Panasonic Plasma HDTV

This Panasonic plasma HDTV, the TH-42PX25U is a 42in plasma screen which has an integrated HDTV tuner and a contrast ratio of 3000:1.

The relatively high contrast ratio is important because it makes blacks more black, ie shadows are darker, and whites more white, ie bright scenes become more vivid. This has a significant effect on the overall quality of the image.

The built-in HDTV receiver means you don't need a separate tuner. If you want to receive free-to-air high definition TV, you just plug your antenna straight into the TV. Although, you may need to buy a new antenna in order to watch HDTV. In addition to an ATSC tuner fro HDTV, the TH-42PX25U also has tuner's for NTSC and QAM256. QAM, which stands for Quadrature Amplitude Modulation is part of the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standard, rather than the ATSC's standard for HDTV, but it has been adopted by the industry as a de facto standard for delivering high definition content over cable

This Panasonic plasma HDTV also has a CableCARD slot (or point-of-deployment module, to give it its technical name). This means that if your cable company supports CableCARD, you can get a card from then which slots into the TV and allows you to watch protected cable TV content. CableCARD essentially gives you some of the features of a cable set-top box, without haviing to have the set-top box. However, the system is uni-directional and so doesn't support interactive services such as pay per view, video on demand, and interactive program guides. Negotiations for a bi-directional agreement on CableCARD are underway.

The TH-42PX25U connects to home theater equipment, such as a DVD player or cable or satellite box using an HDMI cable. The HDMI cable carries both digital audio and video signals and is one of two standards for connecting screens displaying HDTV (the other being DVI which only carries video signals).

The feature set of this Panasonic plasma HDTV is completed by an SD card slot, which means that if you have a digital camera which uses SD cards, you can take the card out of the camera and plug it into the TV to view your pictures on-screen.

You can read reviews from people who already own a Panasonic TH-42PX25U at Amazon.