Panasonic TH-P58V10A plasma television

The Panasonic TH-P58V10A is a 58in plasma television with a thin chassis and a great display panel. It may be expensive, but this is about the only downside — it has great image quality, it's super-slim and can be easily wall mounted, and its power consumption isn't particularly bad.

When we first unpacked the Panasonic TH-P58V10A, we were surprised at its relative lightness. Don't get us wrong, it's still 51kg of metal and glass, but we were able to move it around without any extra help. The chassis is all metal so it feels well constructed, and the front plastic bezel is pleasantly thick. A power button on the front panel provides an easy way of turning the television off completely to save power, though the buttons on the right for volume and channel allow a soft-off for quick start-up.

The Panasonic TH-P58V10A misses out on the Viera Cast online access features of the Panasonic TH-P50G15A, so there's no Ethernet port on the rear. There are four HDMI ports, though, so you won't have any trouble connecting a media streamer or media centre PC. A host of analog connections — two component, four composite, two S-Video and one VGA — allow a veritable fleet of legacy equipment to be connected.

We tried the Panasonic TH-P58V10A with a ASRock Ion 330 HT-BD media centre PC connected via HDMI and VGA, as well as a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook via VGA. A suite of Blu-ray movies — Year One, Angels and Demons, The Dark Knight and Terminator: Salvation — made their way through the ASRock media centre PC's Blu-ray drive, and we were consistently very impressed with the Panasonic TH-P58V10A's performance.

In the THX-certified image mode we saw great black levels and wonderfully clean colours — though perhaps very slightly undersaturated. There is a reasonably large range of adjustability for brightness, sharpness, saturation and contrast levels — it's not as powerful as the Panasonic TH-P50VX100W but there's room to tweak the picture to suit your living space.

A contrast ratio of 2,000,000:1 means that the Panasonic TH-P58V10A has the versatility to display detail in both dark and bright areas of the screen. Motion is consistently smooth when needed. However, 24p compatibility means Blu-ray video with a 24Hz refresh rate is displayed faithfully. Put simply, if you need a television that's got great image quality, the Panasonic TH-P58V10A has it in spades.

The Panasonic TH-P58V10A plasma television is only 2in thick, making it a perfect candidate for wall-mounting. We think it has noticeably superior image quality to other super-slim TVs like the Sony Bravia KDL40ZX1, so if you're looking for a screen to be part of a proper 'home theatre' installation this should be high on your list.

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