TV - Bumtious/AV-Forums og Panasonic 50VT50

12:54 AM

Guys, I have tried to ensure this makes sense and spelling and grammar is correct. This is a long post.

I had a 50”VT50 on loan for a few days. It’s a brand new out of the box production line set.

I ran it for 50 solid hours with out of the box settings on using THX normal preset just watching normal TV via Sky HD. During the “evaluation” I have just been watching Sky broadcast content and with the exception of the calibration to set the panel up properly, I have not run or been watching test patterns. I did not look at Blu Ray content or 3D. I’m not going to get technical, I’m not going to show measured results, because they don’t always translate to what you actually see. (The Panasonic 20 range was a classic example of this, They were the sets used on an ISF course that I was on with Mark, and although the CIE gamut charts were spot on, red was not correct and everyone there could see this it was orange, it was not until an external processor was used that things got nearer to correct, but that caused purple snakes!!!!) Last year’s sets quite frankly were a disaster too.

AND YES I’m comparing The VT50 to my personal and benchmark set, a KRP 600a, for me that was the whole point of this exercise and it’s what I do with every set or piece of equipment I’m potentially interested in purchasing to replace an existing component of my personal setup.

I want to try and make this clear, I don’t take what any reviews conclude from anywhere as gospel, I respect them all and take on board the opinion of the reviewer, but don’t always agree with their conclusions, neither should you. Nor should you take what I found as gospel either. I adopt the same view with anything else such as HIFI or cars.

With AV/HIFI, I always evaluate in my home with my setup. Its personal and I know how I prefer things to look and sound, and like anything you use for a long time you get to know it and get used to it. Sure listen to the opinions read owners experiences and views, read the reviews. It is then your personal choice how they wish to use the information. I would suggest armed with this information you go look for yourself and trust your own judgement.
NO ONE ELSE HAS YOUR EYES, EARS OR POCKETS (or your other half Big Grin

hopefully)

All I’m doing is sharing my personal opinion of my own evaluation.
I have certain boxes I want to tick. Above all, I want to engage with what I’m watching or listening to, in the case of a TV I can’t if I’m being distracted by performance issues. (I personally can’t engage with 3D as I quickly get agitated and fatigued, I choose not to watch 3D presentations even at the cinema).

I’m looking primarily for an accurate image as I know how it should look as I’ve been doing this since I was 9 (Learning how to set up CRT’s in the mid 70’s).
I require a set to have the ability to achieve good colour accuracy, good low black level and a stable image with no visible voltage capping, all sets are capped but sets that do this well are not noticeable, the last two ranges from Panasonic were a joke. I pick up easily on any sort of flickering or “wrong” colour. An experienced musician knows when something is out of tune. I’m the same with a TV.

Again let’s be clear, there is NO such thing as the PERFECT TV, certainly at domestic level, there never has been and I doubt there ever will be, grade 1 level professional monitors cost many thousands (23”Sony’s cost £20k plus) so your £2000 hokey cokey 2000 with 3D and smart TV along with baby changing facilities certainly is not going to perfect, let alone a £1000 or a £500 set. I would make the suggestion that some people’s expectations need to be more realistic.

(Day one) First thing on opening the well packaged VT50 is the build quality. Vastly superior to last year’s VT30, the silver trim was badly finished and the joins could be seen at did not meet up properly, not so here and I think its looks gorgeous.

Firing it up, it wakes up really quickly, and is again rapid going though the easy setup, switching into home mode and then into onto Sky, first thing I noticed is how green the image is, (normal preset) this is usual for a Panasonic set, look at them in showrooms compared to the others. Most others look blue, Panasonics push towards green (They are tuned for the Japanese market). Remember I have this next to a correctly set up benchmark KRP.

Next thing that stood out is the ability of the filter, ITS GOOD, really good. And the MLL level is very low enough for superb dark detail, it is NOT krp level but certainly 5090 level, and that is plenty good enough, especially with the right amount of light applied in the room. Done properly YES the black IS at a level where it blends with the bezel and looks stunning. Repeat, stunning. Now again the filter is not quite as effective in daylight as the KRP but is one of the best out there and next to an ST and GT in a showroom you can see what a positive advantage it gives the VT over these other sets in the range. A good filter will prevent the image washing out in brighter ambient light. Panasonic sets when they had glass on them used to be appalling with this. Not the VT50.

Putting the set into THX mode, to my eye it looks wrong, far too green (it’s fixable) and I will talk about this later, so I put it into pro1, with default settings. It is obvious this preset luminance is too low and seems to be uneccesarily tuned to work in a particular way, sadly it makes makes the image look flat, so I put into normal mode. Now in normal mode the image gains a decent amount of luminance though colour is wrong, far too much blue and green. It does look kind of OK, sort of safe, but for me irritatingly wrong. And in normal mode the image has much more noise in the image, a mixture of dithering and PWM noise and IS worse than my KRP. All other modes (except dynamic) are cleaner. There IS more dithering in this year’s sets but NOTHING to worry about and nothing that should not be considered normal. Dithering is being applied to create better colour gradation and reduction in false contouring. For the short run in period, I settled on the normal THX preset.

I Watched the set all night, caught up with 4 episodes of Fringe AND FINALLY, Panasonic seem to have cracked it, a rock solid stable panel. No floating blacks, no jumping contrast, no gamma shifts, just rock solid and Panasonic are to applauded for this because NO other domestic set since the pioneers have been able to achieve this level of image stability and integrity, when I made any adjustments to contrast and brightness they were smooth and showed no sharp jumps or drops. (I definitely agree, reference level). Repeat, no other brand of sets currently on the market achieves this performance. Last sets to achieve this was 8G and 9G Kuro, and this is what I have meant in other posts when referring to picture integrity critical to good distraction free viewing. The ST, and GT are almost as stable however when I have tested these with a greyscale bar pattern these sets still show some colour tinting in some of the bars. The VT does not.

The only things that did raise their heads that was distracting was flickering and false contouring. Panasonic sets have always suffered from this as it’s simply the way the panel is driven; however, it is not a problem for everyone. It has been dramatically reduce this year and bothered me less and less as the set ran in, and was worse with the normal preset. Finally retention, I fell asleep on my sofa around 2am watching Comedy Central HD, when I woke up at 5am and turned over the logo was there in all its glory. It did disappear just watching normal TV after a day and I expect this to be a non issue once the set has hours on it. This happened with a GT50 in the store that lent me the set and that set after watching BBC news but that set now does not suffer with any retention.

The set in my moderately lit living room during the day in THX mode is bright enough but colour does not seem to be tracking consistently. The effect is that sometimes skin tones look awesome, other times people look jaundice and oversaturated. Trying pro1 is the same it’s far too dim. Pro1 at night is ok, but your room has to be lit with care to ensure the luminance is enough. I have 2 of the Ikea tall floor standing Chinese style paper lamps either side of my set up. (Usually I use just 1 of them).

(Second day, 50 hours use). Time to calibrate and see how it looks against the KRP.

Measurements taken using a Quatum data 780 signal generator, Klien K10 and Calman Pro V4.

Using the THX out of the box preset, the measurements against the target were ok but the image looked too green and just wrong. Gamma at 2.2 gave reading of 2.0, 2.4 was almost spot on, just a little low at 30 and 70IRE points. I measured my KRP, and all ok so the measuring kit was functioning correctly, I calibrated pro1 on the VT.

Panasonic has certainly fixed the mess that was the VT30. The set seemed responsive, changing the values seemed to do what they are supposed to do. They still interact with other values but nothing that could not be sorted, just a bit annoying, but no cms within domestic Tv’s are perfect as the chips used are cheap $2 or so (see later).

Once done, greyscale looked spot on and a check with grey bars confirmed this and was identical to the KRP with no signs of colour tinting contamination. Gamma was near enough and gamut was hitting all the right points. (Bear in mind this set will be a demo set for the retailer that kindly lent it to me, and I will be calibrated properly once settled in their showroom).
So back with Sky, sometimes the set looked really good, other times colour looked wrong, green and flat.

I Used normal viewing content to test calibration, I used HD versions of Coronation Street, the last episode of Fringe, Dexter, Hawaii 5-0, Kung Fu Panda2, Champions league final, Waterloo Road, last week’s Graham Norton, The Chase (ITV quiz show 5.15PM), 2 and a Half Men, Friends, along with SD versions of the same shows, as well as Sky News HD, Sky Sports News HD. There is also no complaint from me with the way the set handles SD. However, if your settings are too aggressive then it can become noisy. Sometimes skin tones looked stunning, but not consistently enough and that has always been a problem for me with Panasonic TV’s, on too many occasions as mentioned earlier there is too much green. Skin tones looked correct at some of the time but looked jaundice and oversaturated at others.

I was also very aware of false contouring especially in dark scenes and seem to be a mixture of the 50Hz bug and looking worse because of the excessive green push as purple and green are the colours that stand out with false contouring if skin tone is wrong. There is also some non defeat able sharpening of static images going on, if you watch some football, as the camera moves around then stops then starts again you can see this engaging and disengaging on the crowd and looks like a quick flicker. I also noticed these occasional vertical lines when watching football but is far less obtrusive than Pioneers infamous dirty screen which never bothered me as that is a small price to pay for everything else that the Pioneer does well. Again I looked at the content on the KRP and it all looked awesome and correct, with little false contouring.

Yesterday, 11:20 PM

So first I set about trying to fix the colour tracking, and what I was seeing seemed to point to gamma and colour not tracking properly.
The following “quoted” text advice is taken from the Gamut measurement section of Calman4.

“Getting good results from Color Management System (CMS) calibration requires understanding the goals. Without knowing which variables are the most important to optimize, it is all too easy to perform a calibration which produces good looking charts and terrible looking pictures.

For primary colors, the absolute luminance is of critical importance. (Much more important than the precise location of the primary on the CIE gamut chart.) Delta L of all primary colors should be reduced below 3, and the absolute luminance of the primary colors should match one another as closely as possible. Particularly avoid the situation where one primary is far brighter than the others.

For secondary colors, hue is critical. Your first goal in calibrating secondaries is to reduce Delta H to the minimum possible.

Then work with the CIE chart to get the primaries and secondaries as close as you can, without ever sacrificing the two main goals above".

Now as I’ve hinted, I own a Lumagen Mini processor, this has advanced deinterlacing and scaling capabilities as well as extensive colour management, with differing selectable greyscale parameter adjustment up to 21 points and advanced gamma controls along with a raft of other controls to fine tune the image. The chips used in these products are over $100 just for cms. This is only handling processing and colour management yet costs more than a 50” GT50, (just to put it into prospective)

I wanted to see if I could fix this colour issue without the processor and I can confirm the controls on the set can unlike previous ranges which could not.
With much experimenting with the gamut, manipulating the red, green, cyan and yellow points using saturation, hue and luminance controls skin tones can be made to look more natural and not jaundice looking. It’s very hard to explain but when its right, its right and conversations with another experienced calibrator confirmed he was having trouble fixing this also. The charts don’t always tell the full story. Fixing this almost totally eradicated false contouring being a distraction In fact it was on par with the KRP. (You will never clear it with plasma)

Having got colour right, what could be done to get extra luminance out of the panel. Compared to the KRP, the image was still dull, it’s fine at night with the right sort of lighting in the room, during the day in even the slightest amount of day light the panel is just not bright enough.

This is going to be hard to explain but here goes. If you use a white windowed pattern, you fill around 25% of the screen, taking a measurement at 100ire in each of the presets I got the following readings:

Pro1 95, Game 101, THX Day 170, THX Cinema 105, Cinema 101, Normal 162, Dynamic 202. (cd/m2)

Then using a full white raster I got the following:

Pro1 69, Game 70, THX day 71, THX cinema 69, Cinema 69, Normal 71, Dynamic 71. All the readings from all presets are basically the same.

You can easily test this, freeze an advert with a bright white background and change presets, brightness does not budge.

Freeze a dimly lit scene, change presets and see what happens, easy to see the differing brightness levels. Now this is about dynamic range, you can almost describe it like differing gear ratios with a car and it’s acceleration response. Using that analogy with the pro1 preset 1st second and third gears acceleration/torq are set too low, its sluggish to respond to get to decent cruising speed.

It is just acceptable in a dimly lit room but during the day even in a fairly dark room, the light output is too low, especially compared to the KRP. You can’t fix the other presets, advanced CMS and gamma is not available. It was possible to manipulate the CMS to give extra luminance, but you have to balance it carefully and consistently across all the colour points but there is only so far you can go.

This is where I introduced the processor. Placing the set into 1080p direct, keeping all the settings on the VT I adjusting the white level (correct name for contrast) this TOTALLY dealt with and basically looking at the KRP and the VT I saw the same image. Both looked AWESOME. In fact at times it was better than the KRP and I have to say it seemed to have the warmth and dynamics of a good CRT.

Forgetting the processor for a moment, The VT set up correctly and used in isolation is quite simply the best domestic set Panasonic has ever produced and YES in my honest opinion it is a match and maybe even betters 9GLX Kuro. There are pros and cons and I will give my opinions shortly.

I have spent hours working on 9G Kuro’s. Looking at the 50”VT50 I had I can safely say the MLL levels (with the hour meter at 65 hours) betters 9GLX. I don’t need to see that side by side, I’m confident of that. The VT will not go as bright using the preset that matters, pro1 but everything else that really matters to giving a great image is present.

MLL is better on the KRP but not by much and as I will never recommend watching a TV in a completely blacked out room, (unless watching 3D, then IMHO it’s the only way to watch 3D) using my Ikea lamp MLL on both looked identical. That is dark enough to provide outstanding proper black levels that no other brands TV’s currently on the market in the UK (other than Panasonics own GT50 and ST50), can provide.

Using the processor with the VT you have the ability to raise luminance tracking to the same level as the KRP. You then have an undoubted equal in terms of critical picture performance criteria. You can also calibrate the other presets as well as the pro1/2 presets as you would use the processor to do the calibration and would be even more accurate.

Some Pro’s and cons VT50 vs 9GLX.
Pro’s
Sleek design
Smart TV capability
3D
Freeview HD
Freesat HD
Less dithering with bright colours so looks cleaner

Con’s
Harder to calibrate correctly
More dithering in darker scenes
Brightness levels
Flicker (if you are prone to it)
False contouring
50Hz bug
Non defeatable static image edge enhancement.

Equal
MLL level
Colour accuracy when set up correctly
Image stability and integrity

KRP vs VT50. The differences are the same apart from MLL and the filters ability to reject ambient light. The KRP is better. But it is close and if you do not have the sets side by side the performance of the VT is outstanding and from what I have seen so far, nothing gets close to the VT.

I could list more but you get the idea, it’s up to you to look at the differences and decide.

For me all I can say is “it’s about time”. As a standalone product my advice to 9GLX and KRP owners is that quite frankly the VT with all that it has to offer is a set worthy of consideration if you want to change to a set with more facilities as the important aspect of picture quality with 2D is now taken care of. For the areas of performance that I know set the Pioneers apart against Panasonic sets I would suggest that you ask yourself the following “can live with it” questions.

Look closely at is the light output from the VT in the only modes that can bet set up correctly for colour accuracy, pro modes. False contouring is more pronounced against the Kuro’s but can be controlled with correct set up. 50hz issue. And flickering, only you can decide on this one and it seemed to lesson as the hours racked up, maybe I just got used to it, but different presets were worse than others with Normal being the worse.

Using the Lumagen the above issues to fix can be made almost non issues. It cleans up 50Hz motion but does not completely eradicate it, but it became acceptable to my eye. False contouring with correct colour tracking was only distracting if I went close up to the set and the light output became a total non issue. It makes a superb VT absolutely awesome. You can even manipulate the edge enhancement to be a non issue as you have controls for horizontal, vertical and diagonal sharpness and texture.

To sum up, it’s a great TV, there are pros and cons, go look for yourself. The risk for me is how will the set change as the hours rack up, every year the past 5 years the aging management process has been all wrong and performance rapidly drops off after 500 or 1000 or 2000 hours. Hopefully that has been sorted.

The VT’s performance on its own is superb, with the Lumagen, which I already own, it’s awesome AND the fact that I will be soon moving in with my new girlfriend I need a smaller set (55”). As wonderful and understanding as she is my 600a is too big for the room. With the Lumagen I would actually say the VT equals the KRP in quite a few areas and surpasses it in others TO MY EYES.

The Lumagen will add £1300 plus and needs setting up properly on top of that. So is likely to make a 50”VT50 cost around £3400 (still £100 less than a LX508 was by the way). But with the Lumagen it truly is a reference performer
.
I have a 55VT50 waiting for me and my beloved KRP600a is available as of now in the classified section Love

. So will my 4280 as need a smaller set in the bedroom.