I'm looking at buying a high definition 42" plasma screen and was wondering what people considered the best.

After wandering around the department stores at lunchtime (never a pleasant experience before Christmas), the new Panasonic Viera screen and the comparable Pioneer both looked very good, although the colours appeared a little dull compared to Sony, Fujitsu and one or two others. The Sony, on the other hand, looked slightly unnatural.

Obviously, I'm after the best video quality (sound quality is irrelevant, since the sound will be routed through the hi fi system) and I'm also looking for a screen that is as small as possible - ie the "frame" around the screen should be as thin as possible.

I'd be interested to hear any views on the best of the current HD plasma screens.

Ross

Hi Ross,

NEC and pioneer at the moment seem to be the pick of the crop in the Aussie market.

NEC on DBA forum

pioneer or NEC?

I recently bought a toshiba 76cm fine pitch CRT and the picture when set up properly is excellent even on Fox. I had only a small corner unit to put a screen so only an 82cm plasma was possible.

Anyhow there's more experience in the links...and people think that this forum is rabid!

cheers

Dave

PS I'm still loving the etymotics even after my dog had a chew on one earpiece

Thanks for the links, Dave. Also glad to hear you still like the etymotics.

Ross

Ross,
My friend has recently had the new Pioneer 43"(!) panel and that is exceptional, even though scart. From what I remember, Sony buy in their panels from Fujitsu / Hitachi (who apparently jointly own a manufacturing plant between them) before adding their own nice finishing touches. Panasonic now do a gereration 7 that if their gen 6 is anything to go by, will be rather special.
Have also read that LG has now become a major producer, so they may be worth a look as well.
Please do yourself a BIG favour and insist on watching one through a dedicated input from a digital source, not through a multi distribution point so common in department stores, as has been said before, they are very revealing of what they are being fed signal wise.

In my opinion, it has to be the Pioneer. It has the best picture quality for current sources as well as the capability to cater for the future as much as is humanly possible. It has a high definition resolution (1024x768 for the 43" and 1280x720 for the 50") and has HDMI, which Sky have recently announced is the ONLY method they will use to transmit high def pictures from their high def boxes, for copy protection purposes. The Pansonic Viera does not have a high def resolution and does not have HDMI, which is utterly ridiculous, and it has the same name as an Arsenal footballer, which is enough to put anyone off

I haven't played with the HD variants, but in the standard stakes the brand new NEC is way ahead. Up until that turned up we rated the Yamaha above the Pioneer. The Pioneer is gorgeous to look at whereas the other screens are ... utilitarian (best word I could think of that wasn't nasty). We were doing side-by-side comparisons of the NEC and Pioneer using an Arcam DV29 via its HDMI output and the NEC wins hands down due to its superior colour, lack of solarisation and much better handling of action - and the NEC is a lot cheaper to boot!

Interestingly, Pioneer has just bought NEC's plasma wing, so NEC's technology may be making its way into the Pioneers, which seems to be a good thing.

Regards,
Frank.
All opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinion of any organisations I work for, except where this is stated explicitly.

Frank, which NEC model are you referring to?

BLT

It's only just come in and it's called a 42VM5.

Regards,
Frank.

Regards,
Frank.
All opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinion of any organisations I work for, except where this is stated explicitly.

Looks to be pretty well priced! I may take a look....

It's by far the best screen I have seen. Even up close there's virtually no solarisation or judder, admittedly with one of the best DVD players as a source, but still, the Pioneer missed a lot of detail and looked unnatural by comparison. Just make sure that it's the new model since the older one was actually only about as good as the Pioneer. At £2500 plus stand, it's very good value for money by comparison to other plasmas.

Regards,
Frank.
All opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinion of any organisations I work for, except where this is stated explicitly.

But for all I can see it is not HD. The resolution is only 853x480 which seems to be a really strange resolution as this won't be supported by any source. So you will have to either buy an external scaler or hope the built in one does the job.

What do you mean by 'solarisation'?

JR

I ended up buying the new model Hitachi today, which has just been released. HDMI input as well as 1024x1024 HD resolution and detachable speakers (and a nifty motorised swivel). It arrives tomorrow, so it will be interesting to see how it performs.

Ross

Jon

Solarisation is a banding of colour in what should be a single colour area. So you get a fake light source effect. Typically if you have a head shot of a person in the picture with a solid colour behind them (e.g a blue tent or an orange sky) then the solid colour area gets bands of slightly different colours 'radiating' from the person's shoulder or head. It's common in all plasmas, but to different degrees. HD displays can show much higher numbers of colours so should suffer less from this problem.

Alex, I've only been talking about standard plasmas, not HD.

Regards,
Frank.
All opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinion of any organisations I work for, except where this is stated explicitly.

I have just bought the Pioneer 505XDE with HDMI input..and it is simply the most breathtaking experience ever. The nearest thing to comptee is the Panasonic PW7 - but here you cant get it with HDMI until alter this year for some stoopid reason.

If you want future proof HiDef pictures form ALL sources ( the Pioneer upscales all video inputs) there is NO other choice in my humble opinion

Shop around on the net and you can get it for around £4k..the 43 inch costs around £2.5k. The older 504 model is jsut as good and can be ahd for around 3.5k.

DO NOT CONFUSE THE XDE MODEL WITH THE FDE MODEL - THE FDE IS RUBBISH FOR SOME REASON!!!!

regards and happy shopping!

Dil

What about smaller screen sizes than 42/43"? Quite a few manufacturers seem to do 37". Which is the best? And has HDMI?

Neil

37 inchers with HDMI? None at all yet..but you can get some excellent LCDs with DVI and use an HDMI adaptor which works just fine and is future proof. Over this comng year 37 inch plasmas with HDMI will be more abundant!!!

Sharp LC-37GD1E has no MDMI but has DVI (LCD)
Philips 37PF9986 has DVI (LCD)
Sharp LC7U4B has DVI

These are all High Definition HDCP Sky compatible.

Have fun!

Dil