The Short Form

$3,200 ($3,695 list) / HITACHI.US / 800-448-2244

Snapshot

It’s not a Kuro-beater, but Hitachi’s new top-end plasma delivers an impressive picture and some great features

Plus

• Accurate out-of-box color reproduction • User-friendly menus and remote control • Extensive video adjustments • Cool motorized swivel base

Minus

• Just-average standard-def upconversion • Pricey for a 50-inch plasma

Key Features

• 1,920 x 1,080-pixel resolution • (3) HDMI 1.3 ports • Cinema 48 and Reel 60 film modes • TV Guide On Screen program listings • Motorized swivel stand • Backlit universal remote with macro function • Inputs: (3) HDMI, (2) component-video, (1) composite-video, and (1) S-video; • 48 x 34 x 14 ½ in, 108 ½ lb (with stand)

Some contend that LCD flat-panel sets will inherit the HDTV universe, thanks to their manufacturing and energy efficiencies. But the truth is that plasma TVs are enjoying a renaissance, in part because of Pioneer and its much-decorated Kuro models. However, other companies — including Panasonic, Samsung, and Hitachi — also continue to address the demand for plasma’s deep blacks and pure, phosphor-based color reproduction.

Hitachi’s P50X902, a 50-inch set from its high-end Director Series, is a prime example of the new breed. Its translucent beveled edge stands out from the competition’s typical gloss-black frame, and the 3⁄4-inch-high matte-black grille that runs across the bottom to hide the speakers provides even more visual interest. The oval-shaped base houses a motorized pivot that swivels the TV 30° in either direction.

Meanwhile, the Hitachi’s backlit learning remote is the first wand I’ve seen supplied with a TV that can perform 10-step macros, which makes switching sources for the TV a one-touch operation. Aspect-ratio settings for HD signals include a bit-for-bit mode with no overscan and several 16:9 and 4:3 zoom modes that let you adjust the image position up or down.

SETUP

The P50X902 has a solid mix of inputs, including three HDMI ports with Deep Color support (one in the left-side jack pack), an RS-232C control connection, and a slot for an SD card that can be loaded with photos and accessed from the input menu. It also has an IR output to be used with the built-in TV Guide On Screen program listings or as an IR pass-through to operate other components.

When you first turn on the set, you get an unusual Energy Saver menu that asks you to select a power mode depending on whether the TV is being used at home or in a retail store. The Retail setting is a “torch mode,” intended to make the set stand out on a crowded sales floor, while the Home option sets the brightness to a more natural level. Color (including the set’s white balance) noticeably improved when I selected the Night mode, one of three picture presets — the others being Day and Dynamic. (Each preset can independently store picture adjustments for any input.)

The Hitachi’s menu system is attractive and engaging, and it’s full of useful video tweaks. Among the more interesting was Color Management, which lets you use an onscreen honeycomb grid to adjust the gain (brightness) and phase (tint) of all the primary and secondary colors. An unusual Color Decoding menu allows the red and green balance to be easily adjusted either to taste or to a test DVD’s color-decoder pattern without having to look through red and green gel filters. There are four color-temperature settings (High, Medium, Standard, and D.Cinema), and a full set of “cuts and gains” adjustments for tweaking color temperature with appropriate test instruments.

Two Color Space settings are available: AutoStd/xvColor and Vibrant. The Auto mode had a wider color gamut and delivered primary colors that measured closer to the HDTV standard. It toned down the set’s color saturation to create a more film-like image than Vibrant could deliver, but it also sacrificed some color details that added a sense of realism. Since Auto also disabled many of the TV’s advanced color adjustments, I opted for Vibrant along with the D.Cinema color-temperature setting before making final picture tweaks. With these settings, color temperature tracked between 6,000 and 6,300 K across most of the brightness range — not much off the 6,500-K industry standard.

Besides the traditional Brightness (black-level) control, the P50X902 offers Gamma and Black Enhancement adjustments to help strike the right balance between deep blacks and clear reproduction of shadow details. I ended up setting Gamma and Black Enhancement to Medium and Middle, respectively.

PERFORMANCE

After basic calibration tamed the Hitachi’s slightly too warm and oversaturated flesh tones, high-def cable-TV programs looked great on its 1080p screen. NBC’s broadcast of the Summer Olympics offered a steady stream of crisp, brightly colored images to watch. The reds in the uniforms of the U.S. women’s basketball team looked natural and appropriately saturated, while rich blues, neutral whites, and amazingly sharp details could be seen in the sequined swimsuits of the Russian synchronized-swimming team.
The Blu-ray Disc of the romantic comedy Fool’s Gold also looked sensational on the Hitachi. A wide shot of the Caribbean in the opening sequence was convincingly blue-green, and the bright yellows in the Hawaiian shirt worn by treasure-hunter Ben Finnegan (Matthew McConaughey) popped off the screen without looking unnatural. The set’s blacks appeared to be solid, but just to make sure, I used an HDMI splitter to compare the Hitachi with a first-generation Pioneer Elite Kuro. On most programs, the Hitachi impressively matched the Kuro for color accuracy and contrast. But on very dark scenes — such as one in which Finnegan’s ex-wife Tess (Kate Hudson) examines a shipwreck artifact on a yacht’s deck at night — the Pioneer’s superiority was apparent.

The Hitachi’s Cinema 48 film mode — which performs 2:2 pulldown on 1080p/24-frame signals coming from a Blu-ray player and displays them at a 48-Hz refresh rate — did a great job of smoothing judder in a difficult pan-and-zoom sequence from Fool’s Gold. (See the full Test Bench report on the next page.) And it handled standard-def material well — not the best I’ve seen, but also not the worst. There was no evidence of “jaggy” distortions on diagonal lines, and high-quality 480i and 480p DVD transfers delivered over a component-video connection looked clean with the set’s noise-reduction processing turned off. (Since the Hitachi’s NR and MPEG NR settings noticeably reduced picture detail, I left them off for most viewing.)

BOTTOM LINE

While its $3,695 list price is a little high, Hitachi’s P50X902 represents a new level of performance and engineering prowess for the company. It can’t beat Pioneer’s plasmas (especially the ’08 models) at reproducing deep-black shadows, but most people would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. Throw in the Hitachi’s superior, user-friendly menu system and remote control, plus the set’s cool aesthetics and swivel base, and you’ve got a TV worth taking a good look at. 

TEST BENCH

Color temperature (Cinema Night Setting/6500° temperature before/ Cinema Night Setting/6500° temperature after calibration):
20-IRE: 5,320 K/6,458 K
30-IRE: 5,863 K/6,414 K
40-IRE: 6,003 K/6,469 K
50-IRE: 6,063 K/6,478 K
60-IRE: 6,218 K/6,476 K
70-IRE: 6,273 K/6,499 K
80-IRE: 6,258 K/6,434 K
90-IRE: 6,296 K/6,423 K
100-IRE: 6,271 K/6,550 K

Brightness (100-IRE full field): 12.3/17.4 ftL
Primary Color Point Accuracy vs. SMPTE HD Standard

TEST BENCH

With the Hitachi set to its Night mode, D.Cinema color temperature, and Vibrant color space, its grayscale tracked fairly consistently within 500 K of the 6,500 K standard down to 40 IRE. Below that point, its grayscale turned notably redder. White Balance adjustments made in the user menu brought it to within  ±86 K — excellent performance. The set’s primary colors matched the HDTV standard almost perfectly in Auto color space mode, and came awfully close in the Vibrant mode I opted for as well, showing just a bit of undersaturation on green. Its color decoder measured only a –10% red error prior to adjustment with the Color Decoding menu, and 0% error afterward.

As expected with a plasma model,  the Hitachi’s screen uniformity was essentially perfect, with only a slight bit of noise visible in the darkest full-field test patterns, and it exhibited a fairly wide viewing angle and no obvious glare problems on its matte-finish screen. It cleanly resolved 1080i/p- and 720p-resolution test signals via both its HDMI and component-video inputs.

The Hitachi performed well on the upconversion and deinterlacing torture tests on the Silicon Optix Blu-ray and standard-def HQV test discs. But it did only an average job of cleaning up grungy standard-def signals, and its various noise reduction circuits tended to soften the picture noticeably more than some others I’ve seen.

The P50X902’s Reel 60 3:2 pulldown circuitry seemed to work well to reduce judder on film-based material, as observed on the long sweeping pan of some stadium seats in a clip on the Silicon Optix HQV Blu-ray disc. Likewise, the Cinema 48 function — which can be enabled to activate 2:2 pulldown for 24 frame-per-second content delivered from Blu-ray discs via the HDMI input — also seemed to smooth out motion on some scenes. One particularly challenging scene I used to test this occurs in the Blu-ray Disc of Fool’s Gold at around 37min:20sec into the movie. The shot starts with a static close up of a globe sitting atop a tall file cabinet, after which the camera pans diagonally down to peer into a long hallway before zooming in on a person entering the room. The combination of the diagonal pan and the sudden zoom creates noticeable judder and jerkiness. Turning on the Cinema 48 function nicely smoothed the motion, but didn’t help extract additional detail during the rapid pan the way I’ve seen some 120-Hz motion circuits do on the better LCD HDTVs.

This set’s audio options include two surround modes, with the Wide mode doing a good job of throwing background music well past the sides of the TV. But the small speakers sounded unacceptably thin without the Bass Boost function turned on, and in larger rooms viewers may find the dynamic impact wanting in the absence of an ancillary audio system. A helpful Lip Sync function allows alignment of the out-of-sync audio that occasionally occurs with some cable programs, and it worked as advertised.