Gonna post this here.
On hearing some peoples dismay I have just been to have a look in John Lewis in Watford, they have an area where on the back wall there is a 42S20, 42X20 42G20 a 50X20, 50VT20 and a 50G20.
On the left wall there was a Panny 42"LED LCD, a 40" Samsung, A Sharp 50" Quadtron and one of a 55" Sony's LED.
On The right wall there was a Samsung Plasma, a Samsung LCD, a Panasonic 37LED LCD and a Toshiba 46LCD.
Now they were all showing the Switzerland Chile game on BBC HD.
I'm going to light the torch paper here. The VT20 had 467 hours on it.
When I had one to test it was new out of the box and I did not see any football in it.
This set has some processing issues on it and there is NO WAY its faulty.
Before we get into motion, flicker, all the panny plasma sets were doing this strange flicker thing even when the image was still and a close up of the pundits in the studio, and you could see it all the time during the game, just the odd single flicker but very regular.
Motion
With IFC off (I did this with all the sets that had this feature), you guys are right, to me it looks like some kind of phosphor decay issue, the lines are breaking down during quick pans. Instead of seeing a blurred white line which all the other sets showed, all the Panny plasmas did the similar things its just that the other panny plasmas showed the usual green phosphor lag thing. The Panny LCDs did not. Now on the VT20 and the G20 what you saw was the white line breaking down into separate green blue and red lines, indicating that the discharge speeds of the 3 main colours are different. quite simply, the same thing was going on elsewhere in the image, the ad hoardings in the background and edges around players. All the non panny plasmas (including panny lcds) were not doing this.
With IFC on (all the sets that had this Feature) to be honest its out of the fat and into the frying pan. It vastly reduces this "image integrity" break up but introduces some other nasties. It causes judder because the speed of the pan is not constant and the camera is being moved by a human so the smoothing compensation that the set is adding is tripping up. It also causes tearing of lines and mosquito noise around images. It is causing line twitter and can clearly be seen around the nets where they appear to shimmer. But even worse, there is this weird moire effect that can be seen when there contrast between the stripes in the grass, its especially visible as the FIFA logo pans across the screen after a replay. All the sets with the IFC feature did this.
Not only that at least twice all the panny plasmas seemed to go into slowmo coming out of a replay for about 2-3 seconds before going back to normal, while the pannies did this all the other sets were normal.
Sadly these sets IMHO are not faulty. Its a trait and its what they do and I don't think this can be addressed by a firmware change, its just the set.
Andyjack you can go through 100 of these and IMHO they will all be the same.
The problem is now is that people are buying on recommendation, I'm sorry but now the sets in the shops are bedding in you need to go look at them.
There are one or 2 people who throw their toys out of their prams if anything is said against their choice of set.
The same issues are being raised now by people for these findings by owners not be taken seriously. The problem of "it must be faulty cuz mines ok" is caused by less discerning or untrained/uneducated eyes.
The traits raised here ARE present on all of them.
What the answer, I don't know, is there an alternative, IMHO nothing right now, the overall colour accuracy on the VT was far better than anything else but I agree motion is not great but new sets from others are on the way later in the year.
When I first had one to check against my reference set, I thought it was reasonable, now they are bedding in, and settling down, sadly as expected the masked issues from the panels initially being over driven are showing themselves, and while we are at it the set I had has shown a 0.004 MLL rise now measures 0.012, up from 0.008 not far off double. Same with the other set I am monitoring and both sets are between 500 and 600 hours.