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0 7 4<br />
Televisions<br />
WIRED TEST<br />
38 to 49 Inches<br />
With 42 inches of full-res 1080p and mindblowing<br />
contrast for around two grand,<br />
you can finally trade in your rear-projection<br />
mastodon for a sleek panther—without<br />
moving home to Mom and Dad’s. —C.C.<br />
Panasonic TH-42PZ700U<br />
$2,200 • panasonic.com<br />
We’d love this 42-inch pla<strong>sm</strong>a if we couldn’t buy Toshiba’s set and a<br />
newly discounted iPhone for the same price. Our Blu-ray movie looked<br />
great on it, with rich colors and lots of contrast. But we found Panasonic’s<br />
noise reduction heavy-handed, creating blocky image artifacts.<br />
Thankfully, it’s easily disabled, leaving a good—if slightly noisy—picture.<br />
WIRED Displays photos and plays music from USB drives and<br />
camera-friendly SD memory cards.<br />
TIRED Back-breakingly heavy. Can’t find cadence of all HD sources,<br />
which can lead to loss of resolution. Stand is a bitch to assemble.<br />
Philips 42PFL7432D/37<br />
$1,800 • philips.com<br />
She’s purdy, but kinda dumb. This 42-inch LCD 1080p failed three<br />
of our five processing tests. We saw jaggies in angled lines, and when<br />
presented with HD sources that originated at 24 fps, the set came<br />
up with moiré and flashing. It also turned dark colors black, yielding an<br />
inky picture. Add brightness to compensate and you lose contrast.<br />
WIRED Ambilight. Three HDMI ports.<br />
TIRED Complex menus. Maximum noise-reduction setting turns<br />
picture plasticky; other modes are indistinguishable. Can’t sync up<br />
cadence of all HD sources. Disappointment shouldn’t be this pricey.<br />
Polaroid TLA-04011C<br />
$899 • polaroid.com<br />
Offering 720p in this size category is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.<br />
Still, our Blu-ray movie looked decent on Polaroid’s low-buck machine.<br />
But as Momma told us, you get what you pay for. (Or was it that girl<br />
we met on Nerve.com?) Adjustment couldn’t clear up its color problems<br />
fully, and its noise reduction created a distracting pulsing effect in<br />
some video. We also saw ghosting, indicating poor motion processing.<br />
WIRED 40-inch flatscreen for well under a grand? Twist our arm.<br />
TIRED Mediocre performance in video-processing tests; pixel interpolation<br />
yields artifacts. Lots of jagged diagonal lines.<br />
Samsung LN-T4065<br />
$2,699 • samsung.com<br />
Though it delivers a well-balanced movie picture requiring almost<br />
no tinkering, the Samsung 40-incher’s colors were a little subdued<br />
for our taste. The set performed admirably in our gauntlet of signalprocessing<br />
tests and offers a slew of digital and analog source inputs,<br />
but at this price, we’d get a 47-incher and suffer the plug-swapping.<br />
WIRED Good noise reduction. 15,000:1 contrast delivers dark blacks<br />
but not a dark picture. Swivel stand. Plays media via USB.<br />
TIRED Couldn’t catch the cadence of some HD sources, producing<br />
a ton of jaggies and visual artifacts.
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