Slightly OT: home cinema

["Timothy Morris" <timothy.morris@xxxxxxx>]

As many of you are no doubt aware Home Cinema really is a love of mine (my interest in Home Automation really is just limited to infra red lights and curtain control).

 

I've just laid out an obscene amount of cash on a Panasonic 42" plasma display screen and an Arcam DV-88 DVD player.

 

I played Gladiator on it last night, and it is the best quality picture I have seen outside a West End cinema. OK, the SIZE of the picture cannot compete with a CRT projector, but the quality is awesome. This together with the flexibility of Plasma (you don't have to shut the curtains and turn off the lights) warrants a wholehearted recommendation. The Panasonic doesn't suffer from any of the posterisation and black level problems traditionally associated with Plasmas.

 

The screen on its own is good, but it really sings when partnered with the Arcam.

 

For those that are looking for larger Real Estate, a 50" panel is due early in June, and a 63" is rumoured for later in this/early next year.

 

The 42" retails for 7,300 (I paid 6,500 including a desktop stand)

50" is expected at around 12,000

63" - god knows.

 

One of the reasons these panels are so expensive is that the manufacturing yield is still low, as it was with TFT some years ago. I've read somewhere that they actually make much larger panels 55-60 inches or so, fire them up, and then cut out the area which has no faulty pixels. How true this is, I don't know.

 

Just to make sure that I'm not viewing with "rose tinted spectacles", Phil Harris (a known plasma sceptic) is visiting on Good Friday. I'll ask him to post his thoughts once he's seen it.

 

Tim.

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