Panasonic TX-P42GT60B review

For this review we tested the 42in model in the GT60 range (TX-P42GT60B), but it’s also available in a 50in (TX-P50GT60B) screen size. All models have identical specifications except for their dimensions and power usage. We’re confident that image quality will be practically identical across the range.

The TX-P42GT60B is one of Panasonic’s mid-range plasma TV sets, but it certainly makes an impression when you first set it up. Its slim bezel isn’t that much thicker than some of the high-end LCD TVs, and its brushed aluminium stand and silver finish makes it look just as smart.

The first thing you see when you turn on the TV is the Home screen. A live feed from your selected source takes up most of the screen with TV listings running down the side, but there are also smaller windows dedicated to Panasonic’s smart TV content, a photo gallery and a media player. Two other Home screens are also available with a different selection of apps, widgets and bookmarks, but all three can be customised to your liking. If you want to fit in more apps and shortcuts to your favourite channels, though, then you can always create your own Home screen using one of four different layouts.

Alternatively, you can bypass the Home screen altogether and jump straight into full screen mode. However, we found this caused an irritating pop-up ad to appear every time we turned on the TV. Luckily we were able to disable it by turning off the Viera Connect Banner in the Display settings in the Setup menu.

A SMARTER TV

There’s a good range of smart TV content to choose from in Panasonic’s Viera Connect menu, including Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and YouTube. Facebook and Twitter are also present along with Skype, but you’ll have to buy a webcam to take full advantage of it. It’s still not quite as extensive as other smart TV content you’ll see on other 2013 TVs, but you can download additional apps from Panasonic’s own app store, the Viera Connect Market, to help bolster the ranks. Most of them are free, but some require a small fee.

The GT60 comes with a Smart Pen, which lets you turn your TV into a giant digital canvas. It’s a novel idea, but while the drawing apps and touchscreen games might be mildly entertaining for young children, we doubt you’ll want to use it to poke and prod a £1,000 TV.

The smart pen gives your younglings an excuse to jab at the TV for once

Inputs are located on the back of the. We were still a little disappointed to only find three HDMI inputs rather than four (one supports ARC, so you can send sound back to amplifier), but it also has component and composite video inputs, a Common Interface card slot, digital optical audio, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and aerial and satellite connections. You’ll have to use an adaptor for SCART, though. The TX-P42GT60B also has integrated Wi-Fi and an Ethernet port for connecting the TV to your home network.

If you want to take advantage of the TV’s integrated photo gallery and media player, there’s also an SDXC card slot, two USB ports and one USB3 port. Its file format support is quite selective, though. We could play most of our video files, including H.264, MKV, MPEG4, WMVHD and XVID HD formats, but it couldn’t detect MOV clips. It also only recognised JPG images and MP3, FLAC, M4A and WMA audio files. The media player can also play recorded TV files from your flash drive, but you’ll need to make sure it has at least 160GB capacity, as smaller external hard disks won’t work.

IMAGE QUALITY

Picture quality on the GT60 was mostly excellent. Standard definition content suffers a little with low-quality Freeview channels, such as BBC News, but tweaking the noise reduction and resolution enhancement settings improves things.

HD footage looked fantastic. Since the GT60 is a plasma TV, its deep black levels were stunning and the depths of space in Star Trek were truly pitch black compared to our reference TV. We were pleased to see its deep black levels didn’t affect its overall contrast either, as we were able to pick out a very high level of detail in night scenes without anything getting lost in the darkness. Panasonic’s Brilliance Enhancer setting can help increase contrast, but we only noticed a change in picture quality when we set it to Max. Highlights were made more prominent, but it also made skin tones look unnaturally glossy, so we left it off while watching films. Instead, we found the regular Contrast setting was much more effective at increasing the level of detail in darker shots.

As is often the case with plasma TVs, colours tend to be more realistic than vibrant, but they still had plenty of depth and richness. It’s possible to tweak the picture quality with the TV’s Colour, Tint and Colour Temperature settings, but Vivid Colour made such a minimal difference that we turned it off for watching films.

The GT60 has a 3,000Hz panel so it coped very well with fast moving scenes. We only noticed a very small amount of judder in our Blu-Ray test footage, but we were able to smooth it out by increasing the 24p Smooth Film setting. This feature changes to Intelligent Frame Creation when you’re watching TV, but it essentially performs the same function. We found this wasn’t really necessary when watching TV, though, so we preferred to leave it off.

It’s 3D-ready, too, and comes with two pairs of active shutter 3D glasses. We saw no evidence of ghosting or crosstalk and the very small amount of judder we noticed while watching Avatar was easily smoothed out with the 24p Smooth Film setting. There were some noticeable shortcomings, though. The depth of field was a little shallow compared to higher-end TVs and glasses are noticeably darker than with passive 3D glasses we’ve tested as well. This means films will always seem slightly muted in 3D, but colours still looked rich and vibrant. It’s possible to raise the brightness using the regular picture settings, but increasing it too much made the screen appear very milky and had a negative impact on colour depth.

A minor disappointment is sound quality. Speech was clear, and the 10W subwoofer adds a small amount of bass, but for the best results we recommend using a dedicated speaker system or sound bar.

CONCLUSION

For many years plasma TVs ruled the roost, however LCD sets have come on leaps and bounds and these days there’s less to choose between the two technologies. The feature-packed LG 42LA690V has great image quality and provides more features for less money, making it a great alternative. However, if you want the best image quality without spending silly money, the TX-P42GT60B (or its bigger 50in sibling) is still the TV to buy.