Hope its OK to start a new thread, as the others were speculating about price etc...
anyway, picked one of these up from the local Panasonic centre in Brighton (right next door to the Sony centre). Agreed a 7 day return to test it at home.
Now, before I give my impressions, I'm no expert, and I don't have a proper screen. Instead I used some matt white artists board on the wall. Not ideal, but I was thinking it should be a harsher test than when I saw the Sony HS1 at Sevenoaks.
Anyway, I'm very impressed by this little panasonic. As they say, you should ignore the specs and just see what it looks like. And it looks very nice indeed.
It certainly seems to paint a much more natural image than the Sony. With the Sony, after a while I became quite aware of the horizontal line structure and it became quite fatiguing. There was none of that with the Panasonic. I tried it with Final Fantasy, Gladiator and also R1 Starship troopers (with this last one, the opening studio logo has those little scratches in the film. Really noticable blown up big - really makes it feel like home cinema
)
The blacks aren't great, but that can be improved by using the low light mode and 'cinema' picture mode, and it really didn't bother me that much. This latter mode seems to be very clean- the other two modes (normal and dynamic) have quite a bit of noise, especially noticable on large areas of single colour.
Trying to lower the brightness right down to get a good black ended up losing too much detail, so I might try a grey screen.
I was about 13ft from the image maximum - less than 2x screen width anyway, and there was no chicken wire obvious. Occasionally you'd notice it for a split second out of the corner of your eye, but if you looked at it it wasn't there.
Nice bright image too - I was a bit concerned about using the low power lamp mode, but it was plenty bright - the room was almost completely dark though.
Each video mode (PAL/NTSC etc) has its own memory settings so you can adjust separately for your different regions. There are also a full set of connectors on the back (Composite video, S-Video, SVGA, Component). Chart in the manual shows how to get the best picture (it likes being fed 848x480 wide SVGA). Manual mentions automatically selecting 16:9 or 4:3 by a signal down the S-video. Not sure if it did it, but it'd be nice if it did.
It seems to be quite short throw (not seen many though). At 11ft from the wall, the smallest image was 7ft diagonal (16:9) and the largest was about 8.5ft. So for the size I was looking at, it needs to be in the middle of the room. Also, I might want to ceiling mount it, as otherwise the angle might be a bit steep.
All I have to do now is persuade my wife of its charms. I'm tempted to ask her to pick one up while she's over in Japan, but what happens if it breaks down or has dodgy pixels? (this one has one bright green one in the top border). I'm sure she'll love it once its up and running, but we're moving soon, so she'll try and get me to take it back until then. Probably makes sense, but even if I do, I think I know which one I'll be buying.
I've heard good things about the PLV30 but I can't get a demo easily (Richer sounds or mail order being the only simple way to get one), so I'm looking forward to seeing impressions from people who've seen the PLV-30 to compare with it.
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. Then I'll play with the settings some more. This is one area where I'm interested in more expert opinions, hopefully this week.
Linear Mode
