Fujitsu P42HTA51 review

The set uses Fujitsu's Alternate Lighting of Surfaces (AliS) technology, which explains the apparently square nature of the screen's native resolution. While conventional plasma panels have a strip of electrodes for each horizontal line of plasma cells, AliS panels share an electrode strip between two lines of cells, and expand the area covered by the screen's phosphors. These lines switch on and off thousands of times a second, so that at any given instant only half the panel's pixels are active. This approach gives the visual effect of 1024 horizontal lines, even though there are only around half as many 'actual' lines.

The TV's AVMII image processor also displays some smart technology. This umbrella term takes in a suite of picture-boosting operations tackling such nasties as MPEG blocking noise, mosquito noise and jagged and ghosted edges. There's also a colour tuning element designed to make tones more natural, however this latter aspect of AVMII doesn't seem to deliver on its promise.

Rather intimidating onscreen menus, meanwhile, play host to less interesting features than you might initially expect. For pictures, it's only worth mentioning the ambient light sensor that can adjust the picture in response to the amount of light in your room, a White wash feature that floods the screen with white to counter plasma technology's screenburn problems, and individual 'signal' and 'drive' contrast settings.

Fujitsu quotes a so-so contrast ratio for the P42HTA51 of 3000:1 and a pretty high brightness of 1400cd/m2.

Performance
Tragically Fujitsu's home-oriented ambitions come crashing down around its ears as soon as you switch the P42HTA51 on -- its pictures are plain poor by today's standards. Making this worse is the fact that the poor quality is down to a single cause: colours. They simply don't look natural at all, with both red and green tones looking way out of sync with anything in the real world. Reds look orangey and insipid, and greens look sickly and almost radioactive at times.

These problems are particularly obvious when you're looking at 'pure' red or green subject matter, but they also filter through subtly into everything you watch. You find pictures looking muted, while skin tones take on a bizarre hue that makes everyone look like they're suffering from some incurable disease.

As suggested earlier, many other aspects of the P42HTA51's performance are actually pretty sound. Dark parts of the picture look enjoyably black, the picture is generally free of most types of video noise, fine details are abundant and colour blends are smooth rather than striped as they can be on some rival models. But all this goodness is rendered more or less redundant by the colour problems.

Those detachable speakers also do their best to add some respectability to the Fujitsu's cause, combining power with finesse and natural tones to impressive effect. But the bottom line is that nobody in their right mind would buy a TV just for its audio capabilities. Pictures are what really matter, and in this respect the P42HTA51 is sadly lacking.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield