Yes, Panasonic’s 65VX100E 65in plasma screen costs £8000. And so for most of us it will never be anything more than a grubby fantasy shoved to the back of our gadget-obsessed minds.
But we bet you aren’t half interested to know if any TV can really be worth such an absurd amount of money, right?
First impressions of Panasonic’s monster don’t bode particularly well. For the 65VX100E’s simple black rectangle design really couldn’t look more basic – despite being made from exceptionally robust aluminium.
The first real sign that the 65VX100E is a bit special comes with the discovery that its connections are modular. In other words, the screen carries bays into which you can slot boards carrying whatever configuration of jacks you fancy.
Ever the pro
This sort of customisation is highly unusual on a consumer screen – so it’s no surprise to find that the 65VX100E actually heralds from Panasonic’s Professional screen division, aimed at high-end corporate users.
This heritage also means the screen doesn’t ship with a built-in tuner, but then anyone likely to spend eight grand on a screen will likely have all manner of external sources – Sky HD, Blu-ray player etc – to drive it with.
The bulk of your eight grand, though, is going into the prodigious amount of cutting-edge technology behind the 65VX100E’s pictures.
For instance, unlike any of Panny’s more affordable consumer plasmas, the 65VX100E boasts a high-spec new feature called the Dynamic Black Layer.
This sits within the 65VX100E’s screen structure, reducing the predischarge levels of the plasma cells to an estimated one-sixth of normal levels. The result? A native contrast ratio claim of 60000:1 – truly extraordinary for such a big screen.
In living colour
The 65VX100E also boasts a new phosphor material process technology which, when combined with a new optical filtering system and 18-bit video processing, is reckoned to produce an unprecedentedly expansive colour gamut.
Another excellent high-end touch is the facility to deactivate all of the 65VX100E’s internal processing, so that the screen becomes a mere ‘conduit’ for pictures coming in from an external video processor.
This is manna from heaven for custom installers – as are the reams of picture adjustment options the 65VX100E carries.
Manna from heaven for us, meanwhile, is the screen's amazing picture quality. Its reproduction of black, for instance, is stunning, thanks to the complete absence of both the greyness associated with many flat TVs and the green undertone often found with large plasma TVs.
Colours, too, are jaw-droppingly good, combining exceptionally rich, bright saturations for such a large screen with the most natural, subtle and expansive colour palette we’ve ever seen on a flat telly. A bold claim, but it’s the truth, Ruth.
You won't miss a thing
The combination of a full HD resolution with Panasonic’s outstanding video processing ensures that HD sources look unfeasibly sharp, clean and detailed on the 65VX100E, too.
Put all the 65VX100E’s various groundbreaking picture capabilities together with the 65in screen, and you end up immersed in any good Blu-ray movie so deeply that the rest of the world just disappears. Which may explain why it’s taken us much longer than usual to get this review on ‘paper’!
So yes, the 65VX100E costs as much as a brand new Renault Megane Sport. But in AV terms, it’s an Aston Martin.
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