Caillin

Check out http://www.linuxmce.com/ Gonna have a crack at setting this up this weekend. Still looking for a worthy replacement of the Xbox with XBMC.

Just went out and bought the 55" spare of the moment, after about 18months deliverating. Had it advertised for $2499 up here in Townsville, but after asking if they'd match $2299, they did. Now to try and dig up the threads with 1:1 mapping and colour settings!

Sorry, I didn't really mean stripped down. I have read the whole thread on AVS on these screens. I'm more miffed that the price difference between the consumer and commerical panel in Europe and in the US is much, much greater than what they are here. When things like that happen, you know it's not because of the technology in the panel, it's due to marketing/political reasons. But like you said, I hope we see the price come down on the 50" in the next few months. It is also worth highlighting what you said about 50hz. It does indeed work perfectly through the RGB/VGA connection, it's only the DVI/HDMI connections that can't do native resolution at 50hz, only 60hz.

Hey Foggy, I already said this back at the beginning of the thread I must admit, I'm not overly happy about Panasonic's pricing of the commercial panel. I mean only $200 discount??? I was hoping there'd be at least a $1000 RRP difference between the fully featured Viera and the stripped back commercial screen. *sigh*

Ah cool, I knew there'd be a reason why it wasn't a good idea

Is it possible to modify something to make the lamp less bright instead of custom making an iris? The reason I ask, is surely this would extend the service life of the bulb?

Anyone selling these yet or able to get them?

and you'll never get rid of the top/bottom black bars if your watching a 2.35:1 widescreen movie on a 16:9 widescreen display. Unless the display has a zoom funtion, but then you'll be chopping off some of the movie on the sides.

If your referring to my comments, I did specificaly include the Gen 8 Panasonic HD 50" PV500A and the new Pioneer 506 with regards to my "opinion". I must stress that this is only MY experience on the subject, and all I am trying to hopefully have others realise, that if you haven't had the chance to see a digital display configured properly, you could be forgiven for thinking that they are inherently flawed with regards to motion artifacts. I really hope plasma owners aren't interpereting my post as "plasma bashing" and feel the need to defend their purchase. That wasn't my intent at all.

I have to admit that I agree with the point that the OP is trying to get at. Judging from the 1000's of posts of very knowledgable people with regards to digital micro displays and the quality they are getting on them, I firmly believe that I just have not had the good fortune of being able to find a digital display set up properly. Living in NQ it's a joke to try and find something even remotely set up properly, but I still can't shake the fact that every single plasma I have seen, regardless of the source, exhibits the same sort of motion artifacts. I'm almost positive that it is to do with the internal digital processing capabilities of these displays which is causing the problems (scaling/deinterlacing). I viewed both the Panasonic PV500A and the new Pioneer 506 side by side at our local HN, and to be honest, I wouldn't have bought either of them. They were definitely better than most of the plasmas on display, but they were far from what I'm used to with computer LCD's and direct view CRT's. I'd really love to be able to hook up a HTPC to one of the current range HD plasma's, and feed them a perfectly weave deinterlaced, computer scaled 1080i, digital video based source (like the above mention Prison Break) at the panels native resolution and see if the same sort of motion artifacting occurs. I definitely don't see it when viewing HD material on my 1280x1024 19" Samsung LCD, but then again, the computer is acting as the digital processor (7800GTX with Purevideo). *shrug* Plasma guys: for some of us that don't have access to a well setup display model, it's really really really hard for us to get excited about these new generation digital displays. I'm certain that it has to be the onboard processing causing these artifacts. My parents had purchased a while ago a Gundig 76cm widescreen crt, which exhibited the same type of artifacts. They were excited about the image quality of it, but to me, it was absolutely horrible with noticable aliasing and mosquito noise. It wasn't until I dug through the manual and realised it had features to "pause" (still grab) the tv and do some tricky stretching of the aspect ratio. Armed with the theory that the tv had some sort of digital filter between the source signal and the output, I got service menu codes, and managed to turn off the digital "enhancements" of the set, low and behold, the picture became about 10x better, and was actually worthy of their earlier praise. Sorry for the long winded post, but researching why their expensive TV had such an absolute **** picture is what got me started on this trek, and in the last 12 months have got very sucked into the pro's and con's of all the emerging digital display technologies to find an answer to my question of "why do digital displays inherently display far more artifacts than normal computer LCD screens and CRT's"

Judging from threads on the 500A in the US (different model number over there, but same panel), you should definitley be able to drive these to 1366 x 768 at native 1:1 pixel mapping. This will give you the best HTPC experience, as there won't be any internal scaling going on. Do a search on www.avsforum.com I believe they're equivalent Pana is the PX500?

You've seen an A10 in the flesh to make such a large leap of generalisation?

I haven't heard anything. Still waiting. The new 50" Grand Wega is starting to look very tempting.

Pretty much strange one. That and the sets are deeper than an LCD panel, but that's hard to be avoided with something 50".

Good news. At that price though, I'm sure most people would be tempted towards a 50" plasma for a bit more. The public seem to like flat screens (LCD/Plasma).

Nice wrap-up DA. I second all of that.

Make that 2 of us. I'm very likely to go down this path as well. The A10 should provide an excellent upgrade to my 68cm Trinitron CRT until we see SED hit the market then mature some. At 50", I'm sure the 1280x720 Res won't be that much of a problem even at reletively close viewing distances. Convinced my local HN to get one in when they are available and I'll help them set it up properly and give it the once over. (**** gone off topic a bit there guys, I'll shutup now)

No, that was from the UK. Not sure what the model numbers will be here. Guarantee they will be 50PHD8**. It's the last 2 codes that seem to change according to region and colour options. The panels themselves should be the same though.

The yanks are loving this screen to pair up with the 360. Logical choice I suppose. You don't have to worry as much about black level in games (as against movies), good price, big screen, matches native res. What's not to like

Does anybody know if these have hit stores yet?

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Well, if you are playing a 50hz PAL DVD from your HTPC via DVI or HDMI, then your going to have to put up with a slight amount of judder from the 3:2 pulldown. For HTPC use, your better off using the 15Pin RGB input. There is no discernable quality difference between this input and the digital connections according to the guys on www.avforums.com (the UK version of AVS).

What they can't do is display native 1:1 pixel mapping at 50hz via DVI or HDMI. They can only do this at 60hz. Panasonic still haven't realised that some of us in the rest of the world like to use HTPC's...

Yeah, I'm still hanging to find out what price these panels will hit considering the excellent prices of the consumer model.