RedRose
Standard Member
Hi all
I have been asked several questions by several people (particularly KBDVD and Fulabeer) about my general impressions and my take on the performance of the TH50PHW30 that I recently bought. If there's anything I haven't covered here feel free to ask and I'll try to observe / provide an answer:
1) Delivery / service. I bought it from Sound and Vision in Bolton. I live in Preston which, despite having been promoted to City status as a Queen's Jubilee present, is not well provided with good HiFi dealers IMHO. Any that DO exist do not have anything like the demo stock and willingness to please that S&V have. I dealt with Robin; this guy is definitely a salesman but he is also obviously an enthusiast and sold me some really good stuff. Currys it is NOT. The delivery was due Friday PM. It arrived at 11:55AM - pretty good. After sales service so far has been very good. I have had a few questions/afterthoughts and Robin has been very fair. I did have some negative experiences but to be fair they were dealt with professionally.
2) Fan noise. As I menioned in another thread, this baby has four fans in it and it also electronically buzzes. I suspect the power supply as the pitch does change with the screen brightness. I guess this varies the load on the PSU. It is NOT silent, and frankly, if my Yamaha AV amp can be silent, why can't this? I'm not going to start p*****g about with returns and engineers. This is just the current state of Panasonic's art. They will get better just like cars, computers and washing machines. I decided to buy one now. I am going to play around with some acoustic foam or carpet underlay and some cardboard boxes, see if I can't prototype an acoustic jacket (not forgetting airflow!).
3) Lip sync. This was my main concern having read so much about it. Given the facts (that scaling and deinterlacing WILL take time), there is bound to be some. It's fine. I would guess that it's about .2 of a second and is a bit more with zoom modes. I guess this is due to the screen doing even more work. Maybe one day I'll get an amp with a delay or perhaps someone will design a delay box to go inline on the speaker outputs (Symanski, are you out there?)
4) Scaling. Very impressive. I am more happy than I expected to be with the PQ on Sky Digital. I'm running RGB but will be getting an RGB > Component converter soon (Fulabeer - honest ). On DVD it's also brill. I am on Svideo with my old Sony 325 but I have ordered a Philips 963SA. Will report when I get it.
5) 3:2 Pulldown. I BELIEVE this model dosen't have it, but to be honest I haven't spotted a problem on e.g. Fifth Element R1 (although you might spot it yourself). With the progressive scan DVD player this should cease to be a problem anyway.
6) Colour banding. This is also known as solarisation from the computer graphics world. Thanks to KBDVD I am now aware that this can be a problem!! . OK, here's the truth: I have noticed some but only twice so far and believe me, I have looked. Last night on Casualty I noticed that Colette's face (she's a nurse and is brown-skinned, possibly West Indian) was showing banding in the darker corners of her jaw-line. It happened again during Frasier where I noticed a pinkish coloured column (Yeah, small titter) in his apartment was solarising . Now, this morning I watched programmes with talking heads and saw NO banding. So, maybe it's an MPEG compression issue on Sky, maybe a brightness issue, or something else. It is not an major issue but will probably be less noticable on the newer model with more grey scale video memory. Perhaps there'll be an upgrade made available; after all it IS only a memory issue and memory is pretty cheap and easy to come by, innit?
Well then, there it is. (Amadeus is one of my faves).
Sorry if it's a bit long-winded but I though some of you might be interested.
Cheers.
I have been asked several questions by several people (particularly KBDVD and Fulabeer) about my general impressions and my take on the performance of the TH50PHW30 that I recently bought. If there's anything I haven't covered here feel free to ask and I'll try to observe / provide an answer:
1) Delivery / service. I bought it from Sound and Vision in Bolton. I live in Preston which, despite having been promoted to City status as a Queen's Jubilee present, is not well provided with good HiFi dealers IMHO. Any that DO exist do not have anything like the demo stock and willingness to please that S&V have. I dealt with Robin; this guy is definitely a salesman but he is also obviously an enthusiast and sold me some really good stuff. Currys it is NOT. The delivery was due Friday PM. It arrived at 11:55AM - pretty good. After sales service so far has been very good. I have had a few questions/afterthoughts and Robin has been very fair. I did have some negative experiences but to be fair they were dealt with professionally.
2) Fan noise. As I menioned in another thread, this baby has four fans in it and it also electronically buzzes. I suspect the power supply as the pitch does change with the screen brightness. I guess this varies the load on the PSU. It is NOT silent, and frankly, if my Yamaha AV amp can be silent, why can't this? I'm not going to start p*****g about with returns and engineers. This is just the current state of Panasonic's art. They will get better just like cars, computers and washing machines. I decided to buy one now. I am going to play around with some acoustic foam or carpet underlay and some cardboard boxes, see if I can't prototype an acoustic jacket (not forgetting airflow!).
3) Lip sync. This was my main concern having read so much about it. Given the facts (that scaling and deinterlacing WILL take time), there is bound to be some. It's fine. I would guess that it's about .2 of a second and is a bit more with zoom modes. I guess this is due to the screen doing even more work. Maybe one day I'll get an amp with a delay or perhaps someone will design a delay box to go inline on the speaker outputs (Symanski, are you out there?)
4) Scaling. Very impressive. I am more happy than I expected to be with the PQ on Sky Digital. I'm running RGB but will be getting an RGB > Component converter soon (Fulabeer - honest ). On DVD it's also brill. I am on Svideo with my old Sony 325 but I have ordered a Philips 963SA. Will report when I get it.
5) 3:2 Pulldown. I BELIEVE this model dosen't have it, but to be honest I haven't spotted a problem on e.g. Fifth Element R1 (although you might spot it yourself). With the progressive scan DVD player this should cease to be a problem anyway.
6) Colour banding. This is also known as solarisation from the computer graphics world. Thanks to KBDVD I am now aware that this can be a problem!! . OK, here's the truth: I have noticed some but only twice so far and believe me, I have looked. Last night on Casualty I noticed that Colette's face (she's a nurse and is brown-skinned, possibly West Indian) was showing banding in the darker corners of her jaw-line. It happened again during Frasier where I noticed a pinkish coloured column (Yeah, small titter) in his apartment was solarising . Now, this morning I watched programmes with talking heads and saw NO banding. So, maybe it's an MPEG compression issue on Sky, maybe a brightness issue, or something else. It is not an major issue but will probably be less noticable on the newer model with more grey scale video memory. Perhaps there'll be an upgrade made available; after all it IS only a memory issue and memory is pretty cheap and easy to come by, innit?
Well then, there it is. (Amadeus is one of my faves).
Sorry if it's a bit long-winded but I though some of you might be interested.
Cheers.