Repair-It

As Good as It Gets
As great as the TC-P60ST60 looked without calibration, it took on another layer of goodness after tuning, delivering impressively deep blacks that seemed to drop out to near infinity in my dark viewing room and the deliciously rich, saturated colors I’ve come to expect from Panasonic’s better plasmas. Something as simple as the CBS coverage of a golf tournament became a riot of visual delights. Fleshtones after calibration were slightly more saturated and a bit rosier and more natural than the paler faces in the default Cinema mode. The greens of the golf course were never cartoony or exaggerated, and the teal and orange shirts and bright pastels worn by the more fashion-savvy golfers called attention to themselves, but in a good way—not the kind that makes you reach for the color control to turn things down. Blue skies took on pungency that elicited my “wow” response. Shadow detail in the dark areas was excellent. I had the set’s ultimate black level set so low that at first I thought I’d gone too far and crushed the fine shadings, but as quickly as my eyes adjusted to the black areas, I could see details emerge. When the broadcast’s two anchors came on camera wearing black jackets with white-thread embroidered CBS logos, it took but a moment for me to fully delineate the undulating folds and creases in their sleeves and the clear outlines of their lapels against the body of the jacket. And all the detail in the bright logos just popped right out of all that blackness. There was so much good stuff happening on screen that I actually began looking forward to the colorful commercials, with their punchy golf clothing, sunny golf course landscapes, and tight close-ups of finely detailed metallic club heads or deep, mesmerizing dimples on perfectly white golf balls. This is the mark of a great TV—when every scene change seems to yield fresh, evocative surprises.

Moving on to Blu-ray, I spun the recent transfer of Prometheus my colleague Tom Norton has been using as one of his black-level torture tests and swam into the rich darkness of outer space, with its endless blackness and an unusually sharp pinpoint specificity to starfields you don’t often see with the competitive backlit LCD display technology. Well-defined shadow details were easily evident in the flashlight-lit cave scene early in the movie and later in the aerial space shots of the passing Prometheus ship. This movie overall has a dark and sinister feel, but when color is used, it’s used spectacularly, as in the opening sequence when an alien drinks a nasty cocktail and disintegrates before our eyes. As the camera zooms deep inside his biology, we see his DNA breaking up, a winding helix of yellow so bright and saturated it almost flies off the screen. The various environments on the ship were also breathtaking, and when the camera zooms in on a small artificial Christmas tree set up by the captain, I couldn’t help but be taken with the dead-on accuracy of the green color in this familiar object.

Everyman’s TV
Most of the best plasma HDTVs I’ve seen have a kind of smooth, film-like texture and solidity to the image, coupled with a special quality to the phosphor-based color that’s hard to explain considering that it doesn’t really show up in the measurements. I once asked a plasma TV engineer about this, and he described plasma’s unique look as “organic.” If by that he meant natural, accurate, engaging, dimensional, even addictive, then I think it sums up the Panasonic ST60 series. With its spectacularly deep blacks, excellent shadow details, and richly saturated colors, Panasonic can chalk up another affordable hit for all us little people with big eyes and small budgets.