Holy strawberry float, so it has!

gooseberry fool man, high five definitely in order.

\o

I jelly.

Remember to turn 16:9 overscan off in the menu. And keep it on normal picture mode or anything other than dynamic for a while first.

£700 now, £50 more than the 50" set. Good business.

Mine arrived today too. Put on my Planet Earth HD-DVD to test it out, very nice. I've been using the horrible Samsung HD CRT set for the last five and a half years, so this is a hell of an upgrade. It's a little bit dull looking, but I don't want to run the contrast up too high just yet.

So, is it a good idea to run a break-in DVD on this thing? I saw a link on AVForums to this. Yes/no/maybe?

Will do. What does the 16:9 overscan do? I had it on 'True Cinema' for Lost and it was awful. It was a very night-time-heavy episode and the blacks were incredibly hazy with little whitish-grey bits fuzzing around all over the place. Then I turned the brightness down about four notches and it was beautiful . Such a massive difference. The motion is very different to my old Sony and it might take some getting used to. It almost makes it look 'fake', if you know what I mean. I'm not sure how to describe it.

My favourite flavour of popsicle is DICK.

Turning it off stops it from zooming in slightly on the image and cropping off a bit of the picture. I personally prefer seeing the whole image. Plus you want it off if you're using it as a PC monitor (remember to turn overscan off on graphics settings on Windows too!).

The cinema modes are really meant for dark rooms. But if the settings aren't right, you can of course adjust them to taste. Plus in the advanced picture settings, I tend to turn all the picture engine enhancements off. I think sometimes less is more when it comes to producing a nice picture. The fakeness could be one of the picture engines being set to high/max. I think cinema/true cinema in particular has a fake/smoothing effect to it, try normal and adjust settings and see if it's still there. Certainly THX mode on the GT and VT turn off all the picture engine stuff and makes skin in particular look very real. The motion effects might also be one of the picture engines like intelligent frame creation being turned on. I don't like any of them on myself but I think default factory settings have them all on.

Does the TV feel like the right size for the distance considering you were at one point thinking of getting a 50" plasma?

Does the TV feel like the right size for the distance considering you were at one point thinking of getting a 50" plasma?

Hands on: Sony Crystal LED TV prototype



For most people, the 55-inch OLED TVs from Samsung and, especially, LG were the televisual highlights of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Sony, however, begged to differ. For according to the Japanese megacorp, OLED technology was already old hat, having been superseded by something called Crystal LED technology.

Shown on a 55-inch screen in a 'future technology' zone in an out of the way corner of Sony's CES stand, the world's first Crystal LED (CLED) screen was claiming to deliver all the pictorial benefits of OLED - outstanding contrast, dazzling colours, extreme sharpness, and immaculate motion reproduction - along with two significant further benefits.

First, since CLED doesn't use organic material, it's not prone to OLED's image quality decay issues, where colours tend to fade.

Second, it's a self-emitting system, with around 6 million RGB LED light sources positioned at the front of the screen - an arrangement which would be expected to produce such benefits as a wider viewing angle, more expansive colour range, and better motion reproduction.

In some ways, the two CLED demo screens on show delivered on these promises. Colours looked as rich and yet also subtle as they did on the OLED screens at the show, and the screen's black level response was outstanding without compromising shadow detailing.

Motion looked very crisp too in a head to head with one of Sony's current normal LED TVs.

Actually, it looked almost too crisp; there were signs of noise during the motion demonstration that suggested some sort of artificial sharpness processing was being applied to the pictures. But certainly actual motion blur of the sort all too obvious even on a top-flight standard Sony LED set was practically non-existent.

For all its undoubted quality, though, there was still a slightly rough and ready appearance to the CLED pictures compared with the much more 'finished' OLED products being shown by LG and Samsung. The CLED sets lack the swanky ultra-slim designs of the OLED models, too.

There was nothing about the CLED demonstration, though, to suggest that Sony's new technology won't ultimately be capable of producing an image quality at least as good as OLED.

The only problem with the demo is that it was clear that CLED technology is still much further from becoming a commercial reality than OLED - a fact which raises questions as to whether there will really be space in the market for CLED sets when/if they finally appear. Only time will tell.

Thanks for the info, guys, I've just whacked on a BBC wildlife programme in HD (the media box arrived a day early), turned off the overscan, put the intelligent frame creation to medium and it is absolutely fantastic! The 32" simply was not big enough to make HD look good. I also can't believe how much better viewing angles are on plasma than they were on the LCD. The one thing I have noticed, however, is that the speakers are quite poor. The speakers on my 32" Sony were actually very good. This Panasonic is a lot thinner and the speakers seem to suffer for it very noticeably. I will almost certainly look at picking up a nice 2.1 set in a couple of pay days' time.


I wouldn't mind it a little bigger . It does look enormous, though, I am just a big screen junkie. I've measured the exact distance from the screen to my dad's eyes when he was watching and it's pretty much bang on six feet. Seven feet isn't possible because of the stand, but I could get it back another six inches or so if I wanted to. The 50" would have been ridiculous . SD content even on the likes of ITV4 looks surprisingly decent. I think (going by viewing graphs) I'm just about in the sweet spot where 1080p is noticeably better than 720p.

1. Panasonic TX-P55VT30B (£2,450)

At 55 inches, the TX-P55VT30B is the Big Daddy of Panasonic's hugely impressive plasma range and a worthy winner of our best TV award. It certainly doesn't have the prettiest design, but there's no doubting its supreme performance in the picture department.

There's just no other TV on the market at the moment that can rival its cavernously deep black levels and superb contrast performance, which help it to deliver images with a real cinematic feel. Add in excellent, cross-talk free 3D pictures, sterling sound quality and good support for Internet content and you've got a set that really stands out from the pack. It will set you back £2,450.

Seems odd to recommend intelligent frame creation for ball sports. I had it on mid and it was making the ball flicker and stutter when moving quickly. I tried it on max and it was even worse. Now I've turned it off, the ball moves around very, very smoothly. It's an HD source, for what it's worth.

No need to apologise!

I am giving it another go on mid to see if the superior panning makes it worth it.

Next problem: buzzing. Argh! It is worse the brighter the screen. At quiet points in films all I can hear is bzzzzzzttt and I can't seem to do anything about it. I've tried fiddling with the audio and video controls and nothing seems to make a difference.