The Official Panasonic G20/25 Owner's Discussion Thread [no price talk] - Page 101

hey man cartoon network worked
for me it really did! Knock on wood.

zoomed in so no icons

good deal. glad it worked. i want to say that with overtime the more you use to tv the less prone it will be to IR....supposedly

a question for you other g20 owners, did you receive the usb drive that is connectable to a keyboard with this tv? only reason i ask is because bbuy ended up giving my tv to the wrong house than ended up going back and getting it, so there was no box or anything

Please tell me your kidding. 1200 for a 50 inch 1080P plasma isn't a cheap set? Have you not looked at the market lately? Even other sets? The g20 is a clear cheaper set. Hence so many people are able to afford it.

If you are within your 30 days. You can return it regardless of your reason behind it. (Unless YOU broke it yourself)

oh my god so they took the tv to the wrong house and the person there accepted
it and watched your tv for a few days? Thats insane!

You must be doing something wrong. My SD performance is excellent. Images are clear and crisp. My colors pop and the image has a very three dimensional look to it on HD material. I see no grain and the blacks are excellent -- even if they rise over time they will still be deeper than most sets out there. I've seen no floating blacks and have heard absolutely no buzz.
Everyone who has seen the set has been amazed and ask "How did you get that picture?"

Then go to another forum!!!

pwaug please post all your settings. I would
love to try them

Hate having so many options.

No magic on my part. I've noticed that each review of the TV comes up with different settings they consider best so there must be some personal taste added to each.

For the time being I've settled on the Home Theater Mag settings for dark room viewing:
Picture mode: THX
Contrast: 49
Brightness: 60
Color: 54
Tint: -3
Sharpness: 10
Color temp: Warm2 (Calibrated in the service menu)(This ofcourse has not been calibrated on my G25)
Color mgmt.: Off
C.A.T.S.: Off
Video NR: Off
Blur reduction: Off
Aspect adjustments
Screen format: Full (HD) or as needed (SD)
HD Size: Size 2
Advanced Picture
Block NR: Off
Mosquito NR: Off
3:2 Pulldown: On
24p Direct in: 60Hz

My TV is in a room with allot of windows and no drapes as of yet so during the day I leave all other settings as above but use the CNET Contrast and Brightness settings--Contrast 62 Brightness 68

I can't account for the excellent SD upconversion I am seeing as I've done nothing special. SD material is clearly not as good as HD sources, but as I said it is crisp and clear and clearly better than on my old 27" CRT.
My 54G25 had a May 2010 build date.

i didnt want to turn this into a fanboy deal, i can understand that to many, just because something cost more/alot, they take that as in better...which is completely false. so im not going to call you a fanboy.

i have a question for you, how many HDTVs do you have? This makes my third, in the same house. People who can look at two different sets in their homes and call out differences certainly have more of an idea what their talking about, dont you think?

who said anything about floating blacks or buzzing?

"How did you get that picture?" so what your saying is they have another plasma equivalent to yours?

There is ZERO pop. like i said im not a fanboy of any company i want good picture, and unfortunately this doesnt have that. What good does a deep black do when all the other colors are so bland? It does have good blacks, but blacks arent everything. they may be the biggest piece to the puzzle but not the entire determining factor.


3d look, are you kidding me? im not even gonna touch that one.

and last but not least, which i will call complete BS on....even if the blacks rise they will deeper than most out there? Oh freakin please. yea deeper than that 400 50" from walmart maybe, they are not going to touch their own plasmas from 3 years ago, let alone the sammy's that are running around. That deepness after the rise is not even possible from the panny fanboys over at cnet, according to their numbers. remember its gonna rise three fold. and before that whole "all sets do this" if they did than panny wouldnt have gotten slammed the way they did, not to mention my panny 800u is still top notch. give me a break, we as consumers are paying money to these companies not the other way around. dont defend them because they did something good two years ago. call it like it is

as far as me doing something wrong, thats not possible. i have worked with these tv for too many years to mess up now. the things i look for in a tv are different from the average consumer.

and so that it could be known, and again to repeat. I do not care what company it comes from, or how good of a picture the tvs of the past had, i am concerned with now. completely objective. dont worry the sammys have their issues also.

Running Cowboy Bebop DVD's, hopefully the IR will go away. Bebop looks awesome.

We bought a G20 for my mom and I wouldn't consider it "cheap" by any means. There were two other Panasonic 50" plasmas right next to it that were slightly less expensive and a whole lot less expensive, respectively. Also at least one non-Panasonic plasma model that was cheaper in the same 50" size. Yes you can spend a lot more but nowadays the pricing of the G20/G25 is midrange at least. Heck I paid a lot less than that for a 50" Panny almost two years ago.

in case this was directed at my comment let me explain

i know a whole generation of people who are used to paying maybe 200-300 dollars for a sony tube tv. when these same people went into the store within the last 2-3 yrs and saw the prices for hdtvs, they couldnt believe it. (by these people i mean personally i know them)

i'll give you a quick example, i went over to my friends house after his uncle broke his tube tv and came home with some 47 inch lg lcd ( POS by the way) to set it up. I didnt say anything because i knew his situation. SD looked the worst i have every seen on anything, i mean it was really bad. He got the HD hooked up and good god man, it was so bad it made me angry for him. yet the only thing he could say it WOW look at how good that looks, he even went as far as to say that it looked better than the 800u panny i had at the time.

so thats not the only time i have helped people set up less than stellar tvs and how they are "AMAZED" by pq. There is a 720 sanyo lcd that comes to mind.....

just to clarify

I hear that man. My friends parents bought some sanyo 37 that they wall monted like 2 years ago. That thing is crap man. Hd looks like standard on my g20 at best.

Yet they think its good LOL. The wall mounting is the best part of that tv.

In any event no one can get pissed at neverthesheep as he solved the IR riddle LOL. Spongebob square pants. Sponge bob is the answer.

That's how anyone would be coming directly from a tube Tv to HD. Off course even the lowest quality HDTV will still look amazing to them compared to there tubes. Its still a jump into HD. Its the same like that for everyone here. My taste in TV now is much higher then it was a year ago. After owning PQ like my 8500. I can't go any lower then that. As I'd be to pissed about it lol

well I remember like 5 years ago or so when the LCD panels came out right after the CRT hdtvs people complained like crazy how the CRT hdtvs were better. The really bad thing was the geometry issues on the crt.

They discontinued those CRT hdtvs real fast too. I bought a 37 inch samsung HDTV CRT I think it was. Again nice and a better picture than the flat panel
lcds of the time. But they also were like 130 lbs LOL.

How does aging the pixels evenly for 35 hours or so from the start of the set change how they will look for the life of the TV?

If in fact it will look different if you burn the pixels for 35 hours evenly than if you use normal content to get the same amount of phosphor burned, wouldn't it make more sense to use normal content and then calibrate since what we watch is normal content and not solid colors?

edit: of course it would probably take many hundreds of hours of normal content to actually get all the pixels past that 35 hour mark the solid color images can do in about one hundred.

Here's my impressions after using my 50G25 for the first day (trying out HD DVD, 1080i digital cable, SD digital cable):

Black level - very good but not as much as you'd expect considering the "infinite black" marketing stuff. I can easily envision a TV with black level half the level of this TV.

Picture quality - Very good as well but still lots of room for improvement. THX mode is fairly accurate to my eyes and only needs a little tweaking. I won't bother doing much with it until after a few weeks of steady viewing have been accomplished. Sd upconversion was better than I thought it would be but still...you can't expect much from SD cable. 1080p HD DVD and 1080i dig. cable looked really clear and crisp. I did notice a lot more grain than I'm used to seeing and the image seems soft with Sharpness level around what most people use on here. I have no idea how people could tolerate a Sharpness level of 10 or less...it looks almost like Vaseline was rubbed over the screen. I'm using 30 and it seems decent.

Buzzing - I listened for it but never caught much of anything until I got really close to the TV, and even then only when really bright scenes were on the screen. Not anything I'd hear with regular watching at anything beyond an almost silent listening level.

All in all I was impressed but i expected a little more (not much, just a little). I'm coming from a 5-yr old 1080i CRT that produced an image that was comparable (a little less definition and slightly less black levels)...I guess I shouldn't expect the image to look that much better when it's being stretched out much bigger than a 36" 1080i CRT.

Had I paid full price I would have been more disappointed, but with it being $400 less I can tolerate a lot more

I have to say, the picture does look much better than my friends who all have 40-46" LCD TVs.

Stupid question, where would I find manufactured date of the television?

TIA

How/where do you check your manufacture date?

Its on a sticker attached to the back of the plasma.

I got my 54G25 today from 6ave and it has a May 2010 build date.

Still can't get the flash drive to recognize, I only have the break in slides on it which are JPEGs, could it be the flash drive itself? It's a Patriot X-Porter XT 800ST 8gig.

The IR is also taking longer than expected, running American Pie 2( I really need to buy some blu-rays) Ran 3 episodes of Cowboy Bebop, it's getting fainter I just thought it would be gone by now. I never gamed more than 2 hours straight so this is concerning me. I know I'm over reacting, because you have to be literally right next to the screen to see it and I only see it when running the scrolling bar.

Rename them to .jpg and it should work.

I downloaded these break in images, extracted directly to the SD card, and it worked no problem.

http://www.webapalooza.com/plasma/

You can check the date without opening the box. Just pull out the gray tab on the back of the box (it secures the stand) and shine a flashlight up in there.

It's a great set, but mines going back. The rising black issue has me spooked. I have an April set, but to me it's not worth the chance. No other TV in my price range does anything for me so I'll hold out for the 2011 panels.

Ok, I've ran probably 3 hours of DVD's/ Spider man 3 bluray from start to finish and the IR hasn't budged. Is there a specific dvd/bluray that would be better for getting rid of it? This is driving me nuts.

If the place that sold the TV will accept returns then of course it's fine to return it at your discretion. It just seems "off" to me somehow that so many people seem to be buying a display that looks great and works perfectly, then boxing it back up and returning it (at great expense to the vendor) because some Internet discussion has them worried that they might be able to detect a slight change in the black level at some point in the distant future.

X2 on that!!!

I agree with that sentiment...at first I was almost scared away from a Panasonic plasma but after reading a lot more about it I decided it wasn't much of an issue and purchased one anyway.

Reading through these forums is a blessing and a curse at the same time. You can learn about a lot of things but you also get lots of opinions from the most nitpicky, paranoid tech people around. Some people on here are never happy with anything and pick any piece of tech apart like it's garbage. Some points are valid and some highly exaggerated. All you can do is read a lot on the points that concern you and try out the products in person if possible.