My Panasonic plasma (P60ST50)

My Panasonic plasma (P60ST50) was delivered last Thursday, it is looks fantasic. I’ve been watching mostly Olympics, and running the slides to age the panel when its not it use. I’m not convinced it’s going to make any difference, but the worst it will do is run my electricity bill a bit higher and age my TV an extra 100 or so hours. I still need to attempt to properly calibrate it, but without changing hardly any setting it looks great.

As for the nvidia gt430 vs amd(ati) 6750, I tried both, and now have the 6750 in my HTPC. Nvidia, stupidly got rid of ability to setup hotkey display changes within their control application. I have a secondary monitor that I like to use when the large panel is being used via cablebox. I like to have hotkeys mapped to remote to switch between the secondary monitor and my TV– single display at a time. I was able to set up the Nvidia card with hotkeys using Ultramon, but for reasons that aren’t clear to me, the computer or control software would get confused and stop switching displays and the resolution would gets screwed up. I didn’t spend too long trying to make this work, mostly because I knew the catalyst software had the hotkey features, and its worked well for my with my old 3850 for years, so I popped in the 6750. So far its worked well, but I haven’t spent much time adjusting settings. The ATI card didn’t allow me to pass audio through DVI, and I think I needed the HDMI out to go directly to the TV for 3d, so I am going back to optical digital out from my HTPC to my AVR, have given up on HD audio for the time being. Maybe if I get sick of 3d, I’ll think about HD audio– I don’t think I’ll notice a huge difference.

I watched ~50% of avatar in 3d with cyberlink power DVD, which worked quite well, execpt that it crashed twice and got choppy at several other places (maybe chapter divisions). The 3d effect was beautiful, and very enjoyable. I also tried the same with arcsoft total media theater, but its very choppy all of the time– there must be some setting that is screwed up.

Bottom line– the panasonic P60ST50 is great TV. I’m very impressed after a solid weekend of use.