Panasonic TC-P50GT30
The good: The Panasonic TC-PGT30 has excellent overall picture quality, with deep black levels, accurate color, and solid video processing. It can handle 1080p/24 sources and bright rooms well and exhibits the nearly perfect screen uniformity of plasma, as well as very good 3D picture quality. It includes a Wi-Fi dongle, its Internet suite is simple to use yet content-rich, and the styling is handsome with a 1.5-inch-deep panel.
The bad: Picture quality flaws include subtly fluctuating black and gray levels as well as inaccurate gamma that washes out shadows somewhat. The GT30 has fewer picture controls than the competition, doesn’t include 3D glasses, and uses significantly more power than LCD TVs.
The bottom line: Excellent all-around picture quality combined with improved features and styling should make the Panasonic TC-PGT30 TV a favorite among bigger-spending plasma seekers.
The GT30 represents the first major redesign of a Panasonic plasma in a couple of years, and is also the first to adopt the thin profile used by Samsung since 2009. We liked the clean, minimalist lines, rounded corners, and classy silver edge around the frame, and think the GT30 easily outstyles the step-down ST30 models.
The new panel measures 1.5 inches deep, but a speaker bulge along the bottom (you can’t detach the speaker) brings the true depth to 2.2 inches. That’s still slimmer than the ST30, with its 2.2-inch panel (2.8 inches with speaker), but doesn’t compete with the 1.5-inch bulge-free depth of the 2011 Samsungs.
The bezel around the screen was trimmed to 1.4 inches on all sides (there’s a shallow, set-back protrusion on the bottom for the speaker, however) compared with 1.8 inches on the ST30. Note that all of these dimensions might vary on the larger screen sizes in the series.
Panasonic’s menus and remotes are basically unchanged from 2010. The menu system looks and acts quite a bit less sophisticated than a Samsung or Sony menu, and we didn’t appreciate having to scroll through so many pages in the Picture menu. 3D Settings seems misplaced in the Setup menu, and onscreen support beyond basic explanations is nonexistent.
We like the remote more than Samsung’s thanks to the better button differentiation, but not quite as much as Sony’s slicker clicker. We missed having a dedicated Netflix button, and noticed that despite officially renaming its Internet suite for TVs Viera Connect, the button on the remote still says Viera Cast.
The main step-up feature of the GT30 compared with the ST30 is THX certification, which can be made use of via a preset picture mode available in both 2D and 3D modes. Unlike the step-up VT30, the GT lacks a 96Hz refresh rate, but in our test it delivered proper film cadence, on 1080p/24 sources, anyway. New for 2011 Panasonic has added dejudder processing to its plasmas.
Panasonic includes a Wi-Fi dongle with the GT30, occupying a USB slot but happily allowing you to use a wireless connection with this TV without paying an extra $80 or more for a dongle. On the downside, and unlike with the VT30, it doesn’t any include 3D glasses, although given Samsung’s recent move we wouldn’t be surprised if that changed soon.
In the meantime the new 2011 glasses are still quite expensive at $179 list per pair. Improvements over the 2010 glasses, model TY-EW3D10, include an on-off switch to make it easier to determine whether they’re powered up, a closed design, and significantly lighter weight. We wish they used Bluetooth sync like Samsung’s 2011 glasses. On the other hand we appreciate their prior-year backward compatibility: you can use Panasonic’s 2011 glasses with the 2010 TVs, and the 2010 glasses with the 2011 TVs.
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