Gadgetory

hi i'm david katz myers senior editor at cnet and this is Panasonic's TCP 55 st60 is a 55 inch plasma TV it's right in the middle of Panasonic's 2013 lineup and I think it's going to be one of the best tvs of the year it's already got picture quality pretty much equivalent to Panasonic's best plasma last year the VT 50 that's superb picture quality's what I'm gonna be talking about a little bit but first let's take a look at the exterior this television around the edge is a little bit of metallic highlight Panasonic called it it's glass and metal design not too much though so it's not very ostentatious very understated television the thin bezel long the edge here and the thin profile reminds me of a little bit of an LED TV of course it's a little bit thicker and a little bit having intercourse it uses more power than an LED TV but again you do get that great picture quality of plasma below the panel is this glossy black stand it does have a nice low profile but doesn't have a swivel around back the selection of inputs pretty standard you got three HDMI there's also a pair of USB inputs I do like the SD card slot and rare edition that allows you to display those digital photos directly from your camera panasonic changed its smart TV sweet this year it's a little bit less simple a little bit busier but you do get that full customization I like that you can go in and add any of the apps that you want to you can even create new screens on the downside the navigation is a little bit slow and it is a little bit busy unfortunately when you turn on the TV at first you're going to be greeted with one of these screens instead of the actual TV picture you have to go dive into the menu to change that the TV also has banner ads that I'm really not a fan of but again you go to the menu and disable those too bad they're enabled by default though selection of apps is very good you get Amazon Instant along with Netflix and YouTube there's also a few extra apps that you're not really going to care about including this calendar app is also a note-taking app neither those sync with common cloud apps like Evernote or Google Calendar harvest so they're a lot less useful if those which you use to store your information on a smartphone speaking of phones and tablets this TV does have an app that goes with it allows you to get some rudimentary controls us in case you lose remote control you can use your phone or your tablet there's also ability to flip photos from the tablet or phone regular TV screen but it doesn't have more advanced functionality like screen mirroring found on some other TVs the TV also supports the full HD 3d standard which means if you want to buy extra glasses you won't have to pay the 80 bucks for these panels onyx we can actually get glasses from third-party manufacturers as cheap as twenty dollars from Samsung moving on to the picture that's really the best thing about the st60 there's plenty of controls to adjust in fact this year Panasonic added a color management system as well as 10-point gamma and grayscale I use those in the lab to really hone this TVs picture to again superb quality the real strength here is black levels as TV can produce a really deep inky shade of black this shadow detail is also extremely good with those controls color can be extremely accurate and we also appreciate this TVs ability reject ambient light it's got a nice dark coating on the screen so in a bright room it really does stand up really well that's one of the main differences between it and the step-down s60 series on the downside the 3d wasn't that great but who really cares about 3d picture quality anyway all told the Panasonic st60 is an affordable premium performing television I think it's going to be one of the best of 2013 I'm David Katz my Christina