So pleasantly surprised by the Panasonic 58DX700! The AV forums review was pretty up and down but the main cause of the low mark (50hz problems) has been fixed and is irrelevant for me. 58" from two meters is massive!
I paid £840 for a 58” UHD tv, that seems very cheap to me. As a result, I half expected it to be a bit mediocre. I was OK with that; this was meant as a stop gap for a while until I could afford something awesome. I’m pretty chuffed to be honest, it doesn’t have the LCD look that I was worried about. A TV in this price point having local dimming (albeit a basic implementation) is one of the things that swayed me over the Samsung 55KU6400, and the contrast was pretty good. I’m not that fussed over deep blacks as I don’t like watching TV in a pitch black room anyway, but it does seem to beat my old Samsung 51E6500 for contrast performance. The panel seems closer to one of Samsung’s 7 series panels than to a 6 series, it’s got a good quality filter and doesn’t appear as frosty.
Motion performance was a pleasant surprise too. As per AV forums recommendations I set the motion processing to low. This doesn’t introduce any nasty artefacts but just seems to take the edge off the 24p judder on pans. At this price point it’s not going to be up there with the best but it seems very good value.
So far I have watched Deadpool and Civil War on Bluray (not getting in to UHD until more films are available). Upscaling seems good, plenty of detail from a 1080p source.
I haven’t tried any HDR content yet and am not expecting wonders as this TV only puts out 350 nits, but daytime viewing is a marked improvement as expected over my old Plasma, I don’t need to pull the curtains when the sun is low now.
The Firefox interface is wonderful I have to admit. It’s definitely better than Tizen but not too familiar with LG so couldn’t comment. Its attractive to look at, simple and not overly cluttered. Freeview play looks good but don’t think I will use the terrestrial feed. I can see less app savvy people loving Freeview play. Bit disapointed there is no Plex but I can use the Chromecast instead.
Overall I’m pleasantly surprised! When my Plasma died I wasn’t sure I would be able to find something to beat it for sensible money but I was wrong. Unless you have a very high end Plasma like a KPR-500a I’m confident this chap would have the drop on it. For the buttons I paid for it that’s impressive.
*Before anyone tries to judge the picture quality based off of the photo I have attached, its broad daylight and I set the backlight to maximum to compensate. You can’t judge picture quality on your phone screen anyway so stop being ridiculous