Our 10 Best Gear Awards

The best gear of the year.

The Audience is Viewing

THX, as a company, has an interesting "job" so to speak: work with companies to help them design better performing products. Their work with audio is well known, but home video is a new realm for them, which you can read about in Seal of Approval.

Panasonic plasmas offer a great starting point. Rarely underwhelming, Panasonic's displays are usually aimed towards the mainstream market, with performance to match. That is to say, good, but rarely great. To say I was intrigued by the idea of these two companies working together would be putting it mildly.

KURO MkII

How do you follow up on a winner? Last year's, first generation KURO plasmas were, quite simply, the best looking flat-panels available. Their black level and contrast ratio simply couldn't be approached by anything else on the market.

Here we are, a year later, and the second generation of KURO has hit the streets. So the question you have to ask yourself is, if you were Pioneer, and you were leading the industry in picture quality, even a year after your initial release, what would you do?

When you turn off your flat-panel TV, it becomes a black hole in the wall. Here’s how to hide it away when you’re not watching.

My friend Steve just bought a large flat-panel TV and mounted it to the wall. He assumed his wife would love the sleek look, but she’s not happy with the way the TV becomes a “piece of black glass that’s just hanging there” when it’s not in use. It seems like she wishes the TV would just go away when they’re not watching it. Luckily for Steve, it doesn’t take any magic at all to make that happen.

Pioneer Elite plasma TVs have long been favorites of critical viewers and specialist home theater retailers. Their latest offerings, under a new Elite Kuro moniker and available in 50” and 60” sizes feature full 1080p resolution and a slew of upscale features, including home A/V networking connectivity and the promise of better visual quality by way of better deep black picture performance.

Unlike some of its competitors, who embrace specific technologies and exclude others, Samsung does not play favorites. It produces both plasma and LCD flat-panel TVs, and makes rear-projection sets with either conventional bulb light sources or the new high-output LEDs. Among the many dozens of TVs the company produces, the very best is probably its latest 63-inch 1080p plasma set, the FP-T6374.

No doubt about it, 1080p is the marketing catchphrase to tout in high-definition displays. That number refers to the number of horizontal scan lines, in progressive (not interlaced) format that represents the highest of all the high-def specification. But whether or not you can actually see the difference between 1080p and lower-resolution high-def formats is questionable. It depends on the size of the screen and how far you sit from it.

Fujitsu was the first to market a plasma TV in the United States, but one of the last to recognize that flat-panel TVs have become a design element. The company’s TVs have in the past looked more appropriate displaying "Flight 209 delayed. Scheduled departure time 7:45 a.m. New departure time 7:45 p.m." than depicting Jeremy Piven’s five o’clock shadow in the latest episode of Entourage. But the company now offers consumers a choice between silver and gloss black cabinet finishes, and has gently rounded the bezel for a more stylish look.