Customer Reviews

Do Not Buy
Do Not Buy this model or any other Panasonic plasma without careful research. Mine stopped working after less than two months. The first service call took over a week and they replaced three circuit boards. Still doesn’t work and now they want to replace the actual plasma screen. The in-home service is great if you want them moving in. The picture and sound were awesome when it worked but who wants to deal with multiple repairs on a new set? Every time I walk into the house I look at this dead, expensive TV. Check out other consumer rating sites to read about multiple component failures.

I like it
I’ve compared several LCDs and Plasmas in stores. The picture quality of this plasma TV is better than higher end LCDs from Sony and Samsung. At 42 inches, I found this TV to be a better deal than those LCDs. The color saturation and black levels are slightly better than the best LCDs despite advances in LCD technology. The superior contrast also allows me to lower the brightness of the picture without compromising the details. The picture is a lot easier on the eyes this way when there’s less light in the room. I set the picture setting to standard with default settings. The cinema setting might be useful under bright lighting conditions. Vivid is too bright to be useful.
Awesome colors and black levels made this TV a great buy for me.

Just What I Was Looking For…
This is my first HDTV. I went back and forth on LCD and Plasma. Most of the people that I felt who knew this type of technology recommended Plasma and Panasonic and Pioneer was the brands the said to stick too. I simply could not afford the pioneer and the jump to the 50″ Panasonic was to much for my budget (no one locally seems to care the 46″).

I ended up purchasing this Panasonic Plasma from my local Best Buy.

I am SOOO happy I picked this TV. It looks even better at home then it did in the store. I was concerned about glare as there is a lot of natual light in the room and many told me LCD does better in those type of rooms, I must say - this TV is perfect in my well light room. My old Tube TV had glare from the window, this Plasma has no glare at all.

I have digital cable from Insight with the HD box. It’s great. I have complaints about the cable box making you pick 1080i or 720p, but that’s not the TVs fault.

I find myself watching shows I wouldn’t normally watch just because they are in HD and the picture is so amazing.

I was worried about how non-HD programming would look to, and this TV does a great job of showing standard defination and if you chose to streach the picture it does a really good job not making it look good when in streched mode.

I even got a chance to call Panasonic support with a question. When you are watching standard def programming and are not streching it the side bars are gray by default. I wanted to make them black. I called the 800 number on the manual and Panasonic was very helpful in telling me how to change the side bars to black.

I highly recommend this TV. It’s got good viewing angles too. If you can see the TV the picture looks fine.

Panasonic Viera TH-42PZ85U
Awesome in every way - and a great price. It was delivered, brought to my doorstep on a dolly - carried into my living room - unwrapped and examined for damage (it was perfect) by a very friendly truck driver. I installed it at my cottage and it woks beautifully.

Great TV
I just got this TV 4 days ago after ordering a TV from Amazon about 3-4 weeks ago and having the delivery company crack it at their docks. Anyway I’m very happy that I ended up with this TV, as it wasn’t the original one that I ordered. I had originally ordered a 32″ Samsung LCD for a den, but changed my mind after the accident and got this Panasonic and bumped my 40″ Samsung LCD to the den.

This TV was easy to set up and looked great out of the box. The bezel looks a lot better than the older Panasonics. My parents have a Panasonic Plasma that they bought around 4-5 years ago that is still going strong and looking good. The newer versions are slimmer and sleaker and give the appearance of a super wide screen.

The NBA playoffs looked teriffic and the sound wasn’t bad either. I was excited to see that you could adjust the bass on the TV, but after doing so realized there isn’t a huge difference. The controller has surprisingly large buttons, which would be good for someone older to use.

Comparing this to my 40″ Samsung LCD you can see the difference in the color “popping” off the screen. These TV’s are designed for different things so neither is at fault and so far I don’t have a complaint about either of them.

I originally paid over 00 for this TV, but amazon price adjusted every time I saw the price go down and emailed them about it. The lowest I’ve seen it was around 4/15 and that was 72.xx shipped from Amazon.

Finally, the delivery, the second time around was great. They called me and asked when I wanted the TV delivered. They gave me a 3 day option to choose from. Also on the day of delivery I called CEVA and they were able to narrow down the delivery window to 3 hours. The delivery guy came within that window. While he was there I gave him 5 bucks just to take the TV out and make sure there weren’t any cracks.