Panasonic PT-53WX53 53-Inch Widescreen HD-Ready Projection TV
You may want to know more than what the manual tells you...
I really like the TV.  I like the way the picture looks, considering that I spent $1500, and not $5000.  I've had my TV a few days, so I can't tell you how it holds up over time (I'll be back).  This review is a \\"tell you what you may want to know from day one\\" as much as it is a review.  I hope I can help prevent you from damaging your projection TV by telling things not mentioned in the manual.<br />An earlier review (different website) gave the TV one star out of five because he said after eight months he had side bars permanently burned into his screen, and he felt the manual's &quot;don't use 4:3 mode more than 15% of the time&quot; wasn't enough information.  Keeping this in mind, I never use 4:3 with gray side bars (I can live with the &quot;Just&quot; stretch.)<br />The manual says nothing about a break in period (it didn't say &quot;this TV has new technology and doesn't need a \\"break-in&quot; either).  I've read several internet articles that recommend special treatment the first 100 hours--have the contrast turned down.  This TV doesn't list &quot;contrast&quot; but I'm assuming &quot;picture&quot; is the same thing.  One said 250 hours (most said one hundred).  Everyone said turn down the contrast (or in our case, I think `picture').  One said to turn down other things (well, you need some brightness, or else no light gets to the screen and that can't be a good break-in either J.  Several articles on projection TVs said \\"Wow, after the breakin the picture became really great!\\"  My second day I thought it was looking better than the first.  One site said \\"don't just turn on your TV for 100 hours and say `I'm done!'\\", that the turning the TV on and turning it off (so that the components warm up, then cool down, etc.) was a part of the conditioning.<br />As delivered, the TV setting was on &quot;vivid&quot; which has the highest picture.  I turned that all the way down.  I hooked a computer LCD monitor up to my DVD player through an S-video, and ran component cables (red, green, blue) from the DVD player into the TV so I could compare the pictures.  The TV seemed to error on too much red (people skin color), so I changed color temperature to cool, and there was too much color, so I turned down the tint.  This gave people a more natural looking skin color.  This isn't a criticism of this particular model--one website named three TV brands and said they all give you a TV with the contrast (or picture) turned high and probably too much red.  For comic relief, one guy mentioned that the stores put the most expensive TV's in a category on &quot;vivid&quot; so they look better than the less expensive TVs.<br />One site said that the large the projection TV, the more likelihood of problems like burn in .  I'm paranoid about the TV logos in the lower right corner if the logo is solid white (I sent ABC an email pleading with them to change to something half transparent so the colors underneath come through.)  News channels with a running ticker at the bottom of the screen-never!  <br />Right now while I'm breaking the TV, I'm not playing any cartoons.  My understanding of the break in is to run the circuitry without a heavy load on the lamps (like driving your new car 50 miles an hour on the highway).  To me, the cartoons are very very colorful, equivalent to playing a normal movie on vivid.  Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of the break-in?  I hope to find something about this on the internet.<br />Biggest complaint- I've already seen with two of my widescreen DVDs that they don't quite fill the screen from top to bottom (slight slivers of blackness at top and bottom) and none of the zoom modes will fix this.  Those DVD's are now banned from the TV(I'll play them on my computer).  One review site said the problem was that this TV only has four Zoom options, and other TVs have more.  Maybe later I'll get a new DVD player that can send out a signal with various zooms and then I would just put the TV on standard aspect (no zooming) to accept it.  Perhaps this is my biggest complaint against the TV, that the basic \\"zoom\\" can't make it zoom all the way in each direction.  From reading the manual, I would have thought it would zoom completely.<br />TV gets 4 of 5 stars for excellent price to performance ratio.  I wanted to give 5, but if all this stuff I found on the internet is true, then when I bought the TV, I could have read the manual, turned it on, and misused/abused it during the first few weeks of use.  I don't know how much new lamps cost, or what I would pay for the labor.  The guy with the problem of the burned in side bars said that one would cost $500 total (parts and labor).