Innovation

Panasonic VIERA: Televisions with End-to-End Pedigree

From Professional Broadcast Cameras to the TVs in your living room: Panasonic optimises all elements in the TV chain to deliver ultimate picture quality to you.

Panasonic’s flagship flat screen TVs, the VIERA PV and PX models, recently won the prestigious 2006/2007 European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA) Award for Best High-end Plasma TV. The EISA panel itself is made up of some of the most respected consumer electronics journalists from over 20 European countries, therefore their decisions carry a lot of weight – and allow the winners to reasonably claim that they have the best products on the market.

In the past ten years Panasonic has picked up no less than 7 EISA awards for its TVs – more than any other manufacturer. So what is the secret of Panasonic’s continued success in developing world beating TVs?

The answer to this question lies in the fact that Panasonic not only makes TVs, but is one of the very few companies to produce all the elements in the TV chain – from the professional broadcast cameras which captures the action, right through to the TVs in our homes on which the relayed images are watched by millions.

Unknown to most people, because of this extraordinary breadth of expertise in TV technology Panasonic has been responsible for delivering the World’s greatest sporting event – the Olympics – to our homes for the past 20 years. Since the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Panasonic has exclusively provided professional broadcast cameras, editing consoles, monitors, and assorted recording media to the international Olympic Broadcast Centres which beam images of the games around the world.

With the past 20 years of experience under its belt, Panasonic is now working on the largest and most challenging Olympic project to date: next Year’s Beijing Olympic Games. Beijing 2008 will mark the first time that the entire production of an Olympic games will be done in High Definition – meaning that viewers will be able experience all the events with unparalleled clarity and crispness. Although only 91,000 people will be able to fit into the National Stadium to watch the Beijing 2008 Opening Ceremony, thanks to Panasonic HD technology millions of people around the world will be able to follow the ceremony and the proceeding games as intensely as if they were there in person!

In fact whenever filmmakers want to capture the most real-to-life High Definition action they customarily turn to Panasonic. Events as diverse as this year’s Super Bowl to the hugely acclaimed BBC “Planet Earth” series – the most expensive natural history series ever made – were shot using Panasonic High Definition broadcast cameras.

However, capturing the images is only one part of the story – delivering those images to viewers in the very best quality possible is equally as important. To this end Panasonic has a long record of close cooperation with Hollywood studios. In 1996, the company opened a pioneering DVD authoring centre in Los Angeles which has gone on to author more than one thousand theatrical releases for major Hollywood movie studios. More recently Panasonic established the Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory on a mission to collaborate with the film community to combine their creative vision and flair with Panasonic’s latest High Definition digital technologies. Focussing on the de facto HD standard of Blu-ray it has developed specialist technologies for encoding, authoring, and disc replication to ensure the very best HD picture quality for movies released in the Blu-ray format.

Therefore when it comes to designing and developing its VIERA range of televisions, Panasonic’s skilled engineers are able to draw on a huge range and depth of experience not available to most manufacturers. They are uniquely able to optimise the picture quality of the TV in your home based on their intimate knowledge of the characteristics of the professional cameras used to broadcast the Olympic games, coupled with the expertise developed in Hollywood at the Panasonic Laboratories. Therefore every system, device and component in a VIERA reflects Panasonic’s relentless pursuit of superior image quality from every angle and from end-to-end of the TV broadcast chain.

How does this actually translate to the technology within a VIERA TV itself? All our TVs are made up of three critical elements: the V.Real series of Processors, Drivers, and the actual Display Panels themselves. The Processor enhances the basic quality of the images reproduced from input video signals. The Driver then optimises these images for the Panel, which ultimately displays these images with deep rich blacks, stunning clarity, and vivid lifelike colours. Also, unlike many other manufacturers all of these key components are developed in-house meaning that we are able to further optimise their performance as they are all designed from the beginning to work with each other.

And that is why Panasonic’s TVs, represented by the VIERA range of Plasma and LCD TVs, have consistently been rated as among the very best available by both specialist Journalists, the trade, and consumers alike.