Cheap Panasonic TC-P50U2 50-Inch 1080p Plasma HDTV

The issue described in the last paragraph will not be a problem for any user who never uses the 4:3 format option when using this TV, but for me it caused me to return what would have otherwise been a fine TV

As a movie buff, and just a person with general sense, I naturally want to see an uncropped version of any movie or TV channel I watch. This, and I assume all Panasonic units, offers four screen formats: 4:3, Zoom, Full, and Justified. Full and Justified are unusable, as they simply horizontally stretch the existing picture, no matter what the original format, to reach the right and left edges of the screen. This leaves horizontal black bars at top and bottom, which is fine, but the resulting image is unnaturally elongated horizontally. Characters faces and bodies become much wider than normal, especially if viewing a movie or TV channel that is originally in 4:3 format. That leaves you with "zoom" and "4:3" Zoom fills all areas of the screen with a portion of the image, but in doing so lops off 2-to-15 percent of the top and bottom of the picture. This issue is so severe that, when viewing CNN, for example, the entire bottom "crawl" area of data disappeared.

So I opted to stick with the 4:3 option (the full amount of any image is shown, even a Cinemascope film, but the entire image rests within the boundaries of a 4:3 size box in the middle of the screen). At 50 inches, even the 4:3 setting gave me a larger image than my previous CRT TV. (Panasonic allows one to make the color of the resulting vertical black bars on either side completely black, so you aren't watching the image surrounded by gray bars.)

Unfortunately, the TV adds a very slender but very bright vertical line between the image and the black bars on the right and left sides. This quickly causes the burn-in issue that plasma screens are noted for. These lines became burned in to the screen after I used the unit casually for only a week. Now, anytime I use the "zoom" format to fill the screen (on occasions where the source aspect ratio means that very little of the top and bottom of the image would be cropped with this setting) there are two vertical lines on the screen that will not disappear. The are both set about 7 inches in from the outer edges.

Without this problem, we would be talking about an almost perfect TV. And yes, I have scrutinized every single setup option to see if these bright vertical lines could be eliminated during viewing in the 4:3 format, but there is no solution. The TV comes with a feature that blasts the screen for 15 minutes with bright white scrolling bars, in an attempt to remove any burned-in area, but even that will not remove the two vertical lines.Get more detail about Panasonic TC-P50U2 50-Inch 1080p Plasma HDTV.