Hitachi P42T01 review

The Hitachi produced a very attractive picture. There was plenty of detail and pictures looked natural. We don't think this set has the deepest black we've ever seen, however. Certainly, watching in our pitch-black test room we could see the black was a little grey, and even with the brightness reduced we still didn't think the blacks were as good as they could have been.

The P42T01 also exhibited quite a bit of noise, especially around bright objects on a dark background. At the start of Serenity, we see planets set against the blackness of space, and where the planets met space there was considerable noise. This looks like faint sparkles. From a reasonable distance this is barely noticeable, but close up it is quite apparent and is possibly one of the reasons the picture wasn't as black as it could have been.

Sound quality was decent overall. We could easily distinguish speech, even when there was background music or special effects. The downside is that the Hitachi doesn't offer very much in the way of low-frequency sound. Bass is severely lacking and this does leave action movies feeling a little unimpressive. If this is going to be your movie-watching screen, you'll need to hook it up to a hi-fi or AV receiver to really enjoy proper sound.

We looked at some standard-definition material recorded onto our Humax 9200T PVR, and we were pretty impressed. We did feel the Freeview images lacked detail at times, but this isn't really the Hitachi's fault. Given the low bit rate they're transmitted at, and the fact we were using a Scart lead, overall it still did a decent job in these sub-optimal conditions.

When we used the TV's built-in Freeview decoder, we were very pleased to see a sharp, colourful image that looked far better than we've seen on most 42-inch LCDs. Plasma is generally a strong performer on standard-definition material, but we were still pleased to see such good image quality.

Conclusion
Hitachi has made some odd choices here. We love the picture quality of the TV, but we're severely disappointed by the sound quality and the daft connectivity. That said, if you're buying a TV to fit into a home cinema where you'll be using a proper Dolby Surround decoder, then this TV would make a great centre piece to that setup. If you're after an all-in-one solution, the Panasonic Viera TH42PX600 offers excellent sound, and can be found for around £900.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Nick Hide