Panasonic VIERA TX-P50XT50 Pro Reviews

The Panasonic XT50 is a decent looking display, with the silver accent to the bottom and the ‘crystal’ strip surrounding the top and sides of the gloss black bezel resulting in the contemporary look Panasonic have been striving for. It’s unfortunate there are only 2 HDMI ports to the rear, however, so you’ll need to consider what you have to plumb in to it before purchase, although we certainly weren’t unhappy with another of the cost saving measures, in the shape of the old school Panasonic remote control in the box. Another slight disappointment was the lack of calibration controls in the otherwise familiar menu system. Despite that lack of controls once we’d optimised the available basic settings we were able to extract a very convincing palette. Video processing was lacking, when compared to the 1080p Panasonic’s, and the inability to correctly detect film cadences will mean your DVD collection will be best passed through a scaling player rather than leaving it to the TV to cope with the demands. We could certainly notice a loss of resolution with 2D and 3D Blu-rays and some slight scaling artefacts around the edges of both. There were also some brightness fluctuations with 3D Blu-ray that could be a touch distracting. Whilst contrast performance and black levels were good, again they don’t touch the likes of the ST, GT and VT50’s and an ineffective (or missing) filter means the XT50 doesn’t handle brighter environments particularly well. What the XT50 does do very well, is scale standard definition signals so if your TV diet is a fairly even split of the two, or with a heavier emphasis on SD, then the XT50 is worthy of consideration. The Panasonic XT50 will not suit those that watch a lot of HD and 3D content and gamers seeking low latency thrills are also best directed elsewhere.