All about electronics: Panasonic Viera ZT60 Series

Panasonic Viera ZT60 Series

Display

What sets the Panasonic Smart Viera ZT60 apart from the rest of the pack is the plasma screen of this television. It touts a studio master panel that produces Ultimate Black levels, meaning its deep black levels are deeper than the blacks you'll see with other televisions. While the Smart Viera ZT60 doesn't blow away all the competition, its display is one of the best on the market. This TV also has a one- sheet glass design that is not only nice to look at, but it reduces the glare from the plasma screen, helping to solve one of the biggest problems associated with plasma TVs.

The Panasonic Smart Viera ZT60 comes in only two screen sizes: 60 or 65 inches. While many plasma TVs generally come with 50-inche screens or higher, and some even offer a 42-inch size, bigger is not necessarily better. If you can't afford to fit a large plasma screen in your house, you'll have to find a different TV.

This plasma television has a 3,000 focused field drive. What does that mean? The picture on LCD and LED TVs are often described with a refresh rate that indicates how many times a screen refreshes in a second. The faster a screen can refresh itself, the better the TV image will be. The best plasma TVs have a similar spec called the subfield rate. Plasma TVs send electrical pulses to the pixels in the screen. These rapid pulses (sometimes as fast as 1/60th of a second) are created by the sub-field drive. The Smart Viera ZT60's 3,000 focused field drive is basically the subfield drive on this unit. It is comparable to a 600Hz subfield drive, even a little faster, and is the best of the Panasonic brand plasma TVs.

Features

Besides the beautiful display, the Panasonic Smart Viera ZT60 has a robust set of features that makes the home theater experience even better. The Smart Viera ZT60 smart TV lets you customize your home screen with apps and personal pictures and videos. This allows for your most popular content and apps (like Facebook or YouTube) to pop up first, a useful tool to help you find what you want faster. This TV has built-in Wi-Fi. After setting up your plasma TV, you can access the web through a browser. You can also view and share content through Panasonic's cloud based service.

Manufactures like Panasonic are moving into the 3D plasma TV world, and the Smart Viera ZT60 is near the front of the line. With active 3D technology, you can view your content in full HD 1080p resolution. This TV comes with two pairs of 3D glasses, and you can purchase additional ones from the manufacturer's site or some retailers.

The Panasonic Smart Viera ZT60 has a free app download, the Smart Viera remote2, which turns your smartphone into a remote. The app is available on iOS or Android. You can change channels and adjust settings with the Smart Viera remote2, as well as employ the voice interaction feature. Voice interaction allows you to vocally change the channel and conduct web searches, or you can have your TV read on-screen web content to you with the text-to-speech function.

Connections

With so many home theater devices to connect, it's important that your TV has plenty of connections for all of them – cable or satellite boxes, games systems and even PCs. One way to ensure you can see your high definition content on the plasma display is to make sure you connect your devices using an HDMI cable. There's no point in having a nice HD plasma screen if the content you display is not coming into the TV at high definition. The Smart Viera ZT60 has three HDMI ports, which is plenty for your home devices.

Other connections like USB ports are important too, particularly if you have content from flash drives you would like to show or if you want to connect peripherals like a wireless keyboard or a camera for Skype. Component and composite connections are also nice to have, in case you have devices that can't be connected using an HDMI cable. And if you don't want to connect to the web through Wi-Fi, this TV has an Ethernet port as well.

Help & Support

Panasonic has an extensive help and support section to help you if you have problems with your device. If you need to contact the company, you can call a toll-free number, email the support team or chat with an operator through the live chat option. Panasonic also has a FAQs section and downloadable online manuals. Panasonic covers your plasma TV with a standard one-year labor and parts warranty.