PERFORMANCE

Web TV: What an idea! Hitting the Viera Cast button on the 46G10's remote, I was able to check my local weather, which was displayed complete with a five-day forecast and satellite map. It was also interesting (in a voyeuristic sort of way) to use Picasa to scan slide shows of other folks' photos. Watching YouTube videos on a TV rather than a PC was also fun, but the absence of an "unstretch" option meant I had no choice but to see them stretched out to fill the screen.

As I mentioned earlier, the THX mode made pictures somewhat too dim for me, even when viewed in a completely dark room. That one caveat aside, the accurate color and gamma adjustments that lock into place when THX is selected bring the experience of watching a movie at home much closer to what you'd see in an actual movie theater. With Custom mode selected, colors looked more heavily saturated and shadowy scenes showed slightly less detail than in THX. But I ultimately found the increase in visual punch that the Custom mode could deliver to be a worthwhile trade-off.

This proved especially true when watching a Blu-ray Disc of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. In a scene where the Pevensie siblings rescue the Narnian Trumpkin from being drowned, the set's subtle rendering of light and shadow lent the picture a convincing sense of depth. Bold colors like the blue-green ocean and the red fletching on Susan's arrows looked brilliant; at the same time, earthy hues like the orange of Lucy's gown and the green forest in the background came across as natural, as did the pale skin tones of the four siblings.

The Panasonic's handling of blacks in dark scenes was also satisfying. In a scene from Prince Caspian, for example, where the returning siblings visit an underground temple to view friezes commemorating their heroic exploits, background shadows looked deep, and it was easy to see fine details of the engravings lining the walls. But when I viewed a wide shot where the kids first go underground with only a single torch lighting their path, the blacks lacked that last, ultimate layer of depth - the exact thing that enables Pioneer's Kuro plasma screens to "disappear" when displaying very dark images.

To test Amazon VOD, I used the Viera Cast screen to order two high-def titles: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. With both offerings, picture quality was a notch below HD cable, as the image looked somewhat soft with occasional blocky artifacts. And the audio was stereo, not 5.1, which is a drag. But I found the experience of streaming high-def from Amazon VOD to be more consistently satisfying than Netflix's equivalent service, which provides picture quality ranging from okay to awful and is also prone to mid-movie freeze-ups.

The 46G10's handling of standard-def programs was just average. Film-sourced 480i-format programs on DVD looked fine. But standard-def cable TV looked soft, and the set also displayed "jaggy" artifacts on a number of tests that we use to check upconversion performance. As with the Panasonic Z800-series TV that I tested last year (the TH-50PZ800U; review available online), the 46G10's image showed an objectionable degree of flicker when I engaged its 48-Hz display setting (a mode designed to reduce judder with Blu-ray Disc movies when the player's 1080p/24-format output is active). Plenty of other HDTVs can display Blu-ray content at a multiple of the format's native 1080p/24 frame rate with no problem, so it's too bad Panasonic didn't correct that issue this time out.

BOTTOM LINE

Panasonic's TC-46G10 is an affordable plasma TV that combines great picture quality with worthwhile (as opposed to gimmicky) features. The set's somewhat dim picture in THX mode left me squinting, but I appreciated its otherwise studio-accurate picture. And Viera Cast extends your suite of viewing options at no added cost (other than money spent buying or renting titles from Amazon's Video on Demand library of 40,000 movies and TV shows). The G10-series plasma isn't the Kuro heir apparent, but it's an easy recommendation nonetheless.