Review: Panasonic TH-50PZ85OU Plasma HDTV

A Full Suite For Tweaks and Geeks

December 2008 By Grant Clauser

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TVs are not just for watching TV programs anymore, and Panasonic’s latest makes that very clear. The TH-50PZ850U is the top of the line among Panasonic’s new line. The company also offers a 58-inch version, and a slightly less expensive 800 series that lacks a key feature of the 850s.

Connecting TVs directly to the Internet is definitely a trend this year—a trend that actually began last year when Sony did a limited launch of the Internet Bravia product (see review on www.e-gear.com). Earlier this year TVs from Samsung and Sharp also hit the streets with Ethernet connections.

Panasonic calls its Internet feature Viera Cast. It offers news and weather feeds as well as the ability to browse videos on Youtube and photos on Picasa plus financial updates from Bloomburg. There will likely be more content options available as time goes by and Panasonic signs more distribution deals. Navigating the online offerings is not difficult with the remote, and Youtube videos look surprisingly decent on the big screen. A Viera Cast button on the remote takes you directly to those features. The TV includes an Ethernet port for connection to the Web rather than Wi-Fi, but if routing Ethernet to your TV is a problem, a powerline option will work well.

An SD card slot on the front allows you to view digital pictures, videos and play music files. I particularly like the ability to view high def home videos from the SD card slot. In this case I used a Panasonic HS100 camcorder.

The TV’s remote is decent, with plenty of room for the plethora of buttons, but it’s not back-lit—something I expect with a $3,000 TV. The remote can also be programmed to control other products, such as a cable box and DVD.

This model also includes Viera Link, which it confusingly also calls HDAVI Control and which used to be called EZ Sync but which is actually little more than HDMI:CEC—a feature that allows all HDMI-connected products to be controlled via the TV remote—with a Panasonic twist. Although HDMI:CEC is an industry-wide specification, interoperability between different brands is not guaranteed. For me it worked well when connecting a Panasonic home theater system to the TV.

On the picture side, the TV soars above most of the competition, both in feature offerings and in performance. There are four picture modes (vivid, standard, studio reference and game) plus a custom mode for making your own picture tweaks. If you’re not comfortable fine tuning the picture yourself, I suggest the studio reference mode, which will give you the most accurate picture for this TV without going through a full test-pattern routine. A further pro set of adjustments allows you to change parameters such as contour, gamma, black extension (detail in blacks) white balance in red and blue, and gain. A feature called CATS (Contrast Auto Tracking System) automatically adjusts brightness and gradation based contrast, but seemed to reduce black detail.