Hitachi 50HDT50 Plasma TV Review

In order to really experience high definition television, a plasma TV is the way to go. The Hitachi 50HDT50, although pricey, offers crystal clear images as well as plenty of extra features that make it worth the extra dough.

Picture quality is the first thing people notice when shopping for a plasma television. Hitachi’s 50” screen with its 16:9 aspect ratio delivers some striking pictures, which makes this set perfect for a home theater setup. The actual screen used in the Hitachi 50HDT50 has an anti-reflective shield that helps to reduce glare caused by other light sources in the room. In addition to reducing glare, this shield ensures that colors remain vibrant and shadow details don’t become muddy.

New to the Hitachi 50HDT50 is the inclusion of a Virtual HD 1080p Video Processor. This technology takes conventional broadcast signals and bumps them up to near HD quality. This ensures that the picture you see is high quality regardless of the signal’s source.

Watching regular, analog TV broadcasts on a wide-screen plasma display presents other problems besides the picture quality. The most notable is the aspect ratio. Obviously you can’t stretch a picture meant for a 4:3 aspect ratio into a 16:9 without some major distortion. However, the Hitachi 50HDT50 handles this dilemma quite well by using a progressive distortion technique that makes the picture fit with virtually no degradation in image quality. There are additional options to ensure you get the best picture when watching standard 4:3 programs.

While the Hitachi 50HDT50 has a pixel resolution of 1,280 X 780 it can downsample digital 1080I signals for extremely crisp pictures. Adding to the set’s picture capabilities, the TV utilizes a 4 MB, 10-bit digital Y/C filter to separate the brightness and color signals better in the 3D domain. This helps to do away with annoyances such as: dot crawl distortion and vertically hanging dots, which makes for a razor sharp picture. Watching progressive scan movies on monitors meant for video can be a problem because progressive scan runs at 24 frames per second (FPS) while video runs at 30 FPS. The Hitachi 50HDT50 solves this problem by including an automatic 3:2 pull-down detection and reversal. This works by duplicating the progressive scan film and digitally correcting it by removing redundant visual information so that you get an accurate frame rate.

Screen burn is a big problem with plasma televisions. Simply put, screen burn occurs when a static image, like the startup screen to a video game, remains on the screen too long causing a ‘ghost’ of itself to become burned into the screen. It’s something that can’t be fixed and when you’re paying close to five grand for a plasma TV, you’ll want to be careful. Hitachi advises that you never keep the “side bars” (normal HDTV display) on the screen more than 15% of the time. This is especially true if you plan on using the Hitachi 50HDT50 as a computer monitor, so be sure to use a good screen saver.

Sound quality usually takes a close second to picture quality when it comes to HD sets and the 50HDT50 provides adequate sound from 2, 20 watt MTS stereo speakers that can be detached from the unit. The results aren’t earth shattering, but are enough to fill an average room.

Additional features include: front and rear A/V inputs, parental locks, sleep timer, digital window split screen, 3 on screen language menus and a DVI Digital input, which ensures the TV’s compatibility with the newest set-top boxes. The TV comes with a swivel table-top stand and can be mounted on the wall with additional hardware.

Conclusion

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10/10

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