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• The Good: Smart, solid design; full suite of inputs; delivers wonderfully deep blacks.
• The Bad: Colour reproduction isn't spot-on; aspect ratio control is disabled for high-definition inputs; wide, black frame is graceless.
• The Verdict: A competitively priced television with above average picture quality and a host of handy features.
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REVIEW:

Critics questioned Hewlett-Packard when it announced it was going to enter the highly competitive industry of consumer televisions. The jury is still out on whether it will prove to be a successful business venture, but the televisions themselves are uniformly quite impressive.

HP wisely decided not to start the engineering process from scratch. They joined forces with several highly respected OEMs (some official, some not) to ensure that the base technology for their LCD, rear-projection, and plasma televisions would be leading edge.

In the case of the Pavilion PL4200N 42-inch plasma HDTV, HP partnered with a company that manufactures a proven panel that has a long lifespan, the capacity to deliver an excellent contrast ratio, and one that will be far less likely to suffer from image burn-in.

A great starting point, but the designers still had plenty of work to do.

They surrounded the panel with a thick black frame. It's a bit bulky to be considered stylish, but it does do a good job of camouflaging the speakers on the left and right of the display.

More impressive is the pedestal stand, which, unlike the stands that ship with most of the flat screen panels I've tested, is extraordinarily sturdy. It weighs in at about 18 kilograms, and provides a solid enough foundation that HP was able to incorporate a swiveling feature — something of a rarity for pedestals accompanying larger panel TVs.

Understanding that connectivity options often make or break deals for many consumers, HP has delivered a robust variety of jacks - though perhaps not as many of each as some people might like. It sports just one HDMI and one VGA input. It also has a pair of component connections, as well as one S-Video port and a couple of composite video jacks. It has an integrated HDTV tuner to pick up broadcast HD signals as well as a CableCARD slot and RF port. PC and SD card slots, along with a digital optical audio output, round out the PL4200N's collection of connections.

Of course, the greatest challenge for HP's engineers had nothing to do with aesthetics or connectivity, but rather image processing. Could they make the most of the panel they were working with?

It truly excels in terms of contrast. In the digitally remastered THX 1138, faint details in the black uniforms worn by the film's robot police officers were readily apparent even in scenes with pure white backgrounds. The murky streets in the movie Dark City, the shadows of which often appear as little more than black blobs on many lower-end plasma televisions, were composed of subtly textured surfaces that featured a surprisingly wide gamut of blacks and dark greys.

Shadows were represented just as well in my trials with high definition video games. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a high-definition game for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console — much of which takes place in dark, gloomy dungeons — was breathtaking on the PL4200N. True black existed in appropriate places, but objects in shadow could still be perceived, and there was virtually no evidence of false contouring in areas where shadows transitioned into light.

Unfortunately, the set doesn't score as well in terms of colour representation. The colours of images originating from a wide variety of sources, ranging from a DVD player to a camcorder, appeared a bit muted — almost as if there was a sheet of very faintly tinted glass between the picture and the viewer.

Switching from the standard preset to the cinema setting worsened the problem. Toggling to vivid mode helped alleviate the washed out feeling, but resulted in a picture that felt somewhat surreal. Playing with the colour temperature yielded better results, as did monkeying with specific picture controls, such as tint, brightness, and colour.

I eventually managed to arrive at image settings that delivered a picture that was quite satisfactory, though not quite as impressive as some of the top performing plasma displays on the market, most notably the Panasonic TH-42PX50U.

Moving past picture quality, the PL4200N has all of the luxury features you would expect to get in a first-tier plasma HDTV, including both picture-in-picture and picture-outside-picture (which allows users to watch images from differing sources at the same time), a smartly designed remote with backlighting for all buttons, and a flip-down panel in front of the display to facilitate the quick connection of external devices.

Is this the plasma set for you? Its outstanding level of contrast, ability to accept feeds from just about anything you can think of, practical design, and well implemented first-tier features are mighty strong selling points. If you don't consider colour reproduction that's only slightly less than ideal to be a deal breaker, then the PL4200N, priced at $3,299 (Cdn.), is definitely worth checking out.