Operation

Along its 23-centimeter length, Panasonic's remote control offers large, easily recognizable buttons. It's also easy to find your way around the handset in the dark, although it lacks a backlight.

Using a TV with DVD players, Blu-ray players, satellite receivers & Co. isn't always as easy as you'd imagine. The quality of the remote control and on-screen menu are also crucial for everyday use. Find out here how the Panasonic TX-P 42 GW 10 fares on these points.

Remote Control:

The cursor-cross, as well as the input selection, aspect ratio, and "on" button, all sit near the top end of the remote control. Despite this, you can still operate the TV with one hand, comfortably accommodated by a molded grip on the underside of the handset.

The large, clearly labeled number-buttons are also great for single-handed operation, as are the buttons for volume and channel changing.

At the very bottom of the remote control sit the rarely used buttons for controlling the basic functions of a Panasonic video recorder or DVD player. These are also necessary, however, for playing back videos from an SD card.

Panasonic's remote control manages to look sleek while also offering space for well grouped buttons of different shapes, sizes, and colors, making handling relaxed and intuitive.

Program-Skip Function:
During TV-viewing, the up and down arrow keys of the menu-cross offer a modified program-skip function: After pressing the arrow button, the Panasonic displays an info-bar showing the current program; repeated pressing shows the programs on neighboring channels. Pressing the OK button switches the TV to the newly chosen channel.

Channel List:
The other channel list (accessed by pressing the OK button) works in a similar way, displaying seven channels at once, which you can then flick through individually or one page at a time. Once again, a further press of the OK button switches to the chosen broadcast.

The only impractical thing here is that you change pages using the channel buttons, which are miles away from the menu-cross. This is irritating, especially given the multitude of channels the TV can receive via satellite - Panasonic would have been better off changing pages using the left and right arrow buttons, which have no function in this mode. The remote also lacks a "back" button for switching directly between two channels.

"N" and MENU Buttons:
We could do without the "N" button, which "normalizes" the volume and picture settings, returning the gamma curve to a rather-too-bright preset value of 2.0 (see "Contrast and Black Representation" in the "Picture Quality in Detail" section).

Banished to the far top of the handset, the MENU button is a little awkward to reach, whereas the rarely needed VIERA LINK button sits in an unnecessarily handy position directly beside the menu-cross. So, as you can see: Even Panasonic's relatively exemplary operation still has its faults.

On-Screen Menu:

The Panasonic TX-P 42 GW 10's menu looks well structured and attractive, leading the user though most functions intuitively, without needing hours to get used to the system. The size of the menu and lettering is excellent, as is the subtle color theme. The button-layout indicators are clear and helpful. To put it briefly: It's hardly possible to design a better on-screen menu. The menu entries themselves come in a choice of 25 languages.

This is good news for you as well as for us, since we don't have to run through and explain each entry in the picture, sound, and setup menus - you'll largely know what the settings do as soon as you read them.

We'll say just one thing in particular: With the EXIT button, you can make the menu disappear immediately once you've chosen the correct settings. The MENU and BACK/RETURN buttons, on the other hand, move back one menu level so that you can then carry out further adjustments without having to fight your way back through the menu from scratch - very practical.

One small criticism:
The Panasonic doesn't keep important picture settings such as overscan and Intelligent Frame Creation in the picture menu. These, instead, hide in the SETUP menu's "Other Settings" subpage.

OPTION Button:
The OPTION button opens further smaller menus, whose contents depend on the current conditions. In TV mode, for example, the menu controls the channel's volume-correction; in SD-card playback, it controls the slideshow.

GUIDE, VIERA TOOLS and VIERA LINK Buttons:
The GUIDE button opens the EPG menu, and the VIERA TOOLS and VIERA LINK buttons overlap partly in terms of what they do. Essentially, both control other devices via HDMI and manage files on the SD-card drive.

"TV" Button:
The "TV" button is also important for daily use, offering switching between different reception methods - that is, between digital satellite (DVB-S), digital cable (DVB-C), digital terrestrial (DVB-T), and analog TV.

Finally, the AV button opens the menu for choosing between connected input devices.

Channel-Search and EPG:

While receiving DVB-C, DVB-T, and analog TV, you should always connect the correct antenna for the chosen signal type, since the Panasonic TX-P 42 GW 10's channel-search deletes all previously stored channels. Satellite-reception is different: Here, it's possible to search only for new channels, without deleting the old ones.

In all cases, the Panasonic stores the channels it finds in a sensible order. It should, therefore, put public-service broadcasters first (BBC ONE & BBC TWO in the UK), followed by the usual commercial channels (ITV1, Channel 4, Five) - just as you'd hope it would. Convenient menus allow you to sort channels alphabetically, by channel number, according to categories such as radio or pay-TV, or into one of four user-defined favorites' lists.

With DVB-T and DVB-C reception, the Panasonic indicates the status of the data in the Electronic Program Guide (EPG); this uses the GUIDE Plus+ system. With DVB-T, updates take significantly longer than the automatic search-process. To protect the screen against burn-in during this process, the TV switches to a screen saver after a few minutes, and displays the menu with weaker contrast. It does the same for the DVB-C channel search.

After receiving the new EPG and channel data, the Panasonic displays program information for seven channels at the same time, for up to a week in advance. While displaying this, it halts the sound and picture from the current channel.

Satellite channels use a similar system, except here the TV automatically loads the EPG data after a channel search. HDTV and standard channels appear within the same list, so the user has to sort the HDTV channels into one of the favorites lists manually.

Connecting External Devices:

The AV interfaces on the rear of the TV are clear to see and easy to connect. The cables protrude relatively far from the back of the unit, meaning you may need to use angle connectors when wall-mounting.

The side-mounted connections, on the other hand, allow easy access even after wall-mounting.