Panasonic TC-P50S1 Outstanding TV

My old projection HDTV died and I needed to replace it, so I started doing the research. I learned that plasmas have a better picture quality than LCD, and that Panasonic makes the best Plasma displays (now that Pioneer is not making them).

I liked this set because of it's 1080 moving lines of resolution, contrast ratio, refresh ratio and for the quality of the plasma display. I looked at this set at the stores, and to my surprise it looked dull and less sharp than the Samsungs it was hung next to. After tweaking the settings of the set (it had been set to the factory default). I saw it could be set bright, like the other sets. The Samsung also looked sharper, but after closely watching the sets for about an hour, I noticed the Panasonic had better depth of detail, while the Samsung only had edge detail which stood out. The Samsung increases contrast and sharpens the edges which at first looks good, but provides an unnatural looking image for normal viewing. In the end, the Panasonic provided more depth of detail and looked more natural to me.

I decided to buy this set, and it was no mistake. The picture quality is perfect, I don't have a complaint. The color setting looks a bit warm at the store, but this looks more natural in the ambient lighting in my living room. I suspect this may be intentional on the part of Panasonic in order to produce normal colors to our eyes in a typical home setting.

I've looked at lots of LCDs and LED TVs and watched TV at other homes with high end LCDs, and this set is better by far than the others.

One other factor is that I looked at the reviews for this set. Typically, when people buy a set that is defective, they write bad reviews for it. There are lots of good reviews and very few bad, so this implies to me that not a lot of these sets are defective out of the box. I've also owned lots of Panasonic products in the past which all have lasted well beyond my expected life for the product so I think this set will last me quite a long time (much longer than my 'other' name brand projection set which broke with a costly repair every 2 years).