Panasonic Viera TH-P65S20Z

If you’re looking for a truly big picture to deliver your summer of sport, you should take a look at this giant 65-inch plasma from Panasonic. Yes, it weighs a furniture-crushing 75 kilograms, and unlike a projector it’s still a massive presence even when it’s turned off, but plasma has reached a stage of development where it delivers an awfully good picture for your money. Of course, at $5,499 it’s not cheap but you’ll pay a lot more for one of the new breed of 3D TVs.

To look at, the P65 is nothing unusual. It persists with the piano-black screen bezel we’ve become used to, but which I still dislike for the reflections it creates. It has a good, sturdy base to sit on but which offers no swivel adjustment. Many people will no doubt opt for wall-mounting but they’ll need to be sure to reinforce that wall framing first. On the front face there is just the single on/off button at the base of the screen, all other control buttons are hidden on the left side behind the bezel. Here you’ll find TV/AV and channel and volume select along with inputs for HDMI, composite A/V, USB and headphones. There’s also an SD card slot here, and the P65 is all geared up with a separate menu called Viera Image Viewer to play back photos, video or music stored on an SD card.

On the rear of the panel you’ll find a further two HDMI inputs, component video, 2x composite A/V and a composite A/V out.

The remote is not backlit but is reasonably compact and user-friendly. You shouldn’t have to refer to the manual to decipher cryptic icons.

Being one of the new breed of digital TVs, the P65 has a built in Freeview HD tuner and does a swift and effective job of automatically tuning in all the relevant channels. If you’re not a MySky customer and don’t own any other PVRs, the P65 also offers the rather terrific feature of being able to pause live TV through its Viera Tools menu. I use live pause every day when watching TV so this is a major plus in my book.

Performance

To put the P65 through its paces we hooked it up to both a Playstation 3 and an Xbox 360 via HDMI.

On the good news front, this plasma proved to be more than up to the task of handling fast-paced gaming action. Many plasmas can’t keep up and deliver a laggy image that falls behind what you’re doing with your game controller. The P65 can probably thank its 600Hz sub field drive for this admirable performance. Essentially, for every frame of a 60Hz signal the P65 flashes or excites the gas pixels in the screen 10 times. This means that the transition to the next frame is almost instantaneous, in the order of about 2 milliseconds.

When it comes to the likes of Blu-ray movie images the P65 displays amazing amounts of detail and a really immersive picture that you can sit reasonably close to thanks to the full HD resolution. Not too close, mind, or you’ll be looking at film grain and even individual pixels.

On the downside, I found the panel to be a little dim. In the preset Cinema modes the image was just too dark to see clearly, and even the Normal mode was only just bright enough. I usually go nowhere near the Dynamic image mode but I found myself using it with this screen. Unfortunately, there is a limited amount of tweaking you can do with this panel in the settings thanks to just the bog-standard Contrast, Brightness, Colour, Sharpness and Tint being on offer. Colour temperature is limited to Cool, Normal or Warm.

That overall dimness aside, the P65 suffers no other significant image problems. Colours are accurate and saturated with good skin tones. I saw no artefacts that really bothered me other than a slight bit of ringing at the edge of moving objects against dark backgrounds.

I’m going to assume that anyone who buys this TV is going to have a surround sound setup but audio from the P65 is pretty good and has a convincing virtual surround mode.

If you’re looking for a TV that makes a statement, this is it. At the PC World office it drew longing stares all day long. Some staff even considered a little after hours overtime just to get their hands on a game controller and get in front of that screen.