Panasonic TX-P42GT60B review

IMAGE QUALITY

Picture quality on the GT60 was mostly excellent. Standard definition content suffers a little with low-quality Freeview channels, such as BBC News, but tweaking the noise reduction and resolution enhancement settings improves things.

HD footage looked fantastic. Since the GT60 is a plasma TV, its deep black levels were stunning and the depths of space in Star Trek were truly pitch black compared to our reference TV. We were pleased to see its deep black levels didn’t affect its overall contrast either, as we were able to pick out a very high level of detail in night scenes without anything getting lost in the darkness. Panasonic’s Brilliance Enhancer setting can help increase contrast, but we only noticed a change in picture quality when we set it to Max. Highlights were made more prominent, but it also made skin tones look unnaturally glossy, so we left it off while watching films. Instead, we found the regular Contrast setting was much more effective at increasing the level of detail in darker shots.

As is often the case with plasma TVs, colours tend to be more realistic than vibrant, but they still had plenty of depth and richness. It’s possible to tweak the picture quality with the TV’s Colour, Tint and Colour Temperature settings, but Vivid Colour made such a minimal difference that we turned it off for watching films.

The GT60 has a 3,000Hz panel so it coped very well with fast moving scenes. We only noticed a very small amount of judder in our Blu-Ray test footage, but we were able to smooth it out by increasing the 24p Smooth Film setting. This feature changes to Intelligent Frame Creation when you’re watching TV, but it essentially performs the same function. We found this wasn’t really necessary when watching TV, though, so we preferred to leave it off.

It’s 3D-ready, too, and comes with two pairs of active shutter 3D glasses. We saw no evidence of ghosting or crosstalk and the very small amount of judder we noticed while watching Avatar was easily smoothed out with the 24p Smooth Film setting. There were some noticeable shortcomings, though. The depth of field was a little shallow compared to higher-end TVs and glasses are noticeably darker than with passive 3D glasses we’ve tested as well. This means films will always seem slightly muted in 3D, but colours still looked rich and vibrant. It’s possible to raise the brightness using the regular picture settings, but increasing it too much made the screen appear very milky and had a negative impact on colour depth.

A minor disappointment is sound quality. Speech was clear, and the 10W subwoofer adds a small amount of bass, but for the best results we recommend using a dedicated speaker system or sound bar.

CONCLUSION

For many years plasma TVs ruled the roost, however LCD sets have come on leaps and bounds and these days there’s less to choose between the two technologies. The feature-packed LG 42LA690V has great image quality and provides more features for less money, making it a great alternative. However, if you want the best image quality without spending silly money, the TX-P42GT60B (or its bigger 50in sibling) is still the TV to buy.