Back in the early 1990s, I helped a friend carry a new rear-projection television up three flights of stairs to a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Although its screen was only 50 inches, that bulky box was about the size and weight of a classic Volkswagen Bug. My back was so tweaked that I walked around hunched over, stinking of Ben-Gay, for a week. Adding insult to injury (literally), when we finally got the TV upstairs, the picture was über soft. For someone used to the sharpness of a direct-view tube TV, this was hard to swallow, even during football season, when a bigger screen is always better.
The PT-61DLX76 won't win any design awards. It follows the lead of a lot of today's bigscreens with unassuming cosmetics that amount to a giant screen with a glossy black bezel surrounding it. If you're looking to make a visual statement with your HDTV, this isn't the one, though the custom-install crowd may appreciate the lip around the frame that allows the set to be nicely flush-mounted into drywall. The TV's silver cabinet extends below the screen to house the stereo speakers, which sounded surprisingly good — though the sonics were a bit hollow, the dialogue was relatively crisp and clear, and even explosions in movie and TV soundtracks were deep, booming, and visceral.
On the right side of the front is a door that swings down to reveal controls to operate the menu system and other essential functions, as well as composite-/S-video convenience inputs and a SD Card reader for displaying digital photos. Around back is an impressive jack pack with loads of connectivity options, including a pair of HDMI inputs that can handle 1080p sources, a pair of component-video ins, two A/V inputs with composite- and S-video, analog and optical digital audio output, and an RF input for antenna or cable. A VGA input allows connection of a PC. Very nice.
The remote control (like many I've seen lately) is a disappointment. Not only did it lack any backlighting or glow keys to ease operation in a darkened theater room, but I also found its buttons crowded and difficult to identify by feel. At least they were larger than the norm, which is good for pudgy digits like mine.
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The Short Form |
| Price $2,400 ($2,999.95 LIST) / panasonic.com / 800-405-0652 |
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Snapshot
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| This high-rez DLP has all the bells and whistles, but its picture quality falls short of its competition. |
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Plus
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| •Low-price 1080p HDTV •Ample connectivity options •Great feature package •Better-than-average sound system |
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Minus
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| •Poor shadow detail •Inaccurate color |
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Key Features
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•1,920 x 1,080 resolution (1080p) |
In addition to the standard picture adjustments (brightness, color, tint, and so on), there are three color-temperature settings and a plethora of picture adjustment options, including Color Management (which supposedly enhances green and blue), two noise-reduction modes to clean up poor-quality sources, a defeatable 3-D Y/C comb filter (for composite-video and NTSC broadcast sources only), and selectable black-level control. There are also controls for Dynamic Iris, Gamma, and Black Extension, and for Red, Green, and Blue color levels. The Cinema preset mode and Warm color temperature provided a color temperature closest to the industry-standard gray, but even with all of this adjustability at our disposal, S&V Executive Editor Rob Sabin and I couldn't get the set fully calibrated across its entire grayscale (see Test Bench). Eventually we had to settle for getting more accurate grays in the brighter part of its range at the expense of a little lean toward red on darker scenes.
PICTURE QUALITY With our HD DVD player locked and loaded, I cued up The Italian Job and jumped to the opening heist. Right off, I noticed a lack of the detail and clarity I'm used to seeing in this scene on other HDTVs, which takes place in a dimly lit Venetian villa. Although the set's 1080p screen displayed excellent sharpness in well-lit areas of the picture, the rich woodwork and fine architectural details in the shadowy background were simply lost as Steve Frezelli (Edward Norton) applied the liquid explosive that brings a safe loaded with $35 million in gold bars crashing down into a boat basin two stories below. This effect was even more exaggerated during the underwater scene that follows: As John Bridger (Donald Sutherland) is trying to open the safe and free the brilliant booty, I could see an obvious lack of detail in the numbers he was scrawling on the safe door.
Later, when the gang stopped in a snow-covered mountain pass in the Alps to toast their good fortune with some Dom Perignon, I noticed some obvious projection-screen grain or noise in the bright sky that made the passage look dim compared with the crystal-clear vista and mountains that normally add a grand sense of depth to the picture on my day-to-day plasma. Skin tones were also a bit unnatural, skewing toward pink — a problem we couldn't fully adjust out. And the snow scenes could at times be seen to take on a bluish tinge rather than white.
After the movie ended, I pulled up the baseball playoffs on ESPN-HD, specifically the National League Divisional Series, St. Louis Cardinals versus San Diego Padres. Here again, the set showed excellent, sharp detail in the well-lit stadium, but its tendency to exaggerate red was obvious in the red parts of the Cardinals' uniforms, especially the caps.
BOTTOM LINE Panasonic is a respected name in the world of flat-panel plasma TVs, but when all is said and done, the Panasonic PT-61DLX76 61-inch 1080p DLP HDTV is a mediocre offering in a crowded field of similar TVs. The company clearly put some effort into equipping this HDTV with a solid feature pack, including 1080p resolution, at a relatively low price. Unfortunately, its picture quality falls short of its considerable competition, making it less of a bargain than it appears.
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