Hitachi P50H401 50-inch Plasma

Hitachi P50H401 50-inch Plasma HDTV review: Plasma Shopping Shouldn’t be A Math Problem

July 2007 By Grant Clauser

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The picture menu offers mostly just the basic options, making this a good choice for a buyer who doesn’t want to spend time tweaking settings, but not as suitable for advanced home theater buffs. The menu itself is a bit slow to respond to the remote, but adjusting the individual settings such as contrast and color temperature works fine. After calibrating with a SpiderTV I found the standard color temperature dialed the TV in quite nicely and a few more tweaks put it spot on. It includes a few advanced picture settings such as black enhancement, MPEG noise reduction and day/night settings.

On broadcast HDTV the Hitachi looked great. When watching The View I could discern stray hairs on Whoopi Goldberg’s dreds and the dark roots on Elizabeth Hasselback’s blond ‘do. This TV does a particularly good job creating intense colors. Blu-ray movies, played through a Samsung player also looked fantastic. Would a TV with the full 1080p resolution show you more? That depends on a lot of factors.

Hitachi offers an interesting proposition in this TV. The pixel resolution puts it between the typical and the top panels, but offers it at a more competitive price coming from a major manufacturer—and that last point is worth repeating. Hitachi is a plasma manufacturer, not a company that buys its panels from elsewhere and puts a name on it.

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