Panasonic's new plasma TV, the G15, promises a lot: a Full HD 1080p screen using the latest generation plasma technology (NeoPDP G12), a DivX compatible SD card reader, excellent contrast, Internet connectivity and no ghosting.  But does it deliver?  Let's find out …

Handling & Hardware: full range of features, but struggles with video

Looking at its specs, the G15 certainly does fulfill its promises.  The Full HD panel is there, and the resolution is indeed 1920 x 1080 pixels, but it's covered in a glossy surface that suffers from reflections.  Unfortunately, DivX playback isn't compatible with HD video.  For that, you'll have to use AVC HD files produced by camcorders.  You can view JPEG photos one by one or as a slideshow, with music provided by Panasonic as the soundtrack--you can't choose your own tracks.  However, you can access your own audio, video and photo files on your home network using the DLNA-compatible Ethernet port.  This can also connect to the Internet to display information using the VieraCast system that we mentioned when we tested the Viera TX-PV50V10.

The G15 poses no problems when connected to a PC, displaying an image that is neither cropped nor upscaled when displaying a 1920 x 1080 pixel desktop over an HDMI cable.  During the same test, we measured an input lag of 20 ms, the best reading we've ever taken for a TV. 

We would normally mention the precautions that you need to take when using a plasma screen to display static images in this section of our test.  This time, though, we are going to nuance our advice.  In reality, even after showing a highly-contrasted static image for three quarters of an hour, the G15 only suffered from a very light ghost image, that was very difficult to spot and which disappeared after a few seconds.  That's a sign of the excellent progress made against the phenomenon of screen burn that has been made in recent generations, and especially compared to the plasma that we set out to burn in our summer-long test.

That doesn't mean we'd say the G15 will be immune to screen burn, but that you'll have to put some effort into marking it.  That means you can use it for a games console just as much as you want with a PC and Home CInema system.  We wouldn't be prepared to use it as a computer monitor though, given that some parts of the screen remain fixed for hours on end.

Image Quality: top marks!

Let's get straight to the main part of the test with some of the measurements from our lab bench.  And the suspense is over: from here on, we're going to be looking at some exceptional scores.  The blacks on screen were between 0.03 cd/m² and 0.04 cd/m² with whites between 129 cd/m² in light scenes and 157 cd/m² in dark scenes, where the brightness is spread over a smaller number of pixels.  The contrast ratio that produces varies between 3614:1 and 5014:1.  That's quite simply incredible.  You have to turn contrast up to 55 to get that sort of result, which doesn't damage the gamma curve too much.  We measured colours with a deltaE94 of 4.1, which is more than satisfactory.  The best televisions reach 2.6 while the worse are over 6.0.

The whole panel is almost perfectly even, with an average discrepancy of just 1 cd/m² between the 28 different points we measured.  The viewing angles are of course excellent, and the plasma screen is visible from anywhere in the room without any change in the appearance of the image in terms of brightness or colour.


Ghosting is entirely absent and there is nothing trailing behind moving objects.  On the other hand, there is sometimes a blue or green halo around objects moving across the screen that are highly contrasted with their background.  Only one of our test scenes produced this result, and we didn't notice it in any movies.

Finally, the IFCP mode allows you to make movements more fluid by removing the jerkiness in content that was filmed at 24 fps.  It works well but those who prefer watching films in their original framerate can deactivate it.

When we tried it out, we were left speechless by the G15.  The image on screen is just superb: deep, full of contrast, natural … with such high quality, you're left wondering how much room for improvement is left.

Sound Quality: There's not a lot missing

If there's one area where TVs can still make enormous progress, it's sound.  Fortunately for the G15, it's not at all bad, and the audio produced, although not exceptional, is good  enough.  You do need to play around with the settings a little, especially in 'surround' mode, to give it a bit of depth.

Energy Consumption: ouch!

Ouch … there's a nasty surprise with the G15!  248W is a lot more than an equivalent LCD TV would use while switched on.  In some ways, that's the price you pay for quality, and is one of the main problems with plasma technology.  In its defence, it's possible to say that a plasma screen is now a little cheaper than an LCD of equivalent quality.


Fortunately, standby is just like the vast majority of other models with a very modest, and cheap consumption of just 0.1 W.