Simply superb: Raving about Viera

"The finest plasma pictures we’ve ever seen, wrapped inside a body to die for."

This is how technology magazine T3 described the Panasonic Viera, the latest plasma television to come out of the Japanese electronic giant’s true-idea factory. Bestowing its "Best Buy" and "Gold Award" tags on the Viera, T3 was all praise in giving the new Panasonic an overall rating of "5," the highest it could offer.

The Viera is considered the ultimate in plasma TV viewing. It prides itself for having the highest contrast ratio (10,000:1) and the finest resolution among 42-inch televisions in the market.

This Viera is Panasonic’s ninth-generation plasma TV and it shows no sign of Panasonic running out of ideas. For one, it cuts a great slender shape and offers state-of-the-art innovations in picture quality, sound, and connectivity that can only come from Panasonic.

Superb images

The new Viera is equipped with the V-Real processor and V-Real Driver that remaster video signals to render images in spectacular fashion. Its 16-bit video processing makes it possible to reproduce images with 3,072 equivalent steps of gradation, giving images intricate detail, fine textures and subtle expressions.

An original Panasonic technology enables the Viera to optimize contrast by matching it to the images in each scene, thus instead of losing gradation by making part of the image too bright or too dark, the Viera applies just the right amount of contrast correction for each part of the scene, resulting in natural beauty to the image.

Aside from these innovations, Panasonic also added a new Deep Black Filter system to the Viera’s already legendary Real Black Drive System to enable the new TV to achieve exceptionally deep, rich blacks and purer whites.

Panasonic has also put in a sub-pixel controller that processes the red, green and blue colors independently for each pixel to make edges sharper.

Superb sound

The Viera’s sound system has been totally revamped to provide superior bass performance and deliver clear, natural sounds. Its advanced, ultra-slim speakers deliver superb low- to medium-frequency sound, and its woofers use an original, enhanced passive radiator system to produce a tight, rich, robust bass.

Connectivity is one of the Viera’s virtues. With two HDMI terminals, a PC input terminal and an SD card slot, the Viera can be used to enjoy a gamut of electronic devices from DVD players/recorders, HDTV receivers, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 2, down to digital video and digital still cameras.

And finally, the new Viera combines a gracious form that matches virtually any room décor with the compactness of its thin profile (1,020 mm). Its compact body reflects Panasonic’s "melding screen" design concept, which conceals the border between images and their surrounding space.

The Viera is one of the world’s slimmest 42-inch TVs. Panasonic’s pursuit of aesthetics has achieved this super-slim body without sacrificing the graceful design. Even the bezel that surrounds the screen is subtly gradated and is thicker at the screen center and becomes thinner outward.