Official Panasonic ST50 Series Discussion Thread [No Street Price Talk] - Page 218

I'm afraid you are stuck in what I call "maybe I should wait till tomorrow" syndrome. I was too... it is common with fields like electronics where the technology is moving so fast no matter what you buy something better is already on the drawing board and will hit the streets any day now. Now you can accept that's how things are or endless worry about it and never update and be stuck with whatever you currently have. Will plasma technology be surpassed by OLED? Maybe and maybe soon. That said something for sure will surpass OLED and something will surpass that and so on and so on.

I can only relate my own experience... I got a Netgear 3700 wireless router, which is one of their higher end consumer grade routers, about $180 street. It has 4 ethernet ports. I have WOW cable for both Internet access and tv, seperate cables come up through the basement, one off a splitter goes to the big tv in the family room, another cable plugs into the router in the den which is split off again to also feed another tv in same room.

Now I've heard lots of BS that ethernet is fast (well sort of) and it beats wireless hands down as far as throughput. My experience for what I'm doing, big yawn. My main PC in the den is connected to the router via ethernet. I also purchased a Qnap NAS which I'm in the process of moving all my multimedia files too...several TB's worth., so they are available on my home network regardless if the PC is on or not, since I'm keeping the router always on. The original "fun" part was coping files from my PC to the NAS. Because the PC is connected to the router with ethernet and the NAS to the router with ethernet I thought copying the files would be bing, bang, and done. No. In spite of all the claims Qnap made, actual real world data transfer using this method was painfully slow. Something on average between 30-40 MG a second. Which isn't really slow, but not as fast as I thought it would be so took many hours. That's a one time thing, so not a big deal.

Now how it works real world. I have loads of images in JPEG format, the same for music in MP3 format and also thousands of video files typically in MPEG-2 or MPG-4 format. What's more important isn't the format, but the bitrate which both determines how big a file they are and the viewing quality. Well using either my Panasonic ST50 tv through it's DLNA feature (using a media server) or another tv on the network or a cellphone or tablet these videos stream flawlessly so far no stutter or any playback issue all going wireless. I had originally planned on running a ethernet cable from my router in the den to the big screen tv in the family room thinking it would be needed, but now testing it real world don't really see the point. Oh, the bitrate of the vids is typicall 8-9 megabits a second which is good quality. So while the tv has ethernet and USB inputs it works perfectly well for my needs using wireless as do all the other devices I've tried.

What actually matters is the encoded resolution and bit depth of the FILE, not the device feeding it. What I use to do before getting my ST50 was play some quite old vids on CD's made in the 90's on my DVD player that up-converted to a higher resolution and my older plasma handled it pretty well. Now just for fun I tried the same thing, (not the CD, just streaming the source file via DLNA) and the new tv did a decent job up-converting. For sure not as good as DVD and obviously not HD, but considering, not bad.

Hmm... I'm beginning to wonder if there is some association with those experincing buzz/hum and running slides for hundreds of hours. Just maybe could be a self induced issue. As I said several times I'm no fan of "slides", nobody yet as offered even a shread of evidence WHY they use them other than follow the leader nonsense, but is hardly scientifically valid. The idea based on what I read here and elsewhere is the speed up the "break-in" or aging process in some effort to get the set "ready" for calibration BUT, that simply isn't valid. In fact I would speculate it MIGHT do more harm than good. Under normal operation no tv is going to display hundreds of hours of nothing but a screen full of one of the prime colors followed by another in some endless cycle. Forcing a tv to do that (specualtion) I would assume stresses the set most likely causing it to drawn more power (wild guess) which might in effect cause hair line cracking in one or more of the transformers or coils on the power supply board, thus oh no... buzzing. Now I can't prove any of this, but again I go back to my original premesis that using slides accomplises nothing other than wasting your time. Show me the beef. Somebody PROVE scientifically using slides does X. Interesting that I have not used slides, never would, and guess what, no hum or buzzing.