Gadgetory

hi there I'm David Katz Mayer was seen it and with me is the Panasonic TCP 55 GT 50 this is a 55 inch plasma TV this is Panasonic's second best series of plasma TVs for 2012 series also comes in a 50 a 60 and a 65 inch size this review will apply to all of them as Panasonic's second best series this TV does include quite a bit of bells and whistles the principal one is thx video processing so if you put this thing in thx bright room or thx cinema mode or when you're in 3d thx 3d cinema you get a pretty good almost calibrated picture without having to mess with any of the picture control so that's the real benefit of this TV over the step-down st 50 series this tvs styling is also a little bit slicker than that one it's got a nice thin bezel around the screen here there's also a sort of chrome accent around the very edge so all told it's one of the nicer looking plasma TVs we've seen we're not big fans of the stand however it does have this sort of weird two-tone look to it of course hang this thing on the wall that's not a problem Panasonic glues plenty of inputs there's four HDMI around back in addition to a pc input and a component video input although you need to do breakout cables for that component input it's also a smart TV suite on this TV we do like the design of that Smart TV there is plenty of video services available as well including Netflix Vudu Amazon video on-demand so all told the content selection is very good there's also this Viera marketplace that Panasonic uses to get other apps and things and we do find the quality of those apps are a little bit better than some of the other competitors out there although there aren't that many of them the GT 50 does have plenty of ways to adjust the picture there's this custom mode that allows you to go in and play with the two-point grayscale as well as a couple gamma settings it doesn't have the 10-point at full color management system found on the step-up VT 50 however picture quality on the GT 50 was superb it's really one of the best-looking plasma TVs we've tested this year almost as good as the VT 50 but also at the same level of the ST 50 which is a little bit less expensive that does bring up an interesting question if you're in the market for a panasonic plasma TV whether you get the GT or the ST this one it's a little bit more expensive the only real benefit is that thx picture setting but when we went in and calibrated the picture of this TV we found we could actually get a better picture than thx using just the custom settings so all told we do recommend the St 50 for most people you do get the nice deep black levels this set as well as the accurate color there's also a very good ambient light rejection filter on the screen so if you have some bright lights in the room it's going to perform a lot better than a lot of the other plasmas out there of course compared to LCDs you also get the benefit of excellent off angle and screen uniformity performance so again excellent performer but just not quite as good a value as the S 250 we also took a look at the 3d performance so this said it is a 3d television panasonic does not including glasses however but 3d performance is pretty darn good as long as you leave it in the THX 3d cinema mode and turn it to 48 Hertz which actually eliminates some of the crosstalk we saw in some of the other picture settings all told though a very good 3d performer that's a quick look at Panasonic's TCP GT 50 series and I'm David Kessler