Introduction and features
While it's certainly managed one or two LCD TV hits over the past couple of years, Panasonic has overall felt like it's been running to catch up with some of its rivals in the years since it pulled the plug on its ever-reliable plasma TV division.
Given how much of a picture quality leap we've seen from its rivals this year, I couldn't help but fear for Panasonic's latest high-end CX802 models - despite the brand going into more technical detail than anyone else in its bid to sell its new TVs' virtues.
Without getting too far ahead of myself, though, I'm happy to say right at the start of this review of the 50-inch, 4K Ultra HD Panasonic TX-50CX802 my concerns prove largely unfounded.
Design
The 50CX802 hits the ground running with a highly attractive design. It combines an ultra-thin, opulently finished deep grey metallic screen frame with an unusual arced-back, bar-style stand that becomes practically invisible when you look at the TV straight on. It means the screen appear to hang in mid air.
This is an effect Panasonic has tried for with previous designs too, but it's got closer to achieving it with the 50CX802 than it has before.
The only catch with the design is that you'll need a stand for the TV that's at least as wide as the TV, otherwise you'll find your precious new 4K UHD TV crashing forwards…
Connections on the 50CX802 are solid rather than brilliant, chiefly on account of there only being three HDMIs when sets near the top of a brand's range ought to be getting at least four now.
The 50CX802 does cater admirably for today's multimedia needs though, as three USBs (one 3.0, two 2.0) are joined by a very handy SD card slot and the now pretty much universal integrated Wi-Fi and wired networking options.
Network options
Exploring these network options reveals that they deliver streaming of multimedia from networked DLNA devices, as well as access to Panasonic's 'walled garden' of online content.
You can even access the TV through your tablet or smartphone when you're away from home - even outside the country - to either set recordings on it or, remarkably, stream to your smart device live broadcasts or shows you may have recorded onto an attached USB drive.
The set additionally supports Bluetooth connectivity with smart devices for simple file sharing, and the available sharing features include the facility to stream video from the TV to your smartphones and tablets for multi-room viewing.
Panasonic's online functionality is impressive.
Or at least it will be once the new Freeview Play 'app' is added via a firmware update in the next few weeks. This app will open up the potential for catch-up TV from all of the UK's main TV terrestrial broadcasting platforms using a strikingly straightforward interface.
Firefox for your TV
Freeview Play is far from the 50CX802's only smart attraction, though.
Its main smart features are delivered, in fact, by an all-new Firefox interface, designed in conjunction with Mozilla.
Having been distinctly underwhelmed by Sony's tie-up with the new Android TV platform recently, I have to admit I started using the Firefox system with a feeling of dread.
Within seconds, though, I'd taken to the Firefox approach like a duck to water.
Unlike Android TV, the Firefox system shows a real understanding of what a typical TV - as opposed to smartphone or tablet - user wants from a smart interface. It combines a graphically rich design with a brilliantly simple structure and, best of all, reams of customisation options to help you quickly get to just the apps you most like to use/watch.
Aside from not being quite as efficient with its use of screen real estate, the Panasonic Firefox TV system is almost as effective as LG's class-leading webOS platform.
Let's just hope looking ahead that the TV version of Firefox applies really strong quality control to apps that might come through from the Mozilla community, so the currently slick experience doesn't start to get weighed down by clutter.
It's good to discover that the apps already supported on Firefox OS include the 4K versions of Amazon Prime and Netflix.
While Firefox gives you the most up-front sign of change from Panasonic's 2014 TVs, the most important steps forward are actually less obvious.
New picture technologies
Where the hardware side of things is concerned, the panel inside the 50CX802 ditches the IPS type used by last year's (and actually currently continuing) AX9 models in favour of a VA-style one. This has resulted in a marginally reduced viewing angle, but as we'll see it's had a profoundly beneficial impact on the TV's contrast performance.
Panasonic has also introduced new wide colour gamut phosphors to the 50CX802 that can allegedly reproduce up to 98% of the Digital Cinema Initiative colourscape - a colourscape previously only found in digital cinemas that's much wider than the 'old' Rec709 colour standard that's followed us around since the days of CRT TVs (remember those?!).
The 50CX802 further enhances its colour rendering potential by using a 10-bit panel rather than the typical 8-bit affair, a feature which enables it to reproduce 64 times more colour gradation.
The 50CX802's LCD panel also features a new highly transmissive 4K UHD panel design to enable it to produce more brightness while consuming less power, and its edge LED system is enhanced by a local dimming system that can adjust the brightness of segments of the lighting individually, to boost contrast.
4K Studio Master processing
These hardware innovations are joined/harnessed by a new proprietary '4K Studio Master' Panasonic video processing system.
The highlight trick among the numerous picture enhancement features subsumed under this umbrella title is the use of 3D Look Up tables - taken from Panasonic's professional monitors division - that enable the screen to render colours against 8000 registry points.
Typical LCD TVs, by comparison, draw their colour palettes from just 100 reference points.
The 4K Studio Master processing also draws on know-how inherited from Panasonic's plasma division to supposedly enhance shadow detail reproduction during dark scenes.
This feature works by combining the 10-bit panel with joined-up control of the backlight and gain settings (typical LCD TVs address these completely separately), resulting in a claimed 1024 steps of gradation versus the normal 8-bit 256 steps.
One other key - if, potentially, controversial for some AV enthusiasts - feature is the 50CX802's Dynamic Range Remaster system.
This works to a) put back into sources the original source brightness that tends to get lost in the video mastering and distribution processes, and b) convert any source into something closer to the contrast-expanded, colour-enriched high dynamic range (HDR) format set to make waves with the arrival of UHD Blu-ray and expected Amazon and Netflix HDR streams.
Today remastered
Some picture enthusiasts won't like the notion of the 50CX802 essentially 'souping up' the look of today's sources - and Panasonic acknowledges this by providing the tools to turn its remastering processing off. But it seems to us that most people will prefer to unlock the capabilities of the futuristic screen they've paid good money for - so long, at least, as the remastering processing doesn't make an unholy mess of things.
It should be reiterated before leaving this section that unfortunately the 50CX802 doesn't yet carry its key HDR playback and Youview Play features - which means we haven't been able to test them. But they are both definitely coming.
Performance
In action, the 50CX802 is a quintessentially Panasonic LCD TV.
Which is actually very good news, for it means Panasonic has managed to produce a picture from an LCD screen that truly resembles in many ways the pictures it managed to get from its beloved plasma TVs.
The AX902 models from 2014 made some steps along this road, but were ultimately let down by their use of an IPS panel, which limited their contrast and shadow detail.
The 50CX802's use of a VA panel removes - or at least, greatly reduces - this plasma-aping hurdle.
Contrast
For starters the depths of rich, natural blackness the screen can reach are outstanding - much more profound than anything Panasonic has achieved before from an LCD TV, and up there with the best efforts of high-end Sony and Samsung rivals.
The lack of any significant grey, blue or green undertone to black colours, as well as the complete absence of any of the sort of radioactive 'glow' effect LCD TVs sometimes suffer with when trying to show black, means that dark scenes look vastly more convincing and immersive.
They also deliver a credible match for the sense of depth and realism the TV achieves with bright content, making for a gorgeously consistent viewing experience that doesn't find dark scenes standing out jarringly against bright ones as a film cuts between them.
Detail
The new 4K Studio Master processing, meanwhile, earns its corn in impressive style with the amount of subtle detailing the 50CX802 manages to retain in dark areas despite the depths of its black levels.
All too often when an LCD TV strives for the sort of deep black colours the 50CX802 can produce the extent to which it has to remove light from the image causes subtle light details to disappear, resulting in a hollow, flat look to the darkest areas.
Panasonic's light management, though, is clever enough to deliver deep blacks while seemingly crushing out hardly any of the tiny light variations that give a dark shot depth.
This distinctively Panasonic deftness of touch is evident, too, in a gloriously nuanced colour performance.
Every single pixel appears able to offer its own truly deft colour tone to a degree that scarcely seems possible given that LCD is a technology that has to share external lights across multiple pixels.
Colour precision
This colour precision underlines the sense of detail in 4K images, joining forces with the contrast and greyscale capabilities to deliver 4K pictures of truly outstanding purity and texture.
To be clear, I'm not saying the 50CX802's pictures are the sharpest I've seen on a 4K TV - that honour is probably shared between Samsung and Sony's latest flagship 4K UHD TVs. But sharpness shouldn't be confused with detail and accuracy, and on those two fronts the 50CX802 really does set the bar.
Given the current paucity of native 4K UHD sources, it's important to stress here too that the latest 4K Pro technology in the 50CX802 also does an excellent job of upscaling HD content to the TV's native UHD resolution, adding an impressive amount of pixel density as well as genuine detail without exaggerating any noise that might be in the HD source.
Even standard definition images don't look as soft and muted with their colours as they tend to on UHD TVs - though obviously we'd urge anyone with a 4K UHD TV to avoid standard definition content wherever possible.
Making the old look new
The 50CX802's remastering processing also does a very considered job of remapping current video standards to the screen's expanded colour and luminance ranges if you're willing to give it a go too. The results of the remastering aren't as spectacular, perhaps, as those you get with Samsung's SUHD TVs, but picture enthusiasts may well prefer the 50CX802's gentler touch.
There's a gorgeous stability to the 50CX802's handling of all the infinite amount of small things it picks out so deftly in its images, with no trace of the slight flickering effect or dimming in and out that can happen with most TVs - even rival flagship models - when they try to reproduce very small details.
Especially if those details also happen to be moving, like the starscapes around Sandra Bullock in Gravity.
Panasonic's motion handling doesn't deliver quite as much clarity and detail retention as some of its rivals, it has to be said, which can lead to a slight reduction in the images mostly outstanding '4Kness' when you're watching sport or action scenes. But the gorgeous greyscale and colour handling elsewhere largely compensates for this problem.
Minor flaws
Now I've stumbled into a little negative territory with the 50CX802, I might as well add that its pictures don't qet as bright or vibrantly coloured as those of Samsung's SUHD TVs - or Sony's KD-75X9405C.
Especially when you've set the image up to dodge some minor backlight issues noted below.
This could be worth pondering if you tend to watch TV in a fairly bright environment, of you're wanting to get the maximum impact from the new HDR picture technology that's due to arrive soon.
Another fortunately fairly rare problem is some jumping of the image's overall backlight level, and the occasional faint backlight cloud - issues that can become more overt if you leave the backlight setting too high or try to use the TV's contrast-boosting features on too high a power level.
3D
The backlight clouding issues are hard to avoid with 3D content given that the 50CX802 needs to run more brightly in 3D mode to counter the dimming effect of the active shutter 3D glasses, despite the fact that even at maximum brightness the 50CX802's 3D images aren't as bright, vibrant and thus immersive as those of some other 3D TVs.
Small details can slightly fade in and out of the 3D image too, in a way that doesn't happen with 2D.
So that I can wrap the picture section up in the positive fashion the 50CX802 richly deserves overall, however, I should stress that despite the couple of glitches its 3D images are in truth extremely watchable, featuring plenty of detail, a good sense of space thanks to the TV's strong contrast performance, and pleasingly little sign of active 3D's common crosstalk issues.
Usability, Sound Quality and Value
Panasonic's shift to a specially created TV version of Firefox for its smart TV interface turns out to be a masterstroke, enabling Panasonic to combine a beautifully designed interface with oodles of handy customisability and a rich world of content that can only grow further given the relatively open, already well-supported nature of the Firefox platform.
Panasonic's new 'smart' remote control design - which ships alongside a decent if rather button-heavy normal remote - is a big improvement over the brand's previous smart remote control efforts.
It uses a reasonably large, rectangular touch pad at its heart versus the previous over-small, unhelpfully circular one, and its curved design feels very comfortable in your hand.
It's a shame, though, that Panasonic hasn't yet introduced the same point and click approach now offered by Samsung and LG handsets.
The 50CX802's enthusiast focus means that you will need a little picture know-how and the courage and time to delve into the TV's extensive picture set up options if you want to get the absolute best from the TV with all the different types of source that may come its way.
But the results provide a big reward for your efforts, and if you really can't be bothered to change any in-depth settings, I guess a couple of the provided picture presets are at least decently usable.
Sound Performance
The 50CX802 is a mixed bag sonically.
In the plus column it can go reasonably loud without losing clarity, its mid-range is expansive enough to render voices believably even during dense sequences, and there's enough detail in the mix to make movie mixes feel involving and alive.
The 50CX802 doesn't do bass as convincingly or deeply as some rival high-end TVs though, and the lack of any forward facing speakers can leave the audio sounding a bit hemmed in at times.
Value
This is to some extent the 50CX802's ace in the hole. It's really great value for such an accomplished, feature-rich TV, especially when compared with similarly high level TVs from Sony and Samsung.
Those rival TVs have slightly showier, more dynamic pictures, but the 50CX802 delivers a key attraction of its own by giving the most subtly coloured, detailed and frankly plasma-like pictures seen from an LCD TV to date.
Verdict
Panasonic continues to plough its own distinctive TV furrow with the 50CX802, focussing on what some may see as old-fashioned values of accuracy and subtlety rather than aggressive colours and brightness.
So far as I'm concerned, though, there's nothing old-fashioned about caring about picture quality, especially when it results in images as mesmerisingly immersive and detailed as those the 50CX802 delivers.
The set's shiny new Firefox/YouView smart system and imminent HDR compatibility mean that it's actually anything but old-fashioned, too.
We liked
The 50CX802's pictures show a gorgeous and unique appreciation for the finer things in AV life, choosing subtlety over aggression in a way that will likely really appeal to the sort of AV enthusiast who used to love plasma.
Panasonic's new Firefox smart system does a great job of simplifying the job of finding content in today's complicated world, and the set is aggressively priced for what it offers.
We disliked
By the time you've reduced the image's brightness enough to get round some slight backlight flaws, the picture isn't as bright as those of some rivals this year.
It's a pity, too, that two key features - HDR playback and YouView Play - aren't yet available (though they must be getting close to being added now), and that motion tends to look a touch soft in the context of the gorgeous detail and sharpness elsewhere in the 4K images.
Verdict
While there's room for improvement with its backlight and motion handling, the 50CX802 is far and away Panasonic's best LCD TV to date.
Its pictures benefit from a unique focus on colour and greyscale nuances that give it a genuine USP, and it backs this up with an appealingly friendly new Firefox smart TV interface and - following imminent firmware updates - both HDR and Freeview Play functionality.
All at what is, all things considered, an attractive price.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/1WNuRgA
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