are grouped at the remote's bottom, and directly above them is a set of five direct-input keys for switching sources quickly — a useful feature. The Wide button lets you toggle between the TV's Normal (4:3), Full (16:9), Zoom, and Panoramic display modes, all of which can be selected for both standard and high-def signals (except Panoramic, which is available only for 480i programs).
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The Short Form |
| Price $1,899 ($1,999 list) / vizioce.com / 714-668-0588 |
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Snapshot
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| A low price and good performance add up to a great deal in Vizio's newest 50-inch plasma HDTV. |
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Plus
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| •Great price •Deep blacks and good shadow detail •Clean upconversion of standard-def programs |
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Minus
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| •Some false-contouring artifacts •Too-blue out-of-box color balance |
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Key Features
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| •1,366 x 768 screen resolution •Built-in HDTV tuner •Faroudja DCDi processing •Picture-in-Picture •Inputs 2 HDMI, VGA, 2 component-video, 2 composite-video, and 2 S-video, all with stereo audio; RF antenna •Outputs Optical digital and stereo analog audio; headphone •48.8 x 34.3 x 12.3 in (w/stand); 85 lb Full Lab Results |
The Vizio P50HDTV offers four picture presets along with a Custom preset that lets you tweak settings to your liking for each video input. Along with basics such as color, contrast, and sharpness, there are adjustments for noise reduction (Motion and Digital), Fleshtone, and Dynamic Contrast, but no dedicated color-temperature presets — an unfortunate omission given the TV's too-cool out-of-box color temperature. A set of red, green, and blue level adjustments in the Custom Color submenu can be used to pull color temperature back towards the 6,500 K standard, but doing this with any level of precision requires special test equipment (see Test Bench for details).
PICTURE QUALITY After adjusting the Vizio's picture, I checked out the movie Dazed and Confused on HD DVD. In a scene on a baseball diamond where high-school frosh Wiley Wiggins (Mitch Kramer) attempts to concentrate on pitching while a gang of seniors harasses him, the ball field's green turf looked very natural. I found the red and blue hues of the players' uniforms a bit pale compared with how they look on other sets I've tested, but the skin tones of the players themselves showed a range of subtle hues. Dark images also looked very realistic. During a nighttime party scene in a tree-strewn field, for example, shadows were satisfyingly deep, while dark objects such as the black shirt worn by the stoner-thug Clint (Nicky Katt) showed a good range of shadow detail.
High-def picture detail on the Vizio was also quite good. When I watched a courtroom interrogation scene from the 720p-format ABC show Boston Legal, the picture had a crisp overall appearance, and I could easily make out fine pinstripes on the lawyers' gray suits as well as the intricate patterns on their ties. The set also did a nice job handling 1080i-format HDTV broadcasts, which looked equally crisp on its 1,366 x 768-pixel screen.
Another area where the Vizio stood out was in its upconversion of standard 480i movies — something that can be attributed in part to its Faroudja DCDi processing. The DVDs I watched looked uniformly crisp and sharp, and the picture quality held up even in scenes with fast motion. Not all was perfect with the picture, however: A fair amount of false contouring — coarse-looking gradations or "bands" that can usually be seen on flat backgrounds — appeared in medium-dark shots like one of a dim school hallway in Dazed and Confused. The black-and-white movies I watched also suffered visibly from this effect. And though the set's noise-reduction features didn't exactly soften the picture when applied, they did add a slight bit of "ringing" that showed up as a faint visual echo in shots with quick motion.
BOTTOM LINE It wasn't all that long ago that I found myself amazed at the prospect of 42-inch plasma TVs dipping below $2,000. But now that the Vizio P50HDTV 50-inch plasma HDTV has hit the streets, I'm going to have to adjust to the idea of 50-inch models selling for that! The Vizio definitely lacks the visual wow-factor of the 50-inch 1080p-rez Pioneer plasma I recently reviewed (which is priced at $8,000), but I have to say I'm impressed at what the company can deliver picture quality-wise in a set this inexpensive. It may not be the last word in plasma TV performance, but the P50HDTV is one heck of a deal.
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