Product Information :  Panasonic Viera TX-P50C3B

A digital TV tuner built into a HD Ready TV is not necessarily able to receive and decode HD signals. The tuner itself needs to be HDTV labeled and it is recommended to contact the retailer or manufacturer to be certain what type of tuner the TV has.

What technology is the TV based on?

Plasma tvs are thin and lightweight and capable of being mounted on a wall like a painting. Their main advantage toward LCD is that they are capable of showing a more intense black.

LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Displays. It is a flat panel technology which uses liquid crystals sandwiched between two glass plates. These TVs can be even thinner than plasma screens and they normally use less energy. LCD-technology is the most common technique today.

LED-tvs are newer versions of LCD-tvs that use light-emitting diodes as backlight. This allows them to show black and dark colors more intensively.

Projection-TV use three picture tubes instead of one. A red, a blue and a green cathode ray tube. The advantage is that you can easily project to a large surface area without too much loss of quality. One disadvantage is that it is still very expensive to buy.

Picture size is measured in inches.
An inch is 2.54 cm. The size of the screen is measured diagonally from corner to corner.

An abbreviation referring to video content with resolution, displayed at a frame rate of 24 frames-per-second. This is the standard frame rate for film-based content; the vast majority of Blu-ray movies are encoded in 1080p/24. Most HDTVs display images at 50 or 60 fps so only TVs capable of displaying frames in multiples of 24 (such as 100 Hz or 200 Hz HDTVs) can display 1080p/24.

The scanning frequency.
50 Hz - The picture is updated 50 times per second.
100 Hz - The picture is updated 100 times per second, giving a sharper picture with less obvious "flicker".

A television with progressive scanning can generate a picture in a single pass, in a similar way to a computer screen. A standard television uses an interlacing format, alternating lines 50 times a second, creating a full image 25 times a second. Through progressive scanning the television scans all the lines on the television in succession, and does a full screen with all lines 50 times a second, resulting in double the frame rate and higher picture quality.

4:3 Standard Displays

Code Width Height Ratio
QVGA 320 x 240 4:3
HVGA 640 x 240 8:3
VGA 640 x 480 4:3
SVGA 800 x 600 4:3
XGA 1024 x 768 4:3
XGA+ 1152 x 768 3:2
1152 x 864 4:3
SXGA 1280 x 1024 5:4
SXGA+ 1400 x 1050 4:3
UXGA 1600 x 1200 4:3
QXGA 2048 x 1536 4:3
16:9 and 16:10 Widescreen Displays

WXGA 1280 x 768 5:3
1280 x 800 16:10
1366 x 768 ~16:9
WXGA+ 1280 x 854 ~3:2
1440 x 900 16:10
1440 x 960 3:2
WSXGA 1600 x 900 16:9
1600 x 1024 16:10
WSXGA+ 1680 x 1050 16:10
WUXGA 1920 x 1200 16:10
WQXGA 2560 x 1600 16:10
WQUXGA 3840 x 2400 16:10

The contrast ratio is interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Some retailers and/or manufacturers states the dynamic contrast while others choose to show the static contrast ratio. These two values can differ quite much. A TV can have a dynamic contrast ratio of 1600:1 while the static contrast is 800:1. We recommend that you look at the product for yourself if you want to be certain of its contrast ratio.

Type of sound
Mono - the sound comes through a single channel, even if the TV has two speakers.
Stereo - The sound comes through two channels and creates a more realistic, richer sound experience.
Virtual Surround - Thanks to modern techniques you can experience audio effects similar to genuine surround sound through only two speakers.
Dolby Surround - One of the most advanced and thrilling sound systems on the market. This is close as you can get to a real cinematic audio experience, with the sound coming from all directions, transferred through multiple channels.

Indicates the sound effect.
For example, 2x10W means that the model has two sound channels with a power of 10 Watts each. Watt - in short, the measure of the amplifier's power.

720p HD-Ready
The TV can accept, process and display High Definition 720p and 1080i signals. To enjoy HDTV broadcasts it will need an internal or external tuner that can receive and decode the signals.

1080p Full-HD
The TV can accept, process and display High Definition 720p 1080i and 1080p signals. To enjoy HDTV broadcasts it will need an internal or external tuner that can receive and decode the signals.

The three-jack (RCA/Phono) component video connection splits the video signal into three parts (one brightness and two color signals). Component video has increased bandwidth for color information, resulting in a more accurate picture with clearer color reproduction and less bleeding. A growing number of TVs include component video jacks to provide the best possible picture quality (better than S-video or composite video) when connected to a compatible DVD player. Special wide-bandwidth component video connections are capable of carrying wider bandwidth video signals, like progressive-scan DVD and High-Definition digital television. All HDTV-ready TVs include at least one set of wide-bandwidth connections for connecting a separate HDTV tuner (or progressive-scan DVD player). A component video connection can carry high bandwidth signals such as 1080i and 720p.

The number of optical digital audio outputs (Toslink) and coaxial digital audio outputs, respectively. If you have a home theater receiver, check to see which of these two digital audio connections are supported.

High Definition Media Interface. A type of connection for connecting Digital Video and Audio.

Ethernet is a network standard of communication using either coaxial or twisted pair cable. The most widely used for of LAN communication, Ethernet typically runs at 10 megabytes per second, though newer systems use 100 Mbps and even 1 gigabit of transfer.Ethernet has the IEEE standard 802.3. It has several different flavors, with the original Ethernet designed with 10base5. The "10" stands for 10 megabytes per second. Base is the baseband communications it uses. The "5" stands for a maximum distance of 500 meters to communicate with. Original Ethernet used coaxial wiring, while newer versions use twisted-pair cabling. There are several flavors of Ethernet, including 10Base2 (10 Mbps, 200 meters), 10BaseT (10 Mbps, 100 meters, twisted-pair), and 100BaseT (100 Mbps, 100 meter, twisted-pair).