To be honest, after the absorbing so much HDTV information in an effort to purchase my first flat panel HDTV, this review was somewhat validating. Until you get into the particulars where CNET tends to pick at things that I probably would never notice, the review was quite positive in summary. My PX80 arrived this morning and this review makes me even more excited to fire it up. Even the review says at this price point, the Panny's are very tough to beat.
I do agree that CNET should be testing these in real world conditions, not optimum conditions which most people won't ever achieve in their living rooms.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
tsanga 
I've totally lost faith in CNET reviews in the last year, whether it's phones, TVs or speakers. Often you'll see this reflected in huge discrepancies between user ratings (with large enough sample size) and their in-house rating.
I don't know why they insist on testing TV's in custom mode when the best measured gamma is often cinema mode, not to mention that changes the behavior of the color decoder (see PZ80/85 thread). Then they go and complain about the gamma on the TV.
As with noise, I'll repeat what was said in the PZ80/85 thread. Why do you need noise reduction if you feed it a good clean digital source with little noise to begin with? And since custom tends to be on the noisy side (as with standard), how can you evaluate a TV's noise reduction setting on its ability to remove noise that it put there in the first place?
And they continue to make big statements about black level without actually publishing any numbers whatsoever.
I'm not feeling defensive about the fact that this is an entry level TV - you get a bit of what you pay for. But I hate that the most visited website for reviews is publishing such unscientific crap.
[/rant over]
