PRODUCT REVIEW: DECEMBER 1, 2007
Two Of A Kind: Panasonic TH-50PZ77U and
Samsung FP-T5084 Plasma HDTVs
Panasonic and Samsung are #1 and #2 in the plasma HDTV business. So it was logical to square off their two 50-inch 1080p offerings in a product review.
It wasn’t that long ago that plasma ruled the flat screen HDTV roost. But recent advances in LCD HDTV resolution and screen size, coupled with the inevitable price drops, have turned up the heat under the Big 5 plasma manufacturers — Panasonic, Samsung, LG, Pioneer, and Hitachi.
All were quick to respond by prototyping and then ramping up production of 1920x1080p plasma HDTVs in the 50-inch category. While Samsung and LG are also heavyweights in LCD, Panasonic, Pioneer, and Hitachi are heavily invested in PDPs for the near future.
I recently reviewed Pioneer’s PRO-110FD Kuro plasma HDTV and, despite a few quirks, found its image quality to be exceptional. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to seeing just how well Panasonic and Samsung had executed their latest 1080p PDP designs.
Figure 1. Panasonic’s TH-50PZ77U has decent styling.
Figure 2. Samsung’s piano-black finish on the FP-T5084 really shines.
OUT OF THE BOX
Both TVs are stylish and have the latest gloss black finish on their frames. Panasonic has opted for a fixed base with a matte black finish, while Samsung chose a swivel base that also incorporates the gloss black look. The FP-T5084 is slightly narrower (50.75”) than the TH-50PZ77U (52.5”) because the former’s speakers sit behind the frame, while the latter’s speakers adjoin the frame.
Panasonic provides a reasonable number of input connections. You’ll find three each composite and S-video jacks, with one set mounted on the lower right side of the frame, just above an SD card reader for viewing photos. There are also 2 rows of YPbPr component video jacks on the rear panel. Nearby, you’ll also find a pair of HDMI inputs.
All analog video inputs also have analog RCA jacks for stereo audio connections. The HDMI 1 input also has a pair of RCA audio jacks for use with older set-top boxes and media players that don’t support the HDMI digital audio interface, or products equipped with a DVI connection (PCs). If you want to use your AV receiver for multi-channel surround audio, there’s also a Toslink optical output.
Unlike other late model HDTVs I’ve tested recently, Panasonic has provided only 1 RF input. That means you’ll have to make a choice between getting your digital and analog signals via cable, or over the air. If you already have a cable box, then go with the terrestrial connection. Note that this set does not support CableCARD connections and will only receive unscrambled QAM channels.
Figure 3. Here’s the rear panel jack field on the TH-50PZ77U, which offers only two HDMI inputs.
Figure 4. Samsung’s FP-T5084 has more of the connectors you’ll want.
Samsung’s connector complement is more sensible, to my thinking. They’ve provided only two each composite and S-video jacks, with one set on the left side panel. There are also two component YPbPr video inputs on the rear of the set and a pair of HDMI jacks. That side panel has a third HDMI input, which is great for gaming enthusiasts.
The FP-T5084 also comes with a 15-pin VGA jacks for connection to a PC and it comes along with a 1/8” mini audio input. Digital audio output is available through a Toslink connector, and there’s also a stereo RCA jack pair for external amplification.
Two RF jacks are located on the rear panel and are labeled “Air” and “Cable”. This gives you the option of switching between both sources for analog and digital TV viewing, as I do at home. The FP-T5084 will demodulate unscrambled QAM channels, which in my area includes several major TV networks. There’s no CableCARD slot, however.
The internal audio amplifiers and speakers on each TV are adequate, with Panasonic’s rated at 10 watts per channel and Samsung’s at 15 watts per channel. For day-to-day TV viewing, you’ll be happy with each. But even a home theater in a box from Costco will improve audio playback considerably in a small room.
REMOTE AND MENUS
Both remote controls are essentially the same length, although Panasonic’s is bulkier. Samsung’s remote is almost identical in appearance to those used on its LCD HDTVs and Blu-ray players, with only slight changes to the button complement. I’ve never been a fan of small, densely clustered buttons on remote controls and that’s what you’ll find on the FP-T5084 remote.
To move between the two RF inputs and any active AV connections, there is a button labeled “Source” near the power button. Push it, and the FP-T5084 scans to the next active input. There’s no way to select an input directly, something that I always find irksome. Your other choice is to launch the menu and scroll into the Input Selection area.
Panasonic doesn’t provide direct input access, either. However, their “TV/Video” button brings up an OSD list of all inputs, active or not. You then scroll to the one you want to use. The buttons on this remote are also much larger and include two huge rocker switches for volume and channel selection, plus an oversized numeric keypad.
Figure 5. I preferred the larger buttons and layout on the Panasonic remote.
The menu navigation mousedisk on the Samsung remote is located near the bottom of the remote and is easy to use, but the Menu and Return buttons are too small and easy to confuse with nearby buttons. Panasonic’s mousedisk is located near the top of their remote, just below the large bar that activates the menu. Its Return and Exit keys are somewhat easier to find.
I was disappointed with the simple menu structure of the TH-50PZ77U. There’s not an awful lot you can adjust, once you get past the most common image settings. Panasonic has provided three factory presets (Standard, Vivid, and Cinema) as well as a Custom setting.
You can define any of these as the “Normal” setting for any of the inputs, too. There are three color temperature presets (Cool, Normal, and Warm), but no way to fine-tune those from the User menu — you’ll need to access the service menu to do it. You can also label each of the AV inputs.
A sub-menu gives you access to two levels of video noise reduction, an on/off selection for a 3D Y/C filter (not used in component or HDMI modes), a color matrix selection switch (HD/SD) that usually sets up automatically, and two digital noise reduction circuits for Block and Mosquito artifacts.
Figure 6. Samsung’s remote is very similar to its LCD HDTVs and DVD players.
You can also set the level of black to 0 or 7.5 IRE for analog video sources. One setting you may want to avoid is the ill-named “Color Management” menu. What it actually does is enhance shades of blue and green, not tweak primary and secondary colors for accuracy.
There are six different aspect ratio settings to choose from, including Full (anamorphic stretch), Just, H-Fill (expands 4:3 programs on an HD raster), 4:3, 16:9, and Zoom (for letterboxed SD video). The TV will select the correct default settings for SD and HD content, but you can opt for another presentation as you wish.
The image menu choices are rounded out with a 3:2 pulldown on/off selection and an HD Size menu, which either overscans an image or provides 1:1 pixel mapping for 1080i/p sources. The TH-50PZ77U menu advises you to use this circuit if “noise” is seen outside the active video frame, but what they’re referring to is vertical interval or digital data. Look also for two energy saving menu modes (no signal and no activity timers).
The FP-T5084 image adjustment menu is much more tweak-friendly, although most of the adjustments are accessible in Movie mode. Other presets include Dynamic and Standard. Samsung provides five different color temperature settings — Cool 1, Cool 2, Normal, Warm 1, and Warm 2, and you can fine-tune RGB gain and offset from the Movie menu.
Samsung has also proved several aspect ratio modes, including 16:9, 4:3, Wide 1, Wide 2, Zoom, and Just. The latter gives you 1:1 pixel mapping with 1080i and 1080p signals.
Need digital noise reduction? You’ll find three levels, plus off. There’s also a Film mode switch (on/off).
For more picture twiddling, there’s a seven-step Gamma control and a three-step Black Level control. The latter is misnamed, as it doesn’t actually lower black levels — it just changes how fast luminance values come out of black, which is also a function of the gamma settings. A Dynamic Contrast option does exactly that from scene to scene, but in low-lit scenes it has a tendency to wash out the picture.
The Color Space menu choice selects between SD and HD and usually toggles to the right one (601 or 709) automatically. One menu setting you may want to leave along is My Color Control, which lets you increase or decrease saturation of pink (flesh tones), green, blue, and white. Desist! Video programs and movies are coded to specific color spaces, and the colorist doing the transfer made specific decisions about color values to follow the director’s wishes, not yours.
Additional settings include HDMI black levels (0 or 7.5 IRE), xvYCC on/off (leave it off, there isn’t any content coded to that color space currently), Active Color (enhances greens and blues), and DNIe on/off. I would suggest leaving all of the “suit-your-taste” controls off at all times, once the HDTV is calibrated.
Samsung also has energy saving modes in their menu, plus four different ways to minimize the risk of image retention (the politically correct term for burn-in). The first is a pixel shifting mechanism that moves the image slightly over a defined time period, orbiting it around the screen. The next two steps activate a full white screen for clearing stuck images and a scrolling half-screen grayscale ramp. The last option sets the intensity of the side gray bars when 4:3 programming is shown.
I should add here that both the TH-50PZ77U and the FP-T5084 support 1080p/60 and 1080p/24 playback from HD DVD and Blu-ray. There’s nothing special you have to do in either menu, just connect your player, set the output accordingly, and away you go.
ON THE TEST BENCH
For my tests, I connected analog and digital signal sources through distribution amplifiers, using an Extron 12x8 RGB switcher for component video signals and Radiient’s new Repeat-6 1x6 HDMI distribution amplifier for set-top boxes, Blu-ray, and HDVD playback.
Panasonic: After calibration for best grayscale images, I measured full screen brightness at 59 nits on the TH-50PZ77U, operating in Custom mode. Small area full white brightness was 131 nits. The maximum color temperature shift across the screen was just 338 Kelvin, which is very good for a flat panel display.
Contrast measurements were impressive. Using Custom mode and my grayscale settings, I measured ANSI (average) contrast at 1134:1 and peak contrast at 1356:1. Those high numbers were largely due to average black levels of .08 nits, the second-lowest reading I’ve ever gotten from a plasma monitor. 50/50 black/white contrast measured 1192:1, while sequential (small area full white to no signal) clocked at 1854:1.
Figure 7. Here are the plotted gamma curves for the TH-50PZ77U.
Figure 8. The TH-50PZ77U tracks a clean grayscale from 20 to 100 IRE.
The TH-50PZ77U’s gamma performance wasn’t too impressive with factory settings, but cleaned right up after calibration using Cinema and Custom modes as seen in Figure 7. Just for laughs, I included the “broken tree branch” gamma curve plotted with the set running in Vivid mode. Pretty nasty, eh?
Figure 8 shows how well the TH-50PZ77U tracked a consistent color temperature. I had to enter the service menu to raise the overall measurement about 350 degrees, and was very pleased with the results. Measurements start to drift noticeably in Standard and Vivid modes, so for best results, use the Cinema preset with some tweaks, or calibrate everything in Custom mode and keep peak brightness (small area) between 100 and 120 nits. You’ll be happy you did.
The TH-50PZ77U needs some help to hit the BT709 HDTV color space, as seen in Figure 9. The problem is too much cyan mixed into the green channel, and a bit too much red. However, the blue, yellow, and magenta coordinates are close. Dialing back the red and adding yellow would tighten up the R, G, and C coordinates as well.
Figure 9. The TH-50PZ77U’s plotted color gamut shows a bit too much cyan in the mix.
Samsung: After grayscale calibration, I measured 55.6 nits with a full white screen with the set operating in Movie mode. Small area brightness measured 112 nits. (That number almost doubles in Dynamic mode.) The FP-T5084 also tracks a very tight grayscale, with a maximum shift of just 253 Kelvin across the screen.
This plasma produced the highest contrast numbers for any Samsung plasma that I’ve tested previously, with ANSI contrast registering 712:1 and peak contrast 770:1. Black levels were also very low at .122 nits on average — better than the best CRTs. A 50/50 test chart produced a reading of 731:1, while the sequential (small white area to no signal) reading measured 911:1.
Samsung’s gamma curves were much cleaner out of the gate than Panasonic, but white crush was evident above 130 nits. Using a combination of basic brightness/contrast, gamma, and black levels settings, I finally achieved the curve shown in Figure 10. The factory Standard and Movie curves, while usable, were closer to what I’d use for regular video and computer images. Best of all, the calibrated curve didn’t clip at any level.
Figure 10. Here are the gamma curves for Samsung’s FP-T5084.
Figure 11. It’s a bit more difficult to get a consistent grayscale track on the FP-T5084.
The FP-T5084 also tracks a pretty clean grayscale (Figure 11), although my calibration wasn’t quite as consistent as the factory Movie mode setting. Once again, super-bright images aren’t going to be as stable as Movie mode, so set up the contrast for a peak of 120 nits or so and adjust black levels according to the source material.
This plasma came a lot closer to matching the ideal BT709 color coordinates, with just a tad less cyan needed to clean up the green channel and a bit less red to pull that coordinate in. Figure 12 shows how the FP-T5084’s plotted gamut nicely overlaps BT709, so it’s mostly a function of adjusting luminance settings for each color channel to toe the line.
In terms of bandwidth, neither of the two plasma sets had a clear edge. The TH-50PZ77U had noticeable banding when displaying 1080p 18.5 MHz and 37.5 MHz luminance multiburst patterns, while the FP-T5084 had problems with the phase of the chroma signal at 37.5 MHz and banding with a 1080i luminance multiburst.
Figure 12. The color space plot for the FP-T5084 is very close to the BT709 standard.
VIDEO IMAGE QUALITY
Here’s where the rubber met the road. My firsts tests were of 1080i signal processing using the Realta HQV HD DVD test disk. Panasonic passed the two “jaggies” tests with flying colors, but failed the film resolution loss test with significant flickering seen in the corners of the test pattern. Oddly enough, the slow pan over Raymond James Stadium was smoother than expected with minimal jitter.
Using the red laser version of the HQV disk, I saw no big problems with deinterlacing and 3:2 cadence detection. In fact, this HDTV has one of the fastest 3:2 detection circuits I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, it couldn’t handle any of the other oddball cadences, including the 3-2-3-2-2 VariSpeed cadence often used to speed up movies when shown on TV.
Samsung didn’t fare as well. In fact, it failed the HD DVD “jaggies” and video resolution loss tests and had too many artifacts on the red laser DVD rotating bars and waving flags. The 3:2 Super Speedway sequence was picked up quickly and cleanly, but none of the rest of the Realta HQV cadences were corrected.
The good news is that the Film Resolution test on HD DVD was smooth as silk, as was the aforementioned stadium pan. The noise reduction circuit works very well and offers more options to clean up noisy analog signals than Panasonic does.
On to the test clips! Batman Begins was simply amazing to watch on the TH-50PZ77U, as flesh tones were dead on, shadow detail was excellent, and images were sharp and crisp. Earlier scenes from the Himalayas had the right cold, misty feeling with desaturated colors and lots of blues and grays.
Although the FP-T5084 gave a good accounting, it couldn’t produce quite the contrast snap and deep black levels of the Panasonic. Also, flesh tones appeared to have a slight magenta color cast. Pastel shades and muted colors were good, but the images just needed more contrast. Jiggering Samsung’s multi-step Black Level function helped a bit.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cleared showed the edge Panasonic had in getting flesh tones right, contrasting Johnny Depp’s pasty gray face with the warm skin tones of his guests. This sallow complexion had a magenta tint to it on the FP-T5084 that I couldn’t tune out. The crazy reds, greens, and yellows really popped on the TH-50PZ77U, while on the FT-P5084 they were just nice to look at.
The final test clips were from Ghost Rider. If you want to see some extremes of contrast, check out any of the scenes where the Rider is riding his chopper around against the dark evening sky. The whites, oranges, reds, and deep blues were heavily saturated with no clipping or crush on the Panasonic and not quite as contrasty and saturated on the Samsung.
Once again, that slight magenta color bias was evident on daytime scenes with Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes, particularly after he catches up with her on a highway after one of his death-defying motorcycle stunts. Overall, the images were crisp with plenty of detail, and in fact it appeared that camera focus was inconsistent during a series of back-and-forth cuts of Cage and Mendes in close-up. That’s what a good 1080p display will do for you…
CONCLUSIONS
Panasonic’s TH-50PZ77U is a very nice plasma HDTV, perhaps the best one they’ve ever produced. It has amazingly low black levels, great color saturation, and once calibrated, produces a nice gamma curve and grayscale. Unfortunately, it really lacks for calibration settings (even for the end user) that would make it easier to correct the locus of primary and secondary colors. (And a second RF input would be really nice, thank you very much!)
Samsung’s TP-T5084 wins the award for being the most calibrator-friendly. It has a more practical connector complement, plenty of user adjustments, and that second RF input for analog and digital reception. While the black levels are a big improvement over past models, they’re not quite as good as Panasonic’s, nor is this panel’s color saturation as impressive.
Power Consumption: In a six-hour test with a mix of HD and SD programming, the TH-50PZ77U consumed an average of 483.2 watts in Custom Mode, while the FP-T5084 consumed 217.6 watts on average while operating in Movie Mode.
