prankey

Arun - Just following up. Any luck in testing the TV more? Eagerly waiting for your findings. Also let me know how much are you getting the best price for 42GT50, thanks.

Yes, its me Renaming inputs wont help on Panasonic as its cosmetic. Only on Samsung it disables sub-sampling irrespective of resolution. There is a workaround to use an AVR which faithfully upscale all inputs to 1080p so we can use that feature on this TV. I truely believe this is one of the best TVs we can buy for Bluray and DVD content coming from a Samsung or equivalent BR players. But PS3, and our DTH upscale them to improve color quality over HDMi, which is again down converted by Panasonic TVs significantly reducing quality potentially to be lower than 4:2:2 we may get from the BR without such additional levels of conversions. PC and other graphics apps also suffer due to such sub-sampling with strangly looking and colored texts Hopefully there could be some way to get around these as I also feel this TV is outstanding for the price otherwise. Eagerly waiting for your revert on other quesitons. Don't bother much if you could not do all the tests (especially if you do not have an AVR yet).

Outstanding review Arun and great price for the TV. Seems Panasonic has finally learned to keep the prices moderate in India as well. I do have few questions: 1. Can you use 1080p pure direct mode for 4:4:4 sources other than 1080p? This is very important as PS3 (most probably XBOX360 as well, haven't tested yet), Airtel HD DVR and Tatasky+HD output at upscaled 4:4:4 (from original video content with 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 croma) uncompressed quality Y'CbCr component level and hence using that mode should get rid of the artifacts and noise you see on these sources! This is one primary reason I am still inclined to go with Samsung as naming the input as PC or DVI PC gets away from subsampling which Panasonic notoriously do on all their flagship TVs (they convert to 4:2:2 for video processing and hence we never see 4:4:4 real quality on Panasonic plasmas like what I see on Samsung LCD or Plasma TVs). I have extensively tested this and hence find it to be very important deciding factor for color fedility and ensuring that additional noise or artifact do not get introduced due to resampling. Will share more info later, but as of now, lets conclude its equally important to the panel quality and picture processor for other content. 2. Can we use NTFS HDD on USB? Also, NTFS SD card, etc? If not, I see on the manual from UK that atleast the UK model support exFAT (more concerned about this as most HD movies are more than 4GB size and unless either of these two formats are supported, we will have to modify the source to play through USB on this TV). I heard last year's Panasonic does so hoping this year will also do. 3. Any issue playing MKVs with internal/external subtitles and DTS audio? I see on the manual, this should not be an issue. 4. Can we play multichannel FLAC files and those with higher bitrates than 48kHz? 5. On the manual it says it supports DD/DD+/DTS audio but on HDMI input capabilities it only says 2 channel 44.1/48kHz PCM. Can you feed DD/DTS track through HDMI and see if reproduce and best if it can pass it through ARC and SPDIF? 6. I see on the manual that DD/DD+ and multichannel AAC gets converted to Dolby Digital (in a way better as earlier Samsung used to pass AAC content as 2.0PCM only). If we set audio output to PCM, can it support multichannel PCM for AAC audio instead of compressing as Dolby Digital? This can help in ARC over HDMI which should be capable to pass it to an AVR. 7. Can you check by upscaling through PS3 or other sources like an AVR to 1080p for content or game less than that and see if it gives better quality than the TV doing the job? 8. Does outputting video in RGB from PS3 give better quality when we set Deep color, Super Bright as ON and setting RGB limit to FULL on both the TV and PS3? This can help overcome 4:4:4 resampling issue if it passes RGB as received through PS3 without resampling. I have been trying to get answer to these questions over the Internet and I would appreciate your help in getting atleast some of the questions answered and I will keep looking for other answers on other forums. Thanks a ton for taking time in checking these for me and keep rocking with such excellent reviews (snaps look like been taken from an SLR camera, which one was that?)