Panasonic S30B (TX-P42S30B) Full HD Plasma TV Review

The model reviewed here is the Panasonic TX-P42S30B 42 inch Full HD Plasma TV with a Freeview HD tuner and full UK specifications. Also available is the Panasonic TX-P50S30B 50 inch Full HD Plasma TV, which has not been reviewed here but should offer the same features and a very similar viewing experience.

Spare a thought for the Panasonic S30 that barely gets a mention from our forum members or, indeed, the manufacturers themselves, seemingly lost in the rush to sell 3D product. The S30 shares much of the same feature-set and processing as the G30, we looked at back in April 2011, but lacks THX Certification and full calibration controls in the user menus. The G30 was also fitted with a newer generation filter, to combat ambient light, but both are equipped with the new – for 2011 – ‘Real Black Drive’, 600Hz sub-field processing, a Freeview HD tuner and access to Panasonic’s, cloud based, Viera Connect platform.

At this stage in its lifecycle the Panasonic TX-P42S30B can be had online for around £450 so it’s certainly approaching the realms of a bargain basement option. Can the S30 cast off the shackles of disregard and put itself on the radar? Let’s see…

Measured Results Out of the Box

With no THX mode or isfccc controls at our disposal we would have to hope that the Cinema or True Cinema picture modes would get us close enough to calibrate the greyscale in the service menu. True to form, the True Cinema mode gave us the best basis for our calibration, returning the following results for greyscale and gamma:

Whilst it’s a reasonable result there’s a dominance of green upsetting on-screen material, with an easily noticeable tint. Given the way our eyes work, green makes up by far the largest part of the visible spectrum and, as a result, we’re more susceptible to errors in green, than any other. We’d much rather have an excess of blue – or, at a push, red – with, of course, the aim to have all three equally balanced across the board. Gamma results were pretty decent, fortunately, as we’ve very little control over its response. We would have liked to see it closer to our 2.2 target but it’s forgivable, as is, and images are not looking too washed out.
Moving on to colour reproduction, against the Rec.709 HD standard, and the S30 impressed giving us these results:

As with the greyscale, it’s only green that’s giving us any headaches here with its major problem laying in over luminance, i.e. it’s too bright. We would have to perform a balancing act as magenta and red aren’t bright enough - which is doing no favours to skin-tones – and we’ve only a global control to play with but, all in all, it’s an extremely good result for a budget TVs pre-set. So it’s in to the dark recesses of the Service Menu we go for some old school calibration fun…

Calibrated Results

Since we last had cause to enter a Panasonic service menu things have taken a slight turn for the better in that screen luminance isn’t altered dramatically, as it once was, and we were able to affect the White Balance controls without having to hop in and out too much. In actual fact the process is slightly less painful, in some ways, than using the user menu controls in the higher-end 2011 range but the controls are a little coarse and it took a few iterations before we were able to attain the following charts:
We’ve been able to eliminate the excess of green and reduce Delta Errors to below the perceptible threshold of 3. We’ve a slight excess of blue, lower down, but it isn’t visible with actual content and although we’ve not really done anything to improve gamma response, it’s still at acceptable levels. There’s no Colour Management System (CMS) in the service menu so what changes we could make were partly as a result of greyscale calibration with a couple of notches back on the Colour control. We were able to make some small improvement to overall performance with these measurements:
We’ve been able to reign in green’s luminance without harming anything else, too much, and the fact it’s slightly under-saturated mitigates the over-luminance, somewhat. In fairness, there’s little evidence that we made any gamut changes from the pre-calibrated state but it was excellent to begin with and we’re happy with our test material.

Picture Processing

The S30 showed all the strengths and weakness of its more illustrious siblings with some excellent scaling of standard definition and decent deinterlacing of video content that would, on rare occasion, trip up with some visible jaggedness. The S30 also stood up well when presented with a mixture of film based material with overlaid scrolling video encoded text and had no problems in displaying the full 0-255 video signal, when required. The fact that, with Clear Cinema enabled, the S30 managed successful lock on to NTSC 2:3 cadence yet failed to lock on (in time) with PAL 2:2 material came as no surprise as it mirrors what we’ve been seeing from Panasonic all year.

We’ve gone in to great lengths on the issues Panasonic plasma’s have had in displaying 50Hz content (in short, some will notice edge break-up under panning) and, to this end, Panasonic have attempted to alleviate the issue, somewhat, by introducing a Mid setting to their motion interpolating IFC system. We have to say we found it quite effective on video content, especially sports broadcasts, but it’s not something we’d want on all the time and the 24p Smooth Film setting is a crime against Blu-ray disc with some very unnatural looking movement, in either setting. The S30 is already to very competently handle 1080p24 material without need for a prop.

Gaming Performance

We had high expectations here and we weren’t disappointed by the snappy performance of the S30 when it came to gaming with the amongst the lowest input lag figures we’ve seen all year. In 10 tests, the S30 averaged lag of less than one frame, at 14 milliseconds, and we could sense no disconnection between controller and game. Some might have issue with low motion artefacting with games running at under 60fps, natively, manifesting in double imaging so we’d advise ardent gamers to take one for a test drive before purchasing as tolerances to this vary quite widely. The S30 also proved fairly resistant to image retention with any traces being washed away by normal content in short time. Those that like marathon gaming sessions would be advised to give their S30 a ‘break’ from time, much as they should do the same!

Energy Consumption

Panasonic’s NeoPlasmas are designed to be energy efficient and this shows in the S30B consuming an averaged 120w, calibrated, and less than 1w when in Standby. They’re never going to compete with LED/LCD in this regard, however, and we just hope that they’re not further throttled by further regulations. Some hope.

Panasonic S30B (TX-P42S30B) Full HD Plasma TV Review