TH-42PX80U and LN46A550 in my living room now

Hi folks,

I've been doing some TV shopping and I've found myself with 2 TV's in the living room at the moment. One's the Costco version of the Panasonic th42px80u, the other is a Samsung ln46a550. I've been comparing them and thought I'd write up some impressions; however, before I do that I thought I'd ask if anyone would like me to try anything in particular as far as setup, situations, etc. They'll both be here through the weekend and one is going back on Tuesday. I don't have much calibration equipment, unfortunately. I've got them both up and running with recommended settings from the respective owner's threads at the moment. If there are particular changes or setups that anyone would like to see, I'm happy to spend a few hours this weekend and do what I can.

I was planning on putting some photos in this initial post, but the few shots I took exaggerated the differences wildly; I decided not to post them in the interests of keeping the thread more civil. I'll try to get some shots this weekend which are more accurate; that may not be possible.

Here are my initial thoughts; I can spend some more time this weekend.

I've got them both hooked up to a TivoHD at the moment; this is my only HD source since I don't have a Blu-Ray player. I've got the Samsung connected via HDMI and the Panasonic via component. I'd rather have had them both use the same connection type, but it's not an option given what I've got to work with. FWIW, I tried the panasonic using both HDMI and component and couldn't tell a difference. I sit about 9 feet away from the 2 sets. For anyone who doesn't know the specs, the Panasonic is a 720p (1024x768) 42" set; the Samsung is a 1080p 46" set.

After some tweaking, you can get the two sets to look pretty similar in terms of overall brightness and color, though there are some caveats about brightness below. I'm sure a proper calibration could help more. Compared to the LCD, the plasma seems to have a slight greenish cast to it when there's any ambient light. You don't tend to notice this if you're just viewing the plasma by itself, but compared to the LCD you do see it. It seems that you ought to be able to get more accurate color on the Samsung; it doesn't seem to have too many weaknesses here and it's got more flexibility in the setup menus. In any case, while there are differences, I personally didn't think that color was a big reason to prefer one over the other; after tweaking they are more similar than not.

Here's an oddity regarding brightness. It's actually difficult to get the two sets to look equally bright on all scenes. Let's say I tweak backlight, brightness, etc. so the two sets look equally bright on outdoor scenes. The LCD will still look brighter if a very very bright scene appears, and oddly the plasma looks brighter if there is a mostly dark scene with a bright area. I suspect this is due to the way plasmas' maximum brightness varies with the scene, since it doesn't seem to be my eye playing tricks. But it makes it a bit difficult to compare the two.

While the plasma is capable of producing a deeper black, the settings I've got now seem to be crushing blacks a bit on the LCD. I haven't been able to tweak this out yet. This actually results in a deeper looking image on first glance. After a little while you realize that the loss of details makes the LCD image harder on the eye; I find myself straining to look at the image sometimes. What ends up happening is that scenes without true blacks look deeper and have more pop on the LCD, but this seems really bogus to me and I find it difficult after a while.

If you're sitting very, very close, the LCD looks smoother due to the difference in pixel structure and the lack of temporal dithering. In stores I noticed this and actually thought I had a strong preference for the "look" of LCD. At my normal seating distance, this isn't an issue anymore.

I think folks who say "you can't see the difference between 1080 and 720 at 8-9 feet" are overstating the case. In practice, you can tell, it's just not a big difference. The only time it's really noticeable to me is on computer-generated graphics like station logos, sports score boxes, etc. On program material, I don't find it to be much of a factor and certainly wouldn't consider it to be an advantage for either set. YMMV.

The mpeg compression artifacts are more visible on the Samsung. I need to look more closely at some video to see why. This could easily be explained just by the lower resolution and smaller size of the Panasonic.

The Samsung has a semi-matte screen, the Panasonic has whatever they call their latest anti-reflective screen. In my room, they both reflect about the same amount, but the Samsung's reflections are more diffuse and blurry while the Panasonic's are sharper and have that funny double-reflection thing going on. I don't prefer one over the other very much, but I don't have much lighting or direct sunlight where it would be a problem. In another setting, this could be a huge issue for someone. I probably should have tried an LCD with a glossy screen, given my setup.

The gloss black finish on most HDTVs these days really bugs me. I'd rather have my TV look good turned on than turned off, but whatever. I really like the cheapo matte-black finish on the Costco plasmas.

Viewing angles are a real issue for our room. We have a sofa running along the side wall, and there's just nothing the Samsung can do about that. All my comments above about the two sets looking similar go out the window. In fact, the more you tweak the Samsung to look good on-axis, the worse it looks off-axis. I think the off-axis performance is not so bad when you've got the LCD tweaked for a very bright situation, but if you've got it set up for moderate light, it really washes out. You don't have to move far to see it, either. If I move around so my head is even with the left edge of the screen, the black level on the right edge actually increases slightly.

The odd thing is that in side-by-side viewing, I often find myself more impressed with the LCD. I can definitely see why people come away with the impression that LCD produces a better image; it's much easier to make it look impressive. However, what seems more impressive about it also makes the image a bit harsher. The brightness isn't much of an advantage in my room, since I've only got two windows on the side of the room which don't get direct sunlight shining through.

In a dark room, the plasma really just looks a bit better in every way. The difference in black is pretty significant, although the Samsung isn't bad at all. In even moderate lighting though, the difference in black, while noticeable, isn't a big deal.

Overall, the plasma seems softer and more natural; the LCD sharper/harder, capable of being much brighter, and harsher. It seems like you have to do a lot of work to get the LCD to try to do what the plasma does more naturally. This has been pretty consistent no matter how I've tweaked the settings. In bright light, the differences between the sets could definitely work to the Samsung's advantage; it is certainly capable of being much brighter. All in all, the differences in moderate light aren't huge if you're sitting on-axis. I know I listed a bunch of differences in my notes above, but in real life these are not huge differences. Overall I think the plasma makes a better image in my room, but it's actually much more difficult to choose between them than you might think. I do most of my watching these days with some ambient light. If I watched mostly movies in a dark room, I think it would be more clear.

For my initial comments above, I set things up as follows (with occasional changes of backlighting, brightness, and so on, keeping most things the same). The PX80 settings are pretty close to these, from LarryinRI:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...6#post13666916

I can post exactly what I settled on when I get home. The a550 settings are clicq's:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...4#post14113954

I'll do some more tweaking to get each where I like it on its own; I'll see what happens during daytime and nighttime separately.

Sort of -- I've got the Tivo fixed to 1080i output right now because I wanted to eliminate that as a variable. I can change it to native output and see how the two TVs do. With Tivo outputting 1080i, I think the added resolution and sharpness on the LCD actually works against it. The off-axis viewing is also made even worse when viewing standard def on the LCD, since the blacks and colors are more washed-out to begin with.

I got the PX because it seemed like a screaming bargain at the time; I didn't think I'd miss the added resolution once I got it home and for the most part that's been true. I ended up with the Samsung as well since I got a good deal (which may have been a price mistake) which brought the total to not much more than the PX.

Good idea; I'll see what I've got on the xbox. I think Forza II runs at 60fps. Not sure what else I've got. Motion is a funny thing. I do notice more artifacts on the LCD; in particular there's an odd effect where someone's cheek seems to get left behind while their head moves. I notice this on SD channels more often; I'm not sure exactly what to call this one.

There's also a definite difference in input lag between the two. If I am using the Tivo menus you can see the highlight bar move on the plasma first and then it moves a split second later on the LCD. I saw on the owners' thread that the VGA input might have reduced lag, so perhaps I'll try running the xbox via VGA to the LCD and HDMI to the plasma. I know the lag on the Samsung is enough that playing DDR or Guitar Hero is a bad joke; I don't really notice it on Forza though.

If you've got any other specific tests you'd like me to try I'll do what I can over the weekend.

I guess there are a couple of ways to answer that.

The first is that I don't think it's too big a deal -- the visible differences between the two, at my seating distance, don't have too much to do with resolution. It's noticeable, but not a big issue. As far as black levels, for example, the PX80 already beats the LCD.

The other way to answer it is that I didn't set out to compare these two; I've been trying a few different sets and these just happened to be the ones which will be here at the same time for a little while. I thought it'd be an interesting comparison.

Thanks for the tip. I'll play with that; I'd already wondered if I could reduce the black crush using gamma.

This was an interesting experience. The Samsung went back on Tuesday.

I did some more watching with the reasonably accurate settings I started with, and I also tried watching each set alone for a while and tweaking to my preferences. My preferred settings for watching TV with moderate light were a bit brighter and somewhat cooler than the more accurate settings. I found that I adjusted both sets to more-or-less similar pictures, even when adjusting them one at a time.

Overall, the Panasonic just seemed a bit more natural looking in just about every way. While it had its flaws, it just seemed to do things a little better than the Samsung. I did find colors more accurate on the Samsung, but it's not like the Panasonic's colors were terrible. The Samsung just did colors better.

The Panasonic was really much better in dark scenes. It was much better able to do have simultaneous light and dark areas. This was a significant advantage. Even if I had the Panasonic in standard mode, compared to the very dim recomended settings for the Samsung, the Panasonic seemed to have deeper blacks and a richer picture.

However, the one place I felt the Panasonic was frustrating was on very bright scenes. If the source transitioned from a moderately-lit scene to a very bright one, the Panasonic would seem a little dim. It's sort of like listening to audio with a lot of (dynamic range) compression -- you can tell the musicians are playing harder, but the album stays at the same volume. This bugged me; it seemed like the plasma was sort of compressing brightness.

Still, I felt the Samsung had a perpetual haze which I could never adjust out. It only went away on bright scenes; in general I was stuck with less depth to the image.

I did try sending both sets a 480i signal and watching some standard def material. I didn't really notice a huge difference between them; they both looked like lousy standard def content. I mostly blame Comcast for my lack of information here; the most glaring problems were clearly due to video compression. I couldn't really get past that to give the two sets a fair shake on SD material.

Anyway, I don't think either set is perfect, and I actually really wanted to like the Samsung more than I did (bigger, lighter, all that). The differences aren't huge between the two, but if you're picky I don't really see how you'd prefer the Samsung unless you're a stickler for color accuracy above all else, or you have a bright and difficult room.

I did manage to get a few screenshots which I felt represented the things I saw; I'll put them in the next post. I think I managed to overexpose them enough that you can see the difference, but not so much that it's comical exaggeration.

OK,

Here's a baseline for a pretty dark, but not totally controlled room. This was late morning on a cloudy day with the blinds drawn. You can get some idea of the amount of overexposure from the Squeezebox display and the lights on the Tivo et al. Here's the room; the image looks more-or-less as the room looked (despite what looks like overexposure on the lights, go figure):



Here's a very overexposed version of the same conditions, with both TVs off:



And the same overexposure, now with the TVs on but receiving no signal. Note how little the Panasonic black changes:



And here's a version of the room with the two sets on, much less overexposed. This is roughly what it actually looked like:



Basically, the Panasonic screen looks a little green, but that's mostly due to ambient light; the Samsung had sort of bluish blacks.

The odd green cast to the Panasonic image. For some reason, this shot seemed to be an extreme example. In general, I wasn't bothered by it but some side-by-side shots really made it jump out (this was using the recommended settings based on Cinema on the Panasonic and the recommended settings on the Samsung):



The gamma and shadow detail issues are brought out here. Look in the dark areas in the left of the image. Also, neither set looked blurry in real life; that's just my camera not being able to cope with the bright spots and overexposing them. The Panasonic seems to hype up the near-blacks and the Samsung crushes them into oblivion.



OK, now these next two were taken at night (as you can see from Squeezebox):

Here's the sort of shot that really brings out one difference between the sets. The Panasonic is simultaneously doing deeper black and brighter white (again, blurriness means my camera was overexposing). In real life, the Samsung blacks were better than this, but the difference was pretty stark:



And the effect remains even with ambient light:



Anyway, screenshots don't really do justice to either set, and I wouldn't read much from any of these shots except what I said about them; I tweaked the camera to bring out exactly the aspects of the picture which I wanted to demonstrate, even if that meant making the image look washed out or wrong in other ways.

Thanks a lot, Chris. There's definitely something slightly more organic about the plasma's look. It's a bit difficult to capture that in the screenshots; I wish I could do better. The funny thing is that a month ago when I started looking around in stores, I felt that LCD had a smoother look which I preferred more. However, this never transferred out of the store and into my home...

Yes, I was in Cinema mode and warm color temp. when I had that particularly green screenshot. I think there's something about that particular scene also: it had a lot of dimly-lit areas which were in the part of the gamma curve that the Panasonic tended to hype up. That's where I noticed the greeny look the most.

Yeah, the blacks were a pretty clear difference with dark images. The screenshots aren't perfect (especially since most of us are probably looking at them on LCDs), but the difference was no less obvious to the eye. One thing which my camera didn't really have the dynamic range to capture was the Panasonic's ability to simultaneously do brighter whites and deeper black. It sort of comes out in those last two screenshots, but it was more dramatic in person.

Thanks a lot. Just to be sure, this was the ln550 I was comparing against. I think the 650 may have done better; I personally liked the glossy screen on the 650 a lot better than the semi-matte on the 550. The 650's glossy screen seemed to have deeper blacks and a richer image, but I only saw one in the store. I don't know how it would have done compared to the px80 in my living room.